I’ve been talking to Bill on the phone. This is fairly radical for me. I am on the record as a phone-disliker; I’m easily flustered when I’m nervous, and (this is going to be hard to believe) naturally shy, and the phone fills me with dread. Bill said during one of our chats that he thought we should meet. He thinks a distance relationship might work. After all, there are trains. After all, there is phone sex.
I’ve been having one of those conversations with myself about what it is I really want. We all make assumptions about our own needs, and Bill’s list of the joys of a distance relationship (he’s had one before) is quite persuasive. There’s the (theoretical) romance of train travel, being whizzed along on a Friday night towards your lover’s arms. There’s the not seeing each other much thing, because anticipation is exciting. There’s freshness. No supermarket runs. There’s the fact that we’re both ridiculously busy and independent and might not want someone else to have to relate to all the time, to bend our lives around, to negotiate with 24/7.
In the mouth of a man of lesser appeal, lacking Bill’s blunt northern charm, that list could look quite selfish. He’s selling it to both of us as a lifestyle choice but what he might really be saying is: I am not good at sharing, I’m set in my ways. I am not prepared to defend all the live sports I go to and the many beers I have afterwards, and actually what I need is a bit on the side.
Even setting that possibility aside, I’m not sure about an arrangement that skims all the cream and custard out of the trifle and leaves the stale cake behind. It’s made me have a hard think about relationships and what’s vital about them. We’re often told – not least in the constant drone of the mass media – that it’s love that matters, that it’s the spark that counts in sexual dalliances, and that there are ways of keeping the sparky thing alive under domestic duress, so that we can all have the sort of love lives that mimic the train-based one (romantic, anticipated, fresh).
Is that really ingredient x though? Or is it something else? These things are highly personal. We all like different stuff in our muesli. Personally, I’m big on that dried chewy pineapple that’s instant dental caries.
Having considered Bill’s propaganda, I realised that the one thing that’s missing and which he delights in having excluded, is a thing I might value: the domestic life. I miss being partnered up like two little water rats, cosily just above the water line. I miss the day-to-day things Bill doesn’t: supermarket conversations, having someone there at night to tell about my day, snuggled up watching box sets together, with wine (the worst cliche there is, in dating-site terms). And I miss the fact that when you’re contentedly paired up and living with someone, sex isn’t so performance-oriented.
My fear is that the alternate weekends get-together he describes, with each of us travelling once a month, is going to carry high expectations.
In my (admittedly incomplete) survey of middle-aged British men, they have lined up in two basic groups: those who are tired, like me, and want fulfilling but unpressurised intimacy; and those who have been watching a lot of pornography and are all revved up for a woman as unlike their middle-aged ex-wife as it’s possible to find, and highly focused on depilated nights of marathon hot shagging.
It’s possible that Bill is in camp B, is what I’m saying. We’re on the verge of that conversation, after much emailing and intermittent phone chats.
I’ve had my first phone-sex experience. (Don’t judge me, either way.) It was OK. I mean, it works: it really is possible to heat someone up to explosion just with soft words and unexpectedly frank but poetic descriptions of what’s happening – I might actually be a phone-sex goddess – and to be heated up, in turn, by their being very obviously heated up, and to find that you come like a train, but … it’s like eating a lot of the chewy, dried pineapple. Gorgeous, trippy, a sugar high, but there’s a bit of a come-down afterwards. There was no one’s hairy chest to rest my head upon, no heartbeat. And that’s what I miss.
