Recently I got a taste of what it might be like to be a man engaged in online dating. To be one particular man, anyway. Joe is tall, a Russell Brand physical type, offbeat in his old band tour T-shirts and tight black jeans and mad coloured scarves. He has deep-set, soulful eyes. He lopes along, his satchel placed across his body on a long leather strap. It’s full of books, and notebooks. He’s trying to make it as a musician and he’s finding out how hard it is. He plays guitar in a band that’s let down by a bad lead singer who the rest of the group won’t get rid of because they’re all friends. He’s 45. He’s never been married. His long-term girlfriend left him for someone else.
I was the one who approached first. He lives across the other side of town, in an old dilapidated flat he says he’s gradually devaluing with botched DIY. It makes him feel good about himself to make cupboards, he wrote, even though they’re just slightly wrong and wonky. He’s discovering the joy of making things with his hands. He’s discovering too, since recovering from depression, that he has an enormous capacity for fun, if he approaches fun from oblique angles. I asked him if he fancied a beer. I could make the pilgrimage, I said. I was offering to.
Let’s email a bit first, he said. I have a stupidly busy week ahead, out every night with commitments – the band, helping friends with a house move, and mentoring that I do, and a charity thing. Chasing my tail. I’ll write from inside the spaces and I hope you’ll reply.
Over the next few days I heard more about Joe. How he loves ballet. How he loves France. How he loves to cook, producing mostly edible mishaps. How his ex broke his heart. Do you have a sad story, he asked? I’d like to hear it; we’ll meet soon and talk, but tell me why you’re here. I did, trying to keep it under 100,000 words. Let me know when you’re free for that beer, I said.
Confession, the next email was headed.
I’m probably not going to agree to meet you, it said. You seem interesting and bright and available and sane, but then all the people I’ve had dates with seemed so, until I met them. There are so many damaged women out there, desperate for certainty. They’re so needy, the dumped ones. I’m not able to be the answer, the financial resource, the shoulder to cry on, the man who will fight off her ex about custody, or just fight him, period. I’m not able to fund holidays and shoes. My meetings have been more like collisions, to be honest. I’m still being pursued by several women who thought I promised them things, when I was careful not to. This has now got so bad that I’m becoming afraid of finding someone I want, in case they don’t want me. Online dating has proved to be more soul-destroying than I could have thought possible.
“We should meet for that beer,” I said. “We could swap our funny terrible stories.”
Another email arrived. It was headed “Confession about the Confession.”
Joe wrote that he’d been sleeping around. He hadn’t been able to stop himself. So many women had flung themselves at him. “I’ve got into a pattern,” he wrote. “We get drunk and end up falling into bed, and then I realise that I don’t want to do it again. And I can’t explain myself. I’m so unhappy now, and so detached from the process of ordinary courtship, that I don’t seem to be able to act normally. So I’ve decided to be celibate for a while. I’m leaving all the dating sites I’m on. This dating culture is sleazy and superficial and it’s made me the same. It’s made women I meet the same: I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who seem happy to collude in being mistreated and abandoned. I feel tainted. I need the psychological equivalent of a bath. I don’t need the stress or the self-loathing any more. I’m aware that I’m angry and lost. The women I meet are angry and lost. I’m going to try meeting someone in the ordinary encounters of my life, and hope to be surprised by joy.”
I wrote back, supportively. Let’s meet for that beer, I said.
The truth is, I don’t really want to be friends, he said, in his reply. I’d be embarrassed to meet you, now. Then he cut me off.
Stella Grey is a pseudonym
