When is the right time to start dating after you’ve experienced a a loss? Especially a loss by suicide? I’m damned if I know… As with everything grief-related, it’s different for everyone. People helpfully tell you that it will happen when you least expect it. So you turn up to every work do, art club, yoga retreat, writing workshop, funeral (don’t judge me), wondering if this is going to be the moment you meet someone. Only to realise that because you’ve inadvertently been expecting it, by default it can’t be. Dammit!
People also like to tell you that you must be truly happy in your own company before you can let someone else in. The problem with that is that I’m too happy in my own company. I’m blithely skipping towards full-on, card-carrying hermit status and am perfectly fine about it.
I thought I was ready to move on quite soon after J died. Looking back on it, it’s fairly obvious that I wasn’t. There is one male friend of mine, let’s call him John, who narrowly escaped me displacing my confusion onto him, one Peroni-fuelled evening. John had kindly come to visit, to see how I was. This came shortly after some flirtatious texts, or at least that’s what my grief-addled brain thought they were.
That evening I plied him with beers and cooked a fancy meal (way to a man’s heart, etc.). As we sat on the sofa later, chatting and drinking more beer, I was willing him to lean over and kiss me. In fact I was simultaneously willing myself to lean over and kiss him. “I’m ready for this,” I kept thinking, “I’m over J and I can move on! I deserve this!” It would have been so lovely to kiss someone and feel some physical contact again. Poor John had no idea of the internal struggle that was going on in my deluded mind as we talked. Thankfully for everyone involved, the lean-over never happened.
I had been surprised in my early grief that I experienced a very intense physical yearning. I craved human touch in a way that I hadn’t even when I was with J. Maybe it’s similar to what happens the minute you decide to give up cake (or wine, or chocolate, or anything else that gives you pleasure). Suddenly the only thing you can think about is cake and shoving all of it into your face.
In the last few months of our relationship, the sex had been on the decline. Unsurprisingly, it happened in direct proportion to J’s deteriorating mental health. His lows were getting lower and more frequent. He could barely get out of bed and I would incompetently try to ‘cheer him up.’ I would remind him that in the space of a few days he would level out again. There were arguments, where he would push me and threaten to walk out. Eventually I would crumple and cry, at which point he would soften and say he was sorry.
And then the inevitable highs would arrive and they were almost worse – his euphoria felt hollow. He was so wincingly upbeat that he would frantically keep asking me: “What’s wrong?” over and over, because I wasn’t as manic as he was. I would eventually get irritated. “Nothing’s wrong!” I would snap, for the tenth time. It was hard to feel connected to him in the extremes of either of those states, and the level bits in-between were becoming shorter and less frequent.
Leading up to me leaving for my week-long work trip to California, he’d been getting progressively more anxious about me going. Looking back on it, I handled it completely wrong. I think he took the fact that I was so relaxed about it to mean that I didn’t care. I was trying to show him that it wasn’t a big deal, it was just one week. It would be over in a flash and then I would be home. Plenty of people travel for work, why did there need to be any fuss?
I know now that what he really needed was more reassurance. For me to display the fact that I was going to miss him in bright technicolour. To declare my love and be distraught at the thought of being apart from him, even for a few days.
The night before I left he tried to make a special dinner, but he was trying too hard. He burnt the pie and his anger was completely out of proportion. I tried to make light of it, reassure him that it was fine. But he was too far gone and I ended up going to bed alone, while he stayed up going through god knows what inside his troubled mind. I went to bed thinking: “Oh well, we’ll make up for it when I get back,” but to him it was significant – it meant we were over just before I was about to go away.
So, yearning for intimacy surprised me after he died. How can you miss something you haven’t had? I haven’t researched this in depth, but a quick Google search confirms my suspicions. These suspicions are based on hearsay, a couple of stories about friends’ friends and just a general feeling – so, highly scientific. 61% of men remarry or become involved in a new relationship within 25 months of their spouse’s death. This compares to 19% of women. It would have been oh so easy to satisfy the craving with whoever happened to be in front of me. John my friend, if you’re reading this: you had a very lucky escape.
A year and a half after J died, I succumbed to my friends’ unsubtle hints that I should try online dating, so I signed up for a three month subscription.
I didn’t want to join the bereavement-specific dating app. First of all, I’d have to provide a death certificate and I had left J’s dad to get that. The idea of having to contact J’s dad for a copy so that I could do online dating, made me break out in a cold sweat. Besides, in my mind, I didn’t like the idea that the first thing I would have in common with a potential match would be bereavement. I didn’t want that to be the conversation starter. To wallow in it and exchange stories about our versions of it. Grief one-upmanship. I was trying so hard for it not to be the thing that defined me, I didn’t want it to be the thing that defined me in dating either.
I’d done a little online dating back in my thirties, when I was single and living in London. I’d gone onto Guardian Soulmates, online dating was still very new then. It was fun, everyone I met was lovely and it was a great way to have a social life in a big and busy city. So now in my fifties, as I ventured into the new world of dating apps, my expectations were that it would be similar. It would be light-hearted, breezy. I was happy to meet like-minded people, socialise, and if there was someone I had a spark with, great. My optimism was, I felt, realistic. Not being desperate, I reasoned, meant I wasn’t going to be devastated if Prince Charming wasn’t on Bumble. How hollowly I laugh now at my naivety, when I look back at this.
Having completed two painful rounds of online dating, on two different apps, the diagnosis is not good. I dipped a toe in, twice, and even submerged one foot up to my ankle. I have now flinched at the cold, backed away from the water’s edge and put some thermal socks on. Not for me.
Perhaps I wasn’t quite as ready as I thought the first time I tried it (hmmm, pattern?). I am fortunate in that my self-esteem does not rely on validation from strangers. This is possibly connected to my advancing years. If it had, I would be in tatters.
Initially I was too polite, matching with people because they seemed nice rather than because I felt we were genuinely a match. We’re just making friends, right? Until two messages in, a particular gentleman politely asked if I wanted to “exchange sexual stories?” Errrr, no thanks! (Also: what does that even mean?) Then, the first person I matched with who I genuinely liked the look of, started sending me voice notes. I’m not a fan of voice notes – send a text or call for a chat, not this weird in-between! I had to Google how to leave a voice note, but I bravely persevered. After my second voice note, the next morning he had unmatched me. No ‘thanks but no thanks,’ no explanation, no nothing.
It would have been so, so easy to go down a rabbit-hole of: “Was it something I said? Was it my voice? Did I voice-note wrong?” But I shrugged it off: not to be. My three month subscription expired uneventfully, with a couple of spark-free meet ups, and I called it a day.
My sister persuaded me to try online dating again a few months after the two year anniversary of J’s suicide. She told me to try a different app and see what happened. I decided to try again, thinking surely now I’m ready? There were fewer men holding giant fish on this app. And fewer topless selfies in the steamy bathroom mirrors, so that seemed a promising start.
This time round I actually went on a few more dates, with perfectly nice men, but still zero chemistry. Oh, and I got scammed, which is hilarious looking back on it, but at the time felt mortifying. Apparently I am now in the ‘lonely old lady’ bracket, ripe for scamming. But I take some comfort in the fact that my gut instincts were right. I’d shared doubts with a couple of friends, but they’d both said it might be a language barrier. His messages started getting a bit intense. Nothing too dodgy, no dick-pic thank god. I have managed to escape both forays into online dating dick-pic-free. But his messages, were still ‘off.’ Along the lines of : “Do you think you could be the woman I can come home to each night…”
I politely told him to take it down a notch, we hadn’t even met yet. The next morning he’d sent me links some toe-curlingly saccharine love songs, asking me to listen. I immediately blocked him.
Of course, once I had time to reflect there came the excruciating realisation that he was a scammer (or more likely a group of scammers). It was like waking up with a hangover, memories of the previous nights’ indiscretions very slowly coming into focus. He was away ‘working in the Philippines.’ He had a thirteen year old daughter in the UK. I think I was one short step away from the ‘my daughter has had an accident and I can’t get home. Send money’ scenario.
I also went on three dates with someone I had chemistry with over WhatsApp. Weird as it sounds, our message exchange was hilarious and took abstract twists and turns which were hugely entertaining and gave me hope. But in person – you guessed it – no spark.
On our second date he wanted to hold hands as we walked along the beach, and to me it was like we were forcing it, trying to fast-forward through the getting-to-know-you stage and straight into being in an established, hand-holding relationship. He probably sensed my entire body go rigid when he took my hand, as after he’d dropped me home he messaged me: “Are you truly over J?” It had nothing to do with J. I tried to explain that while I am tactile in a relationship, it takes me a while to get to the point where it comes naturally.
On our next date he took me to dinner, and then wanted to hold hands again walking back to the car. So, like a complete coward I messaged him to say that he was lovely but I wasn’t feeling it. I know I should have called him, but come on, we may have held hands twice but we’d only been on three dates!
While it was great pretending to be Carrie Bradshaw for a while and entertaining my friends with embarrassing anecdotes from my failed dates, the novelty conveniently wore off at the same time as my second subscription expired. For the final date I drove 30 minutes to Ely. The man in question (perfectly nice, though far, far shorter than his profile suggested), told me about his difficult divorce which resulted in his 25 year old son no longer talking to him, while we were in the queue at the coffee shop. By the time we actually sat down with our coffees I knew more about his previous relationship than those of some of my closest friends.
I realised then (as I wondered how long was a polite amount of time to spend trying to persuade this poor man to make the first move and call his son, before I could hot-foot it out of there), that I resented spending three hours of my precious time on men I was highly unlikely to want to see again.
I like my own company, I like my free time, I’m happy at home or walking the dogs, or hanging out with the kids (when they deign to let me) or pottering in the garden. What I am not is: miserable, lonely or distraught at the fact that I’m single. So I’m not going to force it. I will let it happen organically, if it happens at all. So maybe this means now is the time I’m least expecting it?
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