The question of whether to keep trying with Peter was answered for me by an email from him saying that a) I’m wonderful and b) he doesn’t want to see me again. Now that it’s over, I look back on our communication cycle with disbelief. I read it and don’t recognise myself. It looks genuinely like an altered state, something bizarrely intoxicated. I’m OK now, feeling normal again, but it was a hard transition, when the love-bombing came to an end, through Adoration Cold Turkey, desperate as a junkie and utterly miserable.
In the case of imaginary relationships that have their origins online, maybe it was a typical pattern. My guess is that Peter saw immediately we met that the whole thing had been illusory, and if he decided that unfairly early, there isn’t any arguing with it. Intuition and chemistry – they all count for much more than internet dating would have you believe. Setting out to find a compatible person who thinks, talks and lives like you do is all very well, but box-ticking counts for little in the end.
A friend who met her partner on a dating site has good advice: “Don’t get stuck in a cycle of emailing; get off the computer and on to the phone as fast as possible, and from there to a meeting as soon as you can.” In retrospect, it’s the best advice I could give anyone.
This week, I had a chance to begin to follow it myself, when a nice-looking man called Henry wrote to ask if I was ever in Cumbria, because he’d love to invite me to lunch. Henry is 60, and I had to ask myself how I felt about 60, and specifically about being naked with 60. I reminded myself that Harrison Ford is 72; would I say no to him? Reader, I would not.
An ex-policeman, Henry was tall and upright, broad-shouldered, and had a knowing look around the eyes, as if he’d been bashed by life and survived, and wasn’t going to be a pushover. He was also near bald, but a woman of 50 who has issues with hair-loss had better go and buy a stack of jigsaws in readiness for the long nights alone.
He sent a head and shoulders shot that he’d just taken in his kitchen, showing a smiling, attractive man in a frayed blue shirt, in a tiny cottage in the wilds, where he’s trying to live self-sufficiently. His dating-site profile was skimpy; he was one of those men who insist that words are meaningless and meetings everything, and it’s a view I’ve come to have sympathy for. On the other hand, a woman needs some clues and pointers if she’s going to travel across England for lunch. He’d volunteered his surname and village, but I couldn’t find him anywhere online. I realise this is new-fashioned, but not being able to find someone on the web, not a trace, is a source of anxiety to me. I’m both repelled and reassured by people who are bedded in to social media; who can be observed being droll on Twitter, who have many friends on Facebook and are demonstrably sane there. Henry seemed like a loner. He confessed he didn’t like the internet much.
“I have paper books and vinyl records,” he wrote. “Come and see me. Come and visit. I’ll sacrifice a chicken.”
“We could meet at a restaurant,” I replied. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable coming to your house.”
“It’ll be fun to meet someone younger,” he said. “You seem young to me. The last woman I dated was 66.”
“Can I ask you something? Are women of 66 looking only for companionship?”
“God no; they’re all gagging for it,” he wrote. Then another message arrived. “Why are you on this dating site? The truth now. No fibbing.” It was hard to know what he meant. “You’re not coming, are you?” he wrote, before I could reply. “You wouldn’t like me anyway. I have dirt under my fingernails. I don’t have any money. I watch a lot of sport on TV.”
While I was pondering, I received a surprise invitation to dinner. I emailed Henry and said that I thought it best to tell him that on Saturday I was going out to dinner with a man I vaguely knew. He didn’t reply, and when I went back on the site I discovered that he’d blocked me, so that I couldn’t send him another message. The man who was going to take me out to dinner realised on Thursday afternoon that he was still in love with his ex-wife, and cancelled.
• Stella Grey is a pseudonym
