In terms of the timing, it seems as if it started at the party – what happened at the party? Or perhaps it started during the hill-walking weekend with his buddies. Perhaps one of them pointed out that Martin didn’t really know me, that he wasn’t even divorced yet, that he should slow it all down. Perhaps they looked at my profile together. Perhaps another of the friends thought I was too old. Perhaps Martin showed them the meadow-sex email and one of them was horrified. Perhaps a little doubt was sown.
It can’t have been the sex email, I reasoned. It must have been something that happened at the party. I couldn’t ask. If I asked the paranoid question, this thing was probably dead in the water. His communications had become sparse and terse, and that obvious retreat pitched me back into formality, in turn. I sent a one-line text message. Let’s have this lunch, I said. Saturday?
Martin was sorry, but he couldn’t. He was going to see his parents and wouldn’t be back until Monday night. Could we arrange for the weekend after? “Unlikely, I’m afraid,” he replied. “Going to be really busy, but I’ll email when I can. Might not be frequently.”
Don’t, please, say you’ll email when you can, I wanted to say. Don’t make me feel the weight of obligation. Enthusing to someone that you’re falling in love, then going cold and turning your back: that’s well-documented online dating behaviour, though it usually happens after sex, not before.
I looked back at the messages we had sent each other the morning of the party. He’d been giddy with optimism, then. He’d written about us spending a weekend together in a cottage this autumn; he was distracted from work by the vision of the two of us by a log fire with books and a bottle of wine. He had written that he was missing someone he hadn’t even yet met, and how was that possible? All that euphoria was gone now, dissolved. It was gone but he wasn’t admitting to it.
Martin’s refusal to be straightforward, to be truthful, preferring to wound someone with silence: that was enough for me, in fact, that cowardice. I’d already haemorrhaged far too much faith. I looked at his profile again, aghast, knowing what lay unseen behind its skilful, comical rendering of his life, appalled by this ghastly cold-shouldering. I wanted to tell him that he should be ashamed of himself.
Instead, I demanded that he call me. I told him that no matter how late he got back on Monday night, he had to call me. We had to talk. He said he thought it would be too late and he’d be tired, but he’d try. No, in other words. It’s such a tell-tale thing, when people are consistently too tired for you.
He went off to his parents, and I had a really tough weekend. It seemed clear that it was over, this promising thing that never got the chance to start. The abruptness of it was a physical shock. I felt fluey and ached, and slept only fitfully. The number one rule in online dating is this: don’t get over-invested before meeting someone. I knew it and I had broken it. The trouble is, it’s intoxicating. It’s hard to resist because, fundamentally, it’s tremendously romantic – and romance isn’t plentiful in life.
The evening after he got home there was an email; my heart thumped as I opened it. It was six lines, enthusing about the books he’d bought, a pub lunch they’d had, the local beer. Unusually, it wasn’t signed. Writing his name would have meant adding kisses or not adding them, and either way that would have been political and telling. He’d had a lovely weekend! And now there was a six-line impersonal update; evidently he was winding things down. He could turn it off, our intimacy, and had. He’d made a decision not to be that person with me, any more; I was to be denied that infatuated, expansive Martin.
Even now, he didn’t say, “I don’t want to meet you, after all; I’ve had a change of heart.” Pressed, he said that he was merely too busy, too tired, too scheduled, but we’d do it soon, we’d do it sometime. When I tried to phone him, the call again went straight to message. I hadn’t actually managed to speak to him at all. Not once throughout the span of this whole brief episode.
Stella Grey is a pseudonym
