‘Obviously, it’s the Acts of Service one.’
‘It is?’
‘All you ever do is do things for your community.’
At first that sounds kind of nice but after a second’s thought, I say, ‘Why am I Acts of Service, and not any of the other ones? Are you saying I’m closed off and can’t simply tell people I love them?’
‘Of course not…’
‘Because I really love you. See? I said it. Easy.’
‘Can you say it to a guy?’
She’s got me there.Dammit.
‘I would,’ I protest. ‘I might. If there was someone nice enough to say it to.’
She’s right, though. That was the one thing I struggled with when it came to Don. Letting him move in? No problem. Sharing a bed? That was fine too. Letting him park his bike and all its paraphernalia in the lock-up round the back, even if it meant moving out some of the old furniture I’ve had in storage for years? I told him to knock himself out. But somehow, even on our wedding day, I felt horribly bashful and squirming when it came to the big declaration. I don’t think I ever actually said it out loud, instead saying ‘you too’ every time he said it gushingly to me, which was often, actually. I was right to be wary. Looking back, Don’s love language must have been Bullshit.
‘OK,’ I concede. ‘I’ll pick Acts of Service.’
The questions keep coming, on and on, increasingly quirky ones designed to draw out my personality so it can be filtered and profiled and broken down into matches.
‘What are the top two traits you look for in a partner?’
Lucy doesn’t laugh when I joke about their own teeth and a pulse, so I plump for patience and understanding, things you definitely need to deal with me, if my dating history is anything to go by.
By the final question I’ve had enough.
‘If you were a season, which would you be? Oh, for God’s sake.’
Lucy pulls an insistent face, and I sigh dramatically.
‘Oh, Ok,’ I sigh. The old me would have put ‘winter’, but having grown desensitised to Christmas cheer for obvious and increasingly piled-up reasons, I select ‘spring’ instead. That’s what this is supposed to be, isn’t it? This time of life? A second spring. That’s how the leaflet in the menopause clinic described it anyway and I’d fought hard not to gag.
‘Next, profile image?’ I say, following the app prompt. ‘I haven’t taken a selfie in my life. Maybe we should give this up as a lost cause?’
‘No, no, no,’ Lucy chides, and tells me she has some great photos of me in her phone – which is news to me – but it’s touching that she’s kept them. ‘Here, let me.’ She does something clever with her phone (called ‘AirDropping’, apparently), and now she’s uploaded to the app a shot of me three Christmases ago when I was in a phase of dying my hair red.
She crops herself out of the image, and suddenly there I am, fixed inside a little circular window. My profile picture. Just a handful of pixels to be judged. Because, let’s face it, any bloke’s going to be more interested in what I look like than which element I consider myself, right? (I chose fire over earth, air and water, if you’re interested, only because I hate being cold.) That was around about the time Lucy scolded me to put more effort into my answers, in case I ‘threw the results’, and I felt like a kid and wanted to stick out my tongue in revolt.
What is this role reversal thing that’s happening? I feel like Lucy’s the watchful adult and I’m the youngster.
Izz warned me about it; the moment people start to ‘hover’, she called it. One minute you’re an independent, kick-ass woman ploughing her own furrow, the next, people are suddenly ‘concerned’ and meddling in your business.
The whole thing, this shift, and all the recent changes in my life, have left me as dizzy as the wheel circling on my phone screen in front of me, where the wordsSearching for your perfect matchare fading in and out in lilac font.
‘Give it a second,’ Lucy’s saying, and I suddenly have no idea how we went from bolognese and night-in-front-of-the-telly-in-our-jammies to matchmaking for rural seniors.
In spite of myself, there’s that old curiosity of mine, making itself felt with an adrenalised rush of excitement. Suddenly, I have an intense interest in the app’s ability to accurately locate the absolutely ideal man for me (should they be solvent, child-free – I have zero desire to become a stepmother – and living within a forty-mile radius of Wheaton, that is).
‘It’s exciting, isn’t it?’ Lucy says as the database does its magic.
It’s taking too long for my liking. ‘It is,’ I reply, wishing the rising sicky feeling in my stomach would go away. What if nobody matches to me? What if they’re all on the hunt for younger women? And, now that I think of it, surely if there were crowds of handsome, eligible men living near Wheaton I’d have bumped into at least one of them by now? (I find I’m pushing thoughts of Patrick out of my brain at this.)
‘Hah! There you go,’ Lucy yelps. ‘Thirty potential matches in your area.’
‘Thirty?’
