From our correspondent in the city of the internet.
I didn’t want to admit it, but Mrs Mann and I hadn’t lolled together for ages. We had become, in Charlie Kaufman’s wonderful phrase, the ‘dining dead.’
Flirtbox had the great benefit of being free. Setting up my profile was painless. I was up on the site within minutes, ready to flirt and be flirted with. My introductory e-missives to Beautiful Sweetlittlething and FriskyinDarlington were ignored. But Cari84 responded almost instantly to the message I sent her.
It was difficult to contain my excitement. We had so much in common. George Orwell was Cari84's favourite writer. She loved the Velvet Underground. If she had to take one film with her to a desert island it would be
Casablanca. She wanted to live by the sea and learn to sail. And as I was nearing my fifth decade I was overjoyed to discover that she was only at the start of her third.
Our early exchanges went well enough. Cari84 would choose Rick over Lazlo and agreed that Lou Reed and friends were much better with the deep-toned Nico. Not that she put any of this in full sentences of course. Plump, well-rounded phrases are not the stuff of this sort of chat. The latter sentiment went something like this:
OMG! vu w/ nico? vu w/o nico? erm??? idk. w/ nico. If I wanted to rofl I wasn’t in the right place. But the straightforward object of my desire had the sort of sultry look that tends to bring on cardiovascular problems. So she wasn't Dorothy Parker, I'd get over it.
Cari84 responded quite favourably to the wizened features my photo displayed, but took none too kindly to my failure to abbreviate.
WTF! I said,
I like verbs. When I mentioned that I wasn’t really six foot four as my profile had suggested I never heard from her again.
This caused me a momentary despair. Was it my destiny to be a dating site non-entity? The only message I had in my inbox was from AmazonEssexGirl who wanted to do unspeakable things with tropical fruit. Few people were clicking on my profile. And the more lurid descriptions I read, the less my interest was aroused. Just a few weeks in and I had had enough.
The night I made the decision to bring my online flirtations to an end I sat down with Mrs Mann for my evening meal with new and restless purpose. I realised it was all my fault. I had forgotten to keep romancing my beloved. I had become Jim Royle, sofa-bound, demanding. While pouring another glass of Bordeaux my wife asked me if I really though of myself as a BoredProvincialHusband. A substantial forkful of bolognese littered my clean white shirt and then I looked at my wife's smiling face and lolled harder than I had in months.
© Rulwynn Mann 2008
15th July 08
