‘I guess that’s what comes of encouraging innocent young men. The lure of the older woman is overpowering!’
‘Perhaps. But believe me, these innocent young men don’t need much encouragement.’
‘So…have I missed the boat? If only I’d been a few young men earlier.’
‘Ah, I see. So now you’re interested.’
‘I was always interested. Just cautious.’
‘Fair enough. Okay, I’m happy to meet, if you like, but will leave it up to you.’
Then came the final slap. ‘Well here’s the deal. You send me a picture of you with something relevant and I’m game. Otherwise it’s a no go.’
‘Don’t know what you mean.’
‘A picture of you today, maybe pointing at Tinder on your computer screen, something verifiable. Then there’s no confusion.’
He was still confused? ‘You’re kidding. Think I would let some young guy demean me like that? Hey, meeting you isn’t that important to me.’
‘I don’t intend to demean you. But it would be nice to put my mind at rest.’
‘Then you can friend me on Facebook or connect with me on LinkedIn and we can send messages that way.’
‘That doesn’t help. Anyone can fabricate social media profiles. It’s a picture or nothing.’
I might have replied, truthfully, that personally I did not know how to fabricate social media profiles. But I had wasted enough time on suspicious Sam and no longer cared what he did or did not believe. To me he was just an irritating greenhorn whose presence was no longer required.
‘No deal.’
And with that, my days and nights of Tinder loving care came to an end.
*
At our last chinwag Sara had pointed out that some of those Tinder tots were actually closer in age to my grandsons than my sons. Only by a year or two, but even so, the thought was sobering (if only slightly). ‘Try to date some men your own age,’ she advised. ‘You might click with someone. They won’t all be like DanBoy and his dreary caravan.’
I mulled this over. I had loved being with young men. It wasn’t just the robust, dexterous sex and the many pleasures of intimacy with delectable, strong young bodies. It was their company, too. Their easy banter, entertaining slang and youthful mannerisms. I loved it all.
But Sara was right. I ought to give the oldies another go. There were a few stipulations, however, which had to be met by any contender with whom I might enter into a liaison. Firstly, he couldn’t have the same first name as my ex-partner. I had spent thirteen long years uttering that name and fancied a change. I was fairly open-minded about it but had a preference for short, zippy names. Drew and Clint, Tod and Rod, for example, were all perfectly acceptable. Secondly, he couldn’t be yet another business consultant, like my ex. I no longer wanted to hear the buzz-phrase ‘systems and processes’ or the constant refrain of ‘does that make sense?’ at the end of every exposition. And finally, (yes, again like my ex) I’m afraid I couldn’t countenance another fellow who took personal development courses and read self-help books. If I were to, as they say, ‘get into bed’ with someone (cue much chortling), I would insist that they already knew who they were and be content with it.
On the other hand, if the aspirant was hot-hot-hot, all the above objections would immediately be rendered null and void.
So, onwards and numerically upwards to the online oldsters. I decided to tweak my own dating profile narrative, making one or two minor concessions. Perhaps it had been putting some acceptable contestants off. Thus ‘all men are rascals’ became the more conciliatory ‘most men are rascals’. And after ‘I’m just looking to have a nice time’ I added: ‘but if something more promising turns up that would be a bonus!’ (This was to encourage the serious prospects…not that I was anticipating any.)
I had grown strangely restless over the months of my internet dating. Once I had been reasonably content lying on the sofa watching TV of an evening or else reading in bed, and in the summer months, with their late hours of sunlight, taking leisurely walks in a nearby park. But now I felt an almost constant urge to be monitoring the doings on the dating site – checking to see who had, or had not, been viewing or winking or messaging me. Browsing through the never-ending parade of prospective matches. Checking the mobile for texts from my conquests (I use that word with irony) and if possible indulging in lengthy, risqué texting sessions, sometimes into the small hours, with any who were around.
It was as if I could never let things slow down, much less come to a standstill, I had to keep them moving, moving, moving. I always had to feel those wheels spinning underneath me. And I wondered whether this was only a temporary character adjustment or had I been altered for good. Was this me, or was it the Raven?
I started to receive messages from a tall, grey-haired Aussie in his mid-fifties called Bob. An academic. Jovial but highly articulate (so refreshing), he displayed an agreeable touch of self-irony.
BOB: You are right. We men are indeed rascals, so nice that you appreciate us on our own terms. You understand us far too well, which removes any advantage of surprise. Not sure why you women put up with us…although I suppose we have our uses!
RAVEN: Yes, you have your occasional uses. Jump-starting car engines, checking tyre pressures…
BOB: And cuddling and other such delights.
RAVEN: Let’s leave those for later, shall we?
BOB: Of course, women can be temperamental and irrational. While men are simply horny. But I will practise being charming.
RAVEN: Keep practising. You never know, it might work.
BOB: Less likely with someone who recognises men for our inherent shallowness and villainy! ‘Tis all that testosterone washing about, an antidote to reasonable and rational decisions at times.
RAVEN: Ain’t that the truth!
Once we had begun communicating on our mobiles, away from the sharp, supervisory eye of the site administrators, he seemed to go into libido overdrive, telling me how horny he was and that he would definitely have to ‘cum’ very soon. Hullo, I thought, here we go. Et tu, Bob? I had hoped for more. Then again, he was from Oz.
We set up a date. Bob lived in Chiswick and offered to drive over and pick me up to take me out for drinks and dinner somewhere nearby. A real, old-fashioned date. These old guys really did have their advantages. Cars, money, their own property, language skills. And the ability to drink and drive without hitting anything.
Bob turned up in one of the larger Mercedes models. Nice. I could get used to it. Must tell Vanessa.
It was a balmy evening so I proposed we have a drink in my tranquil back garden rather than at a crowded local bar. He readily agreed. I opened a bottle of chilled white, got out the olives, and we sat down at the garden table.
He was gregarious, in characteristic Aussie style, and enthused about my vine-covered pergola, the exotic palm tree, the row of towering bamboos along the rear fence and the fish pond. As we sipped the wine he regaled me with tales of his life and times. He was a fluent, intelligent talker and I was pleased that we agreed on the major political issues of the day, because life is so much easier when I am not compelled to leap into those predictable right vs. left battles in order to ‘stand up and be counted’.
A divorcee, Bob and his ex-wife now communicated only through their respective PAs, and he did not often see his teenaged kids, who had moved abroad with their mother. But (unlike most Englishmen in his position, I imagine) he didn’t seem too weighed down by these personal tribulations. And on the upside, as he pointed out, his present family arrangements left him free to follow his horny instincts on London’s freewheeling dating scene.
He told me that one of the women he had met through the dating site and gone out with a few times later killed herself. ‘Nothing to do with me. Apparently she’d been clinically depressed. Bit of a shock, though, to open the paper one day and read about her suicide.’ Even the memory of this tragic incident failed to dampen his spirits, though. He simply poppe
d another olive in his mouth and poured more wine.
He had also had dates with a couple of ‘gold-diggers’, attractive young foreign women (one Korean, one Nigerian) in search of a sugar daddy. Naturally he was shrewd enough to see through them early on, and his only regret was that he felt obliged to give them the heave-ho before managing to get his leg over. They were ‘ravishingly sexy’, he said.
Bob was likeable. How could you not like someone who can reel off the names of half-a-dozen eminent Hungarian scientists (and pronounce their names properly) while also telling you that you have a great ass? But I doubted there would be any hanky-panky between us, because I wasn’t sufficiently attracted physically. I’d become spoilt. The seemingly inexhaustible supply of men online, including many splendid specimens, had made me highly pernickety. If a chap was too short, too old, too fat, too skinny, too hairy, too hairless, too big-nosed, too small-nosed, or he had bad teeth or piggy eyes or bandy legs…it was good-bye, Charley.
Bob had referred to the ‘inherent shallowness’ of men, but I realised I was being pretty shallow myself. Did the Raven care? No the Raven did not.
Bob had a fairly presentable appearance but his bulging belly put me off. After those firm, muscular Tinder tummies, I’m afraid that belly just leapt out at me in a way it probably wouldn’t have done a few months earlier.
After the first bottle of wine he seemed in no hurry to drive off to a restaurant, and as neither of us was starving, I opened more wine and brought out the dips ’n’ crisps. We carried on talking as the light faded and darkness set in. Bob could expound engagingly on a variety of subjects and the hours rolled by. It began to look as if we would not be going out anywhere that night, and I just hoped that – despite his none-too-subtle allusions to matters orgasmic – he wasn’t working himself up for a seduction attempt.
And isn’t that the way of the world? While Charles, with whom I had been dying to go to bed, had gone all impotent, I knew full well that this wizard from Oz would have happily bounced away on top of me all night.
Every so often I went indoors for some reason and on one of my trips I checked my mobile and found a new message. With a delicious frisson I saw that it was from gorgeous sexy Jake.
Jake: Hey how are you? Up to much tonight?
Me: I’m on a ‘date’! But would love to see you very soon. [And wasn’t that the truth.]
Jake: Well if the ‘date’ doesn’t go well you’re welcome to come round to mine and we could have a nice night in. [Oh the agony! Tonight of all nights!]
Me: Sounds bliss. I’d love to have a romp with you again.
Jake: Come to mine later and you can have me anyway you want me. I’m in bed naked, wanting you here.
Me, attempting to eat my fist: Arghhh!
Jake: Enjoy the rest of your date.
I staggered back out to the garden, my equilibrium off by a few notches. When I got to the table, Bob’s chair was empty. I looked around. He was sitting on the steps leading up to the pergola, doing something in the dark. As I approached I saw that he was barefoot and wringing out his socks.
‘What happened?’ I looked down at him, slightly alarmed. Even after numerous glasses of wine, the late hour and Jake’s disorientating booty call, this struck me as a bizarre sight.
But Bob was as unruffled as before. He explained with a mild smile: ‘Just having a stroll around the garden and forgot about the pond. I stepped right in, up to the knees. Hope the fish are all right.’
I put his socks in the dryer, thinking: that’ll be another half-hour, then. No way will I make it to Jake’s tonight. I sighed with resignation.
We moved into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa for more conversation. I glanced down at Bob’s feet. As a rule I try not to look at people’s bare feet because they are such unappealing things. (It beggars belief, to my mind, that there are actual foot fetishists in the world.) As I expected, his feet were really off-putting. Not the kind of feet I like to picture being intertwined with mine. Another reason not to go to bed with him.
It was getting on for 11 o’clock and I was tired. Bob was still lively, though, still full of stories and little asides (mainly sex-related), but well-behaved. To my relief, I realised that he was not the pouncing type. From time to time my mind darted to Jake and what I was missing, but the more tired I grew the less it seemed to matter. And still the socks tumbled on.
Bob left sometime after 1 a.m., giving my backside a playful squeeze in parting. He drove off in his Mercedes wearing his now-dry socks, carrying his soaked shoes in a plastic bag. He also borrowed one of my own books, thereby exhibiting a commendable interest in my writing career.
But it had not been the best night for the man from Down Under. He had missed out on dinner, fallen into a pond and failed to get any action, as it were, ‘down under’.
But I hoped to see him again, if only as a social contact, because it’s good to have raconteurs and clever people in one’s life. But something told me he would not be content sticking to such a platonic role. As he might have put it, where’s the cum in that?
*
I decided one day to send a conciliatory text to SuperA, my very first internet date. (Obviously I didn’t count NiceMan, who still emailed occasionally to ask how my dating was going. But I thought it unwise to tell him about my capers. Why torment the poor man?) SuperA and I had been out of touch since our bust-up over his presence on the dating site on a day when he was supposedly hard at work. (To think I had actually been jealous. It seemed so ridiculous now.) A few months on, in my new, jealousy-free persona, I recalled that we’d had a good time together at our first – and so far only – meeting and I thought I’d try to reignite matters between us.
Me: Hello. Been thinking about you. You’re not still cross with me are you? Why don’t we give it another whirl?
SuperA: Hey. Funnily enough, I did think of you the other day.
Me: Was it a nice thought?
SuperA: Yes, I had a nice memory of waking up beside you with the sunlight streaming through your curtains on to your hair.
Blimey. He was waxing lyrical.
Me: Mm. And I have nice memories of you being on top and letting me have it with both barrels. Ha ha.
SuperA: You were very irate with me, without reason. Why the change of heart?
Me: I wasn’t all that cross.
SuperA: You were beside yourself with rage!
Now he was overstating his case.
Me: I was just being a bit girly. I’m sorry. I’m so much wiser now in the ways of online dating!
SuperA: Ah, I see.
Then he called me and we had a long chat. It was apparent that he too was in favour of giving us another go. He said he was very busy at work (of course) but would be in touch soon to arrange something.
I had meant it when I told him I was wiser. It had taken me a few months but I finally twigged how the virtual dating system worked, and why it was that dates and would-be dates would emerge out of the ether only to disappear mysteriously back into it. As the site members spent so much of their time online, there was a ceaseless ebb and flow of connections being created in varying degrees of looseness, and as new ones formed, earlier ones dissolved, whether consciously or unconsciously, it was never possible to know for certain. The hapless were dropped or forgotten or put on hold, whilst other options were explored.
Everything was built on shifting sand, nothing was solid or reliable or entirely real. A promise one day generally meant nothing the next. And the more you wanted to believe in the value of a particular connection, in its possibilities for the future and its potential for genuine emotion, the more likely it was to be merely a mirage.
In an environment such as this, there was no point in taking any individual or his words seriously, jealousy was negated and normal responses to other human beings – involving sentiments such as hope and trust – were deactivated. If you couldn’t play this pitiless game, you were in the wrong place and had better get out before it ha
mmered you into the ground.
My worry wasn’t that it might hammer me. My worry was that I was learning to play it too well and might not know how to stop once I had returned to the real world, offline.
*
SuperA was appearing at a media event in town, had booked into a swanky hotel for the night, and invited me to go there and spend it with him. He wouldn’t be able to get there before 11.30 p.m., but the plan was to meet in the lobby and he would then take me up to his room, which was on a high-up floor and looked out over the Thames. A late night tryst with a romantic air about it! I relished the idea of getting on the tube and gallivanting into town for hot sex at an hour when women of my age were more commonly tucked up in bed with cocoa and a copy of House and Home.
‘Don’t keep me waiting, though,’ I told him. ‘I don’t want to hang about in the lobby like some Russian hooker.’
‘Are you complaining already?’
At about 10 p.m. that evening I had just finished a languid soak in the bath and was applying copious amounts of body lotion to my limbs, when my mobile sprang to life with the merry chime of a text. I expected it to be from SuperA, and was startled to see that it was from Jock, the bearded Scot with whom I had spent the night in the Docklands, being hump-hump-humped into exhaustion. A blast from what now felt like the distant past in these dating chronicles. We had been out of touch for many weeks and I had assumed he and I were done.
‘Fancy a shag?’ Typically, Jock did not stand on ceremony.
‘Yeah I do, actually, and luckily I’m about to have one.’
‘Knock yourself out. You’re a scream.’ And he added one of those tiresome smiley faces.
You can wait a long time for an exchange like that. I smiled to myself and carried on with my toilette.
SuperA was only a few minutes late arriving at his hotel, looking smart in an Armani suit. I had forgotten how swish he was. He gave me a nonchalant peck on the cheek with his scratchy, short-cropped beard, as though we had only been apart a day or two and not a matter of months.
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