‘Midlife dating is like a grotesque contact sport with too many players, and nobody wins’
I did not expect to be single at midlife. My ex and I split after 12 years together. In the last few years of our relationship, we were both hanging on by our fingertips; neither of us, I suspect, wanting to face the prospect of being single despite us both knowing deep down that we were wrong for each other. The notion of doing life alone, especially as a single parent, was terrifying. So too now is the idea of dating, of getting back out there. The thought of being vulnerable, of being open with my heart.
After our split, I rent a house for me and the children in Bromley. ‘Bijou,’ the estate agent says, which means it’s small and a bit cramped. It’s all I can afford, barely, and the kitchen and living room are basically the same room. There’s no space for 12 years’ worth of stuff, and I sell what I can, before giving some to charity, then hiring a skip for the rest.
In our old house before we move out for good, I am surprised to find how unattached I am to the things that once felt so important. Knick-knacks collected over the years, ornaments, souvenirs from holidays. I look at my wardrobe, bursting with clothes of the person I was, that I thought I was, and I don’t recognise them as mine. I tell my ex he can take whatever he likes of our kitchenware.
I think of all the dinner parties I’ve thrown over the years; elaborate, stressful affairs involving too many courses, days of preparation, and hours of cleaning up. A fish poacher. A bread maker. Gifts we’ve received: an antique candlestick, a picture of taxidermy butterflies, a stylish yet uncomfortable and broken Swedish antique sofa. Other furniture I upcycled, spending months, maybe years, scouring markets and sanding and painting ugly into beautiful. I even went through a découpage phase, and we have various lamps that I spent so much time on, and now realise look ridiculous. I thought I was an elaborate dinner party, upcycle, découpage type of woman.
I touch the Farrow & Ball painted walls that I was so obsessed about, and smell the curtains I had made in our first year. They smell of another place. There’s a large pot in the kitchen, too dirty and broken to go to the charity shop, beyond cleaning. I think of all the things it contained. The juniper-soaked Christmas ham I’d made for guests. The endless Sunday roast dinners. Goose-fat potatoes. I think of Christmases and better times. Family times. There’s a power washer in the garden, also broken, which I’d thrown in a fit of rage when I was pregnant, at the garden wall. I rest my head on the wall. Both the wall and my head feel cold and crunchy.
I spend money I don’t have on removal men for the stuff I can’t leave behind. The children and I sit on the floor of our new home, surrounded by brown boxes written on with Sharpie: Bedroom, Kitchen, Important. And we cry. The three of us sit and cry and cry, and look at each other as we do so, try and outcry each other. Then, we huddle together like penguins trying to keep out the icy cold. The removal men weave in and out and around us, not looking at our faces, not knowing what to say.
When my mum comes to stay shortly after we move, we eat breakfast on the second-hand sofa I found at the British Heart Foundation shop. It is not at all stylish, and extremely comfortable. There is no table. ‘Where’s your cereal?’ my mum asks. ‘You need to eat.’ It is true my skin is hanging off me like an old coat, my collarbones a coat hanger. ‘We only have three bowls,’ I say. And when she looks horrified, ‘We’ll rotate.’
She puts her bowl down on the floor. ‘We can go shopping today. You can’t live like this.’ I try and smile. I am becoming expert at fake-smiling.
‘The stuff you own ends up owning you,’ I tell her. ‘I read that somewhere.’ I read a lot of things. My books survived the exodus. I stack them up against walls, and sometimes at night there is a bashing sound and I come down to find the floor covered in forgotten titles, and I sit amongst them and read until dawn.
‘We can stock up,’ my mum says, horrified at the way I now live. ‘You can’t live without stuff.’ She picks her bowl up and rinses it, then dries it and starts filling it with cornflakes. ‘You’re not a student.’
Midlife marriage breakdowns
Marina Benjamin, in The Middlepause, eloquently describes the self-destructive desires that are perhaps subconscious at midlife, but often unavoidable: ‘In menopause, a woman is forced to negotiate an entirely new psychic terrain, largely in the spirit of alienation. It is an eerie place, spring-trapped with out-of-body experiences and veil-lifting moments that expose jarring, pop-up truths... suddenly you want to pack it all in, give up your job, blow up your marriage, leave the country.’
I was 34 when I split from this 12-year relationship and despite a couple of relationships with lovely men, find myself single again in midlife. Being single at this age may not be what I imagined, but I’m not alone in being so. As the years go by, friends around me start separating. Marriages fall apart. I begin to see loose threads everywhere.
There was a time in our late 20s and early 30s when almost every weekend was taken up with a wedding. And there is a time, a decade or more later, when every weekend is taken up with desperate, angry and confused friends who are sobbing on the phone about their relationship breaking down.
I have an increasing number of single, middle-aged friends. We live lives of extremes, all or nothing. Lone parenting means a good proportion of our time is solely focused on family life, and a social life revolves around the children, or costly babysitters. But there are sometimes weekends without children at all, when they visit their dad, something not experienced by friends still in couples. The house is completely empty, lie-ins are possible, and friendships change in this space, mirror a child-free time of our lives.
Delving into online dating
Like many of my single-parent friends, Orla and I are double agents. After extended periods of sole-charge parenting, any rare, child-free weekend feels like being let out of a cage, a wonderful regression into aliases. We drink and dance until 4am, as if we are 20 and on a girls’ holiday in Ayia Napa, instead of in our mid-40s and 50s, in a quiet pub in Dulwich. The difference is the hangover. Joint pain. Dry eyes. Nowadays, my body screams at me if I drink any more than two glasses of wine or if I stand for too long, let alone dance all night.
‘Remember when we used to go out all night then straight to work,’ Orla says, groaning. We’re lying in our dressing gowns, swiping away at Orla’s dating app. On the coffee table in front of us a giant bowl of chilli Doritos, two glasses of Berocca, a packet of paracetamol, another of ibuprofen, two Yakults, a pot of coffee.
Orla is recently back on dating apps, following the usual on-off pattern that most of my single friends and I adopt. We’ll join an app, scroll relentlessly, go on a few horrific dates, then, emotionally scarred, come off the app and swear never to go back on again. A few months later we are back. This seems to be the modern-day drug of choice. Ultimate procrastination.
‘Middle-aged dating is like a grotesque contact sport, with too many players, where nobody wins,’ I say. ‘A world where the focus is on beginnings rather than endings.’
‘Uh huh,’ Orla doesn’t look up.
As I waffle on, she scrolls through the app, then occasionally holds it up, asking, ‘does this approach really work for him?’ and then shows profiles, reflective of the heterosexual online dating world: a man with a bandage around his head, lying in a hospital bed: ‘Dean. 56. Had a rough time recently. Looking for someone caring’; an extraordinary number of men holding large fish or next to live tigers; standing next to sports cars; giving Ted Talks; or photographed with their children, and sometimes, wives; the polyamorous open-relationship sorts, who are often bearded and seemingly always bake bread; men bungee jumping off cliffs, or parachuting out of aeroplanes; So. Many. Rock. Climbers; the newly divorced sad-eyed men who are clearly 10 years older than their profile age suggests, and searching for someone 20 years younger; or, bizarrely to me, extremely young men, in their late 20s or even teens, looking for women 20 or 30 years older.
Despite my scepticism, this is how people date now. I have friends who found the loves of their lives on dating apps, and I know a number of happily married couples who originally met online. It might be, according to Orla, a jungle out there, but it’s how many people fall in love. So soon I feel ready to dip my toe in the dating pool too. But not without trepidation.
My first attempt at dating was at 14 and went spectacularly badly. The boy, Arron, was maybe a year or two older – I met him in the cafe in Stevenage where I worked. Green eyes, black hair. He wore a shirt and a very thin tie, which I found wildly exciting, and he invited me to McDonald’s that Saturday, writing his name on my arm in biro. On Saturday, I applied six layers of mascara and turned up at 3.55. I waited and waited. 4.40 – no sign of him.
By Monday morning I was still crying. As I waited outside school for my friend to arrive, ‘Bible Ben’, an aloof, mature, wise boy in my class spotted me first and I told him everything. ‘I don’t know where Arron lives,’ I cried. ‘He’s the love of my life. I know it.’ I expected Ben to tell me I was too young to meet the love of my life. Or that we were going to be really late. But he looked straight at my face and whispered, ‘He doesn’t deserve you.’
This time around, it is my friend Orla I turn to for support. ‘What should I say in my dating profile?’ I hold my phone to her. I have no idea who I am, what I want, or certainly what I need. I like books, films, jazz, walking and yoga. I’m looking for someone kind, who is interested and interesting. Orla looks up. ‘Best to be brutally honest.’
I tap in some words: I’m hungover, in a dark room, currently watching back-to-back episodes of First Dates eating pizza and Doritos for breakfast. Shortly I have to take the car to the MOT centre in the industrial area of Orpington. Send help. And full-fat Coke.
‘Yup,’ says Orla. ‘Brutal honesty.’
We laugh, but we’re not brutally honest. At all.
My profile picture is of me clean, wearing actual clothes, without a massive pizza belly, smiling and looking shiny. The reality, and how I am presenting myself online, do not match in any sense. I can’t remember the last time I washed my hair. I broke a hairbrush yesterday trying to brush it.
Butterflies, red flags and first dates
The first conversation, however, seems promising. I’m not very good at chitchat, I’m way too intense. I ignore Orla’s advice to keep it light and friendly, to chat about films and books, or favourite foods, and instead I ask probing questions, as though I’m interviewing someone for a job. ‘What’s your relationship with your family like?’ ‘How was early childhood?’ ‘What do you think is your most annoying habit?’
Alex laughs at my probing questions. He has a normal-looking face and a normal-looking profile. No red flags. We text a bit, and he has banter and good chat, and makes me laugh. And we speak a few times on the phone. I am a bit nervous but after a few weeks of chatting, arrange to meet him anyway.
We meet at Victoria station, after much discussion about where we should go. Alex has suggested a few restaurants and I’ve steered him towards the idea of a coffee or a drink, thinking that if we dislike each other it will be easier to leave. He arrives late but apologetic, and although a good three inches shorter than he had claimed on his profile, he is good looking with a friendly smile, and seems easy to talk to. Funny, even. We have a drink, and chat. It is nice; I am enjoying myself and we go for dinner, after all.
The restaurant he suggests is fairly quiet and we order and laugh and drink wine. I like this man, I think, his open honesty and intellect. He talks a lot about himself, but I don’t mind that. I like finding out about him. He orders more wine, and leans back in his chair, and chats as if we’ve known each other forever. Then Alex reaches into his rucksack and brings out a glass jar, the kind you might put cotton wool balls in. Inside is a giant spider – a tarantula, alive, moving and very real. I yelp. He laughs. ‘Oh, that’s Roger,’ he says, placing the spider next to his plate. ‘He comes with me everywhere.’
Alex was bizarre but harmless, and I do have some nice dates. However, after a few months more of online dating I’m clocking up an array of horror stories. Everyone I meet seems to be a cheat, liar, gaslighter, emotionally unavailable or avoidant, irresponsible, even criminal. My friends act as gatekeepers and cheer me on. ‘It’s a game of numbers,’ Orla reminds me. ‘Eventually, after thousands, you might find someone who’s OK.’
‘Call me romantic,’ I tell her, ‘but I’m looking for more than OK.’
A chance connection
Helen Fisher, an anthropologist, suggests in Why We Love that dating is a game designed to ‘impress and capture’, which is not necessarily about honesty but novelty, excitement and even danger, which can boost dopamine levels in the brain. But that’s not what I’m looking for either. Now that I’ve thrown myself into this world, I am consumed with longing for a stable relationship. I’m craving intimacy. And it feels further and further away from possibility.
Then, amid all of this, something else happens that changes everything: the pandemic. The trauma of living through an internal as well as external change forces to the surface all my anxieties and vulnerabilities. The random nature of life with no pattern is a pattern in itself. There’s no control. I’d always felt a bit out of control, and chaotic, in a way I imagined others weren’t. Other women seemed to project calm, organised togetherness. Now we’re all chaos. And I realise we probably always were. The loss of that realisation is frightening, but it’s freeing too.
My quest for romantic love, obsessing over my body, clear fear of ageing, have been a waste of time of this precious, precarious life.
Then in February 2021, a man called Ben contacts me on social media: he’s doing a series of talks about compassion, and has come across my memoir about nursing, The Language of Kindness. He sends a nice, though very long message, about how we knew each other at school, and my mum taught us both at nursery school, where we went together aged three – do I remember him? At first, I have no clue. But then I remember. Ben. Bible Ben, who was wise, even when we were teens.
Ben has devoted his life to others. He tells me about the food bank he’s been running for six years, the difficulties during Covid of keeping it going, despite a huge increase in demand. ‘We could have coffee and a walk,’ he tells me. ‘Be lovely to catch up properly.’
I have no idea if he’s suggesting coffee as an actual date, or even if he’s flirting full-stop. As such old friends it’s natural and familiar when we chat, and I wonder if I’m reading into it. But we message anyway, become friends again.
We are middle-aged now, and we both have huge responsibilities and there’s a whole heap of people relying on us both – we are both parenting teens alone, for example – and we have completely different lives in many ways.
We arrange to meet at Regent’s Park, and I see him outside the Tube. We are both older. But somehow, he looks the same. And although we are grown-ups, within seconds of talking, I see that we’re both still really those awkward teenagers, rebellious in opposite ways. It’s as if no time has passed at all, and we’re standing outside school, and 14 years old instead of 40-something. I look at him and my body knows him. It’s like muscle memory. He’s at once familiar and new.
I have known Ben longer than anyone outside my family, but our lives drifted in separate directions. We have so much to catch up on, so many years and gaps, and yet walking around the park it’s as if we have spent the last 30 years walking around the park.
I collect Ben things in my head, the way I tease his big ears, his endless kindness, his enthusiasm for chilli seeds and coupons. He always has change and carries stamps, which cracks me up. We are the total opposite and the total same.
Being with Ben is completely unlike meeting someone from a dating app. There is nothing contrived about Ben. He offers to take my nan a food parcel. He buys me a jar of cheap coffee. (‘I know you love NHS coffee. Keep going with writing. I am with you.’) Four months after we reconnect, he offers to pop over one lunchtime – he has made dinner for me and the kids to save me cooking later. He drops off dinner on the doorstep, then leaves. It’s a five-hour round trip. He is steady. Calm. Present. Honest. It is wildly unnerving.
When he asks me out, on a proper date, a more-than-friends date, my instinct is to run.
I’m about to put a stop to our chatting, and explain that I am not in a place where I’m interested in love, or even believe in dating – then I stop myself.
I have been on hundreds of dates in my life. But the best date of my life happens with my friend Ben, during a pandemic, when we go to Morrisons, buy some cheap breaded ham and bread, and eat it on the car park wall, in the rain. We sit on a cold wall and talk and talk and talk. Everything he says feels measured and important. He always was wise. Time seems to gallop as we sit here, and one hour turns into four. He asks if he might kiss me. I have kissed many people. But kissing Ben is something close to spiritual. And we are briefly and totally connected to each other in a profound way.
We are both quiet a while after kissing, unable to speak. Then we laugh. Ben puts his arm around me, and we huddle together and talk more, listen more.
The light is changing. The car park is emptying slowly of shoppers. Ben sighs. He touches my cheek with his fingertips, and looks at me as I’ve never been looked at before.
‘Well,’ he says.
‘Well then,’ I say. And we laugh.
*Names have been changed. Abridged extract from Quilt on Fire: The Messy Magic of Midlife, by Christie Watson (Chatto & Windus, £16.99), out on 16 June. © Christie Watson 2022. Pre-order your copy from the Telegraph Bookshop
