Chapter 2 — The Old Friend's Advice

One day, however, I received a message on Facebook that sent my life in a different direction. The message was from a person who I’d known when I worked down London. I’d contacted him some days or weeks earlier and hadn’t thought anymore about it. We exchanged commonplace messages about the past, some of the laughs we’d had, and what he was doing now. These, however, like the rest, gradually grew less and less, and it was only when I told him about Anna that he related how he’d lost his partner a few years before.

He wrote about how he’d dealt with the grief and loneliness, and how he felt the excruciating boredom of having no social escape. Reading those messages was like reading one’s own present state. He said there are two ways to deal with grief and each person is different. In the first place, you can be noble, you can knuckle down, tolerate the boredom, be the stoic, and show society that you can deal with the grief and come out of the trauma as a man of integrity. In the second place – and the one chosen by my old friend – you can accept what’s happened and move on, get yourself out and start meeting people again, have fun and enjoy life. He recommended a dating site, and there began the new phase of life.

Did I regret what I was doing so soon after the loss of my love? Yes, I did. Anna wouldn’t have minded, and she’d have been pushing me to get out and live life again, but you’re always conscious of what others might think; at least I was in the early weeks, but then shame took hold and I couldn’t give a damn. I accepted that I wasn’t strong enough to have taken the noble path to recovery, and I envy those who have the strength to undertake such fortitude of mind and spirit to overcome the pain. I wanted happiness, fun, the sparkle of life to overcome my pain, and the decision was made, and I would join the recommended site.

Ordinarily I would have had much trepidation about getting out there and dating again. It had been nearly eighteen years since I was last single, and that wasn’t a very propitious time to say the least, but the deep, unsettling intensity of sitting in that room at home was unbearable, and this, above all else, compelled my venturing out. It wasn’t a need for sex, either, which necessitated the adventure, but more a need for companionship, someone to simply talk to in the day or night, someone to have a laugh with and have some friendship.

As advised by my old friend, I duly did the deed, joined and began chatting. I suppose, at the start, I approached the dating game with old prejudices, prejudices from earlier decades where joining a dating agency was considered an act of desperation, a white flag whereby you’d given up on getting hitched in the traditional method of meeting in a pub or club.

In those decades it was considered embarrassing, even downright shameful, to join a dating agency. With the advent of the internet and a new generation of adults, all that changed. Now the contrary is the case. Why would you now waste the whole of a Friday or Saturday night, going out, travelling the hook and crook of every bar and pub of the city, hoping to meet a woman you can get on with? By the time you had met up with a woman, you’d be too far travelled in alcohol to make a favourable impression. Internet dating does away with all that wasteful searching. No one anymore sees it as odd, but simply another benefit of modern day life.