For a while, my dating site profile said that the end of my relationship wasn’t my idea. I thought people would find it reassuring that I’m not a dumper, but – if you like – a dumpee. What I found was that most men didn’t find it reassuring at all. It seemed to trigger something – curiosity and then judgment. “What did you do to get dumped? Are you a bitch?” I mentioned this in an online chat one evening with a man called Neville, and asked what he thought.
“You may as well give up now,” he wrote, ignoring the question, “and withdraw from here and save your money.” I asked him what he meant.
“It’s porn that’s your problem,” he said. “Now that porn is normal, now that it’s normal to look at porn online, that’s the downfall of the middle-aged woman.
“Men are convinced that if they become bachelors again, that’s the kind of sex life they’ll get. Young women, big tits, flat stomachs, a tight fit where it matters. There are loads of gorgeous young things here who’d be happy with a 50-year-old sugar daddy. You can’t compete with that.”
Not having seen profiles written by other 50-year-old women, it was hard to know what the norm was, and how far I deviated from the average. I mentioned this to my friend Jack. Together we went in to my page with rolled-up sleeves and blitzed every one of the errors he identified – being whiney, being needy, being pompous and self-aggrandising (that hurt), overly-conventional (Radio 4 was tussled over; I won), and too bookish. The argument that it was best to be myself cut little ice. Despite his efforts, despite adding baking, London parks, gigs and beer to the list of things I like, I was still, Jack complained, all too evidently an alpha control freak and raging intellectual snob. That was limiting the response types. It was putting people off.
It is important online not to be seen to take yourself too seriously. Men engaged in online dating constantly say how unseriously they take life, as if that’s a good thing. I find it a complete turn-off, but then it is evident that I have way too many opinions. I am persisting with the accurate, off-putting version of myself.
Jack set up his own page on one of the sites and reported back. He advised me not to look at the profiles of my competitors. Too many of them were pert women with doctorates and waists who did yoga.
“There are, like, 15 of them just in your postcode,” he said. I said I’d make a fake male profile and go and have a look. Jack counselled against this. “I wouldn’t go there. You’ll delete your page and join a monastery.”
“A nunnery, you mean.”
“A nunnery. Though a monastery would be more fun. In any case, how many women have ever looked at your profile, checking out the competition?”
“None. Well I thought there was one, but she turned out to be a transvestite.”
“Exactly. It’s too disheartening. Plus, people would think you were secretly a lesbian. If they were secret lesbians too it could become a bit awkward all round.”
Jack had saved the profiles written by the skinny middle-aged Pilates-babes in my neighbourhood. The ones he judged to be successful had a winning combination of softness and steel, showed a modest sense of achievement and ambition, but not too much.
They also referenced cultural phenomena that men can relate to (The Fast Show, Blackadder, The Shawshank Redemption), hinted that they had a ditzy side (“I’m a modern girl, but I admit not great with fuse boxes!!”), reassured men that they liked sex by using the dating site code word cuddle (“cuddles are my favourite thing, and I will look after you”), and listed outdoor stuff – a passion for hills, skiing, scuba-diving – under hobbies and interests.
Being outdoorsy is important to middle-aged men, it turns out. I’ve noticed this. “I don’t like to sit still too long,” the men on dating sites say. “Life is for living and I’m looking for a woman to share the adventure with. No couch potatoes please.” Perhaps it is to do with being 50+, this insatiable quest for fitness: a sign that a man is resisting time as much as he can, and that he expects a future partner to have the same determination.
In a nutshell, it is not looking promising.
• Stella Grey is a pseudonym
