Miles didn’t reply to my text thanking him for paying. Neither did he reply to the second one, asking if we were still on for Sunday. He’d said, before we met, that he was going to make me the best chicken casserole I’d ever tasted, when I came to his for lunch, and the best apple strudel in the universe. That might sound far-fetched, he’d added, but it was accurate. He’d said that I should get a train mid-morning and he’d pick me up. We’d eat, and then walk through the fields and woods near his house. After that, he’d make cocktails – he had an incredible Shetland gin, he said, and grew limes in his conservatory. His excitement was sweet and lovely.
But that was all before we met, and he caught sight of my arse encased in old jeans, and decided against it. He still hasn’t replied to either of my follow-up texts. Instead, he appears to have added me to a list for receipt of his daily email, an impersonal affair sent out every evening to 30 people, some of them with the same surname as his. It’s a bulletin detailing the ups and downs of the day, bloopers from exam papers, a miscellany from his life. I don’t understand what he thinks our relationship is. Is it really OK, in his world, in his mind, to see a woman once and never mention it again, as if it didn’t happen, and ignore her messages but treat her like a buddy for the rest of his life? Apparently so.
I’d already had another invitation, from someone called Lee. Full name Leopold. Austrian, in fact, but based here for business. He’s 47, divorced, childless, and balances his “suit life” – the uniform and obligations of the working week – by having Sunday adventures on a huge muscly motorbike. Recently, he took a year out and saw the world on it, travelling alone.
He wrote asking if we could meet for a drink. I should have said: “Yes, that’d be lovely, shall we say Friday at 7pm?” That’s how sane people respond. But I had to put Lee through the many hoops I have devised, the filters. We had to have an exhaustive, extensive email correspondence before we met. I had to feel as intellectually and emotionally safe as is possible via written word (admittedly, that’s often illusory) before risking another meeting.
I acknowledge that I may be going through a sort of crisis. In fact it’s the return of an old one, in which I try to make the target male fall for me before we meet, so as to make my physical self a downside that is outweighed by my interesting mind. That’s the mechanism, one that seems safer than a blind date – but isn’t really safer. I’ve done it before and it didn’t work. In February, Peter and I talked ourselves into an intoxicated and mesmerised state via this sort of word magic, and met once, disastrously. Nonetheless, I’ve been attempting it again, partly because I’ve been so lonely. I’ve felt badly in need of email romance, after a spate of unromantic disappointments.
My charm offensive appeared to work. “I have a good feeling about this,” Lee wrote, after we’d emailed solidly for four days. “I want to meet you as soon as possible. I hope this isn’t too forward.”
I replied with “I’m available on Saturday for dinner, and then sex afterwards. That’s how you do too forward, hahaha.”
I thought it was funny – I wasn’t serious, as I felt the need to point out in a second message – but online humour with strangers is always risky. Lee didn’t think it was funny. I’m only able to assume this, because he didn’t reply. I looked again at his profile, searching harder for warnings enmeshed in the prose. His pick would need to be 100% woman, he’d written. He’d used the word feminine three times. I intuited that my response hadn’t been very ladylike.
I messaged him. “I’d like to play a game of Q and A with you. Let’s play Q and A! I’ll start. Scrabble: yes or no?” I waited, looking at my phone every five minutes, confident that a dull evening was about to be enlivened by wit. It wasn’t. Nothing. No response. Silence. I had a long bath and a soap bubble conversation with myself out loud in the echoey bathroom. Why are these men so bloody wet? I asked. Why are they so easily scared off? Can’t they rise to the challenge and at least be playful?
Stella Grey is a pseudonym
