Fifteen years ago, I began a relationship with a man I met as a result of dialling a wrong number. We were together for six years. The misdialling happened one afternoon in late July. I’d set out to arrange a surprise party for a friend who was due to return to the UK after a long period abroad.
Not naturally given to making such arrangements, I was perhaps already behaving out of character. I had myself returned from a fortnight’s holiday in Greece the day before and somewhere between my still-packed suitcase and the welcome of friends must have retained the sense of possibility that can accompany time away from the day-to-day.
I remember sitting at the bottom of the stairs, hurriedly dialling the first of my proposed guests, not noticing that I’d reversed two digits in the process. I’d rushed into the invitation before registering a sonorous, amused-sounding voice that was explaining gently that he was not, in fact, Peter.
There was every reason for the voice to have been brief, even irritated. Instead it was patient and appeared to have caught the flavour of both my mistake, and my invitation. The voice hoped the evening would go well.
It took me five minutes (and the encouragement of my friends) after replacing the receiver to decide to call him back. I told him that a few of us were heading to a bar near Gloucester Road, in central London, within the next few hours (my only, self-imposed safety measures being to take somebody along with me and to choose a location a bit of a distance from my home). I asked if he’d like to join us. He replied with a soft “Why not?”
We agreed that he’d carry a newspaper under his left arm. This and a loose description of his physical appearance (just under 6ft tall, dark) were our verbal “lonely hearts” ad. But it didn’t feel like that at all. There was a live thrill to making the suggestion, quite different from the world-weary online exchanges of dating profiles.
He was far better looking in life than the face I’d ascribed to the voice. In other circumstances, I might have let nerves prevent me from approaching him. A few vodka shots later (we’re talking 90s habits), we had more than reached the level of rapport that we’d established over the phone. My friends understood and fell away. We went on to dinner at his invitation. And so a long-standing relationship began.
Then in January 2008, newly single, there was another “opportunity”. An ordinary Tuesday at my relatively new workplace brought another blast of serendipity, while having none of the carefree context of the first. There hadn’t been time for lunch and, harassed and wearing the anonymous face we tend to reserve for colleagues, I’d rushed to the WH Smith at Paddington station, in search of a birthday card. It was an unlikely romantic setting. Standing by the racks of cellophane-sealed words for every occasion, was a man looking at the same Beatrix Potter birthday cards I had chosen. When your gaze has alighted on the same item there’s an opening for talking. One of us said something banal about the card. He had an energy about him that I liked right away.
So I took another, bigger, risk. Having gone to the till with many more birthday cards than I needed, I walked back to where he was standing. I think my voice was a bit shaky as I told him it was my new year’s resolution not to let opportunities (and in this instance, obvious chemistry) pass me by and asked, “I don’t suppose you’re single?” It wasn’t the most elegant approach but there was an adrenaline to putting myself on the line. There’s an unmasked honesty to it that reminds you you’re alive.
If he was taken aback, it wasn’t for long. He said he was only recently out of a relationship and so was unused to thinking of himself as single, and that this was the most flattering thing to have happened to him for years. Still smiling, he left. It was when I’d made my way to the till again that he came back in to give me his business card. If that sounds charmless, it wasn’t.
He was in Washington, working, when I followed up with an email two days later, from “the girl at the card counter” (I hadn’t given him my name when we met). He replied instantly, suggesting dinner on his return the following week.
I felt shocked and proud of myself for having made something like this happen. He once called it “a story for the grandchildren”. We dined out on the manner of our meeting – from the outset. It didn’t, in the end, bring about the grandchildren, but our time together is something I cherish.
We’re in constant receipt of advice about how to find a partner online: how to present ourselves, what to say and what to avoid saying. We frame ourselves in two dimensions, designed to lead us to three. Some sites go as far as to present a science to it – a promise of precision matching whereby the “eclectic” music tastes of a trainee teacher or a love of the outdoors are catered for by a process of rigorous calculation and laborious completion of quizzes; a virtual sorting hat. This is 21st-century matchmaking. None of it, not even the relative immediacy of Tinder (which didn’t exist at the time of either of the encounters I’ve described) gets anywhere near the feeling of grasping the instances “real life” can offer.
Such moments are rare. In my experience, they happen perhaps every few years. But the regret of not having spoken, and of not having stopped, is something most of us have felt. There’s the minute when the train moves on and the person who was two away from you in the carriage, whose gaze you’ve caught, deflected and then sought again, is part of the surge towards the exit; when the lift door closes when you could have manufactured a need to go all the way up to the eighth floor, or when a department meeting at work includes a new face to whom you didn’t seek an introduction. There are myriad moments when we could act and we don’t. Because we’re British or because it might seem forward or because of the multitude of “what will he/she think?” – thoughts we will regret on the journey home.
With an interval of more than eight years between them, my own actions can hardly be called habitual. They haven’t needed to be. But I’d like to keep hold of their spirit. Perhaps it’s time to rethink our attitude to approaching someone else, to make the everyday open to a possible spark. It would free us from the particular brand of romantic l’esprit de l’escalier that would have us behave otherwise.
