The next morning, just after 6.30am, Martin messaged again. “Really early, in a rush, teaching summer school and going for a run first, but just wanted to say, what a delight to meet you last night. Very much looking forward to talking more. See you at the usual place at around 8pm? If you’re free that is. If you’re not out on a date with some young hunk.”
“Date? What’s that?” I asked him. “Hereabouts, it’s a middle-eastern fruit eaten at Christmas. I’ll see you around 8pm at the usual virtual corner. Wait, this does sound like a date.”
“It is, it is,” he wrote. “I’m bagsying you this evening. Accept no other offers!” I looked at his page again. It was a deft summing-up of a person, of Martin’s mental landscape; it made me want to tear up my own profile and begin afresh. I really liked the look of him, too, in his pictures. Age 44, sturdy, tall, with a receding hairline, he was a man unafraid to rock a checked shirt and brown cords; endearingly unhip, his smile mischievous. Barely half an hour after getting going with the day, I had to stop and look at his profile again. My eye ran down the questionnaire part and saw something new. In answer to the question, “Do you want children?” he had put “Undecided”. I hadn’t taken that in before. I messaged him. “Just noticed you are undecided about children. I’m past that point. If children are a maybe, we’d better say cheerio, I think.”
His reply said, “At work but just had to say, not an issue, I promise you. I tend to the No more than the Maybe.” At 4.30pm there was a follow-up. “The point is it’d be No if my partner/wife was also a No, and Yes if she was a Yes. It’d be up to her. Left to myself, I’d happily be a No.”
That evening we talked on screen for two hours. Afterwards, there was a message at 1am, another at 6am, and two at lunchtime. The following evening, emboldened by our growing rapport, we swapped real-world identities and email addresses, and Googled each other, and had the funniest on-screen chat. By now, it was clear we were hugely compatible. But this I’ve learned: email compatibility isn’t something anyone should rely on. It can, and has been, utterly decimated by a real-world meeting.
It’s easy to fall for someone over email. What’s difficult is following through into life. The closer that email conversation brought us, the more risk there was that a real encounter, in a cafe after a train journey, would be the beginning of a big letdown. I might not like him. It might be mutual. He might take against my middle-aged body on sight (this has happened; it is not imaginary). In person, he might dominate the conversation. He might be pompous and given to monologuing. He might think I was. We might find we had said everything we were ever going to, in typed, unspoken words. We might have an instant, chemical hormonal realisation that it would only ever be a sibling sort of love.
I could see that it would be easy to put meeting off indefinitely, as I had so disastrously with Peter, so I suggested meeting at the weekend. He said he was going climbing with friends, but, yes, soon. Next week. A week is a long time in a virtual romance. Emailing took us into our childhoods, our student days, our marriages and our sad stories: he had only been married a couple of years when it had broken down. They were separated but not divorced, it turned out. “I’m afraid I initiated it,” he wrote. “We wanted different things.” Oh, you’re not divorced yet? I asked him. Are you sure you’re ready for this, for meeting someone new? I couldn’t be more ready, he said.
He went on his weekend climbing trip and was silent, as he had warned me he would be, and I was twitchy and stayed quiet; it is important to know when to be quiet. I heard from him at 7am on Monday. There was a text at lunch, and then in the evening he wrote about his weekend, and I told him about mine.
“I feel like I’m falling in love with you,” he replied. “Couldn’t stop thinking about you, at the cottage. Couldn’t stop myself rereading your letters. Never experienced anything like this. Caught up, caught up in it. Can’t wait to meet you: this weekend? I can come to you, or you to me. Don’t mind. Can barely even wait until then.”
Stella Grey is a pseudonym
