My mother, many of my friends and all too many dating gurus advise joining societies in order to meet men. Get out into the world and meet people in the old-fashioned way, they say – the fools. These internet shenanigans are all very well, my mother told me recently, trying to be modern, but real-world socialising has to be better. There must be a nice dance you can go to, was her follow-up suggestion.
I have joined societies, I have made bad pottery and I have been to public lectures. Nothing doing. “Just talk to people while you’re out and about,” Mum said.
She is an inveterate talker-to-everyone, but she’s 80 and is indulged. There are sometimes attractive middle-aged men in the cafe where I take a book to lunch, and I look at them out of the corner of my eye, trying to gauge whether they are married or attached.
Twice, I’ve seen faces I know from dating sites, both of them staunch non-repliers, and have been half-tempted to humiliate them in front of their peers, citing their offhand rejections, but who needs that kind of trouble?
Members of the Works From Home crowd also hang out at the cafe, in their jeans and pinstripe shirts, with their tiny laptops and mysterious folders of papers. Our eyes meet occasionally, and sometimes for a second or third time, but then they finish their coffee and leave. How can a conversation start that isn’t awkward or obvious?
This week I saw an attempt. A man in his late 50s, lanky in Levi’s, began to talk to a pretty woman of about 30 who was sitting opposite him. She was doing a sudoku in a newspaper.
“How are you getting on with that?” he asked. That was his gambit. He was being friendly and introducing a topic of conversation at the same time as signalling his interest. Easy.
“I seem to be stuck on this one, but it’s a super-fiendish one,” she said, smiling.
“Oh, I love those,” he said, coming across from his seat so that he could look at it too, and sitting almost knee to knee. I was amazed at his smoothness. She let him talk her through it and said his method was going to be invaluable for future attempts. If only he had stopped there!
To the wide-eyed horror of all around, he began to test her on various mathematical problems, putting them to her verbally and talking her through them. When she understood something, he told her she was smart, sounding surprised. He started explaining prime numbers and she interrupted to say she knew, but he talked over her. “Wait, listen to what I’m trying to tell you,” he said.
Then he made his move, unaware it was already too late. “Could we talk about this more over dinner?” She politely declined, and when she had left he picked up the newspaper and didn’t seem too disheartened.
Shortly after this, an interesting-looking man with shaggy dark hair came and sat opposite me, and opened his copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He had his back to the corner, and every few minutes he scanned the room from over the top of the novel.
Noticing I was looking, he began to look at me, though only when I appeared to be absorbed by my own book. Do not read too much into this, I told myself. He might be one of the high-prestige lords of online dating, the ones who never reply unless you meet their stringent criteria (the list that begins “under 35 and blonde”). He might not be glancing at you at all. He might be thinking about Gabriel García Márquez and not seeing you. He might be thinking about his shed, or about his wife, Claire, so young that she’s still at university. He might be wondering if you are Claire’s mother’s dumpy friend Janet, and if he should say hello.
Follow sudoku man’s advice and ask what the book is like and say you have it but have never got around to reading it, my helpful inner voice suggested. The man was sitting eight feet away, and continuing to glance at me. Why couldn’t I just ask the question? He might think me forward, desperate, perhaps someone preparing to talk him into a cult or a Ponzi scheme, but so what? I opened my mouth and closed it again, unable to speak, and he drank his coffee down and was gone.
• Stella Grey is a pseudonym
