Tangled Web
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 23, 2015

His chair scraped mine. He acknowledged the intrusion with a polite smile and settled at a table for two. We sat at adjacent tables and observed the Saturday pageantry of the Fremantle cappuccino strip.

My neighbour ordered a beer. He shuffled his chair counter-clockwise to capture the last shaft of afternoon sun. His closely-clipped beard shone auburn but was greying around his sideburns.

He seemed fidgety, drumming the footpath with one scuffed boot. He undid the buttons on his polo shirt. Then he quickly fastened them again. A moment later, his hand flew up to his neck to check his collar was sitting obediently flat.

A woman materialised behind us, hovering by his table.

“M—-?” she said hesitantly.

“Yep! You must be S—–?” He lurched to his feet and pecked her awkwardly on the cheek. She was younger, perhaps not yet 40. Her mouth was a bright slash of red lipstick competing for attention with her short dress.

“You look different to your photo,” said the woman, tittering self-consciously. She parked her red handbag and flicked her shoulder-length hair.

“You look better than yours,” he replied, grinning at his own joke.

She faltered.

By the wounded look on her face, I knew he’d grazed her ego. I twigged that this was a first date: a real-life rendezvous after an online flirtation.

“Uh, I mean, you look even better than your photo,” he said, trying to recover.

A pair of Harley-Davidson Softails rumbled past. Our heads swivelled towards the noise.

“Like bikes?” asked the man, edging towards safer territory.

“Yeah, they’re okay,” she replied. “I had a boyfriend once who had a Harley. He was crazy about it. He used to say ‘only a biker knows why a dog sticks his head out a car window.’” They both laughed at her ice-breaker.

I feel uncomfortable overhearing their conversation but I’m jammed between occupied tables. My neighbour begins cataloguing his work history as I study a squabble of seagulls on the road. A bus nearly collects a mess of bird on bumper. The gulls dive between oncoming cars, en route to stray chips. Several more, perched on the awning, screech applause for the daredevils.

The man’s companion is bored. She casts around as he elaborates about the rigours of construction work. Perhaps his job leaves him no time for dalliances? I wonder how many of these dates has he been on. Will she give him a second chance? Does he like her?

I speculate about their chances.

My divorced girlfriends say internet dating makes them feel disposable. Cruising for internet love dispenses with the magic. You become an algorithm of desirables: looks, height, weight, education, income. The mechanics of online dating sabotages romance. The internet subverts kismet.

One jaded girlfriend, after a dozen disastrous blind dates, offers her online suitors a forewarning. ‘By the way,’ she writes by way of a post script. “If we meet offline and you look nothing like your online picture, you’re buying me drinks until you do!”

On the upside, she says spurning an unsuitable candidate is surprisingly painless. On her laptop, she can be as kind or as brutal as she likes, knowing he can’t interrupt, argue or grovel. But she says being discarded online is just as torturous as being dumped in person.

“At least he can’t see me crying. I get to preserve my dignity.”

Another girlfriend, newly-divorced, says internet dating is demoralising.

“I’m sure men use it as target practice,” she tells me.

“As soon as they find out I’m a nurse, the innuendo starts. Having two degrees doesn’t save me from the lewd jokes. One bloke wanted to meet up at McDonalds. He thought a nurse wouldn’t mind. If that wasn’t bad enough, he insisted I come in uniform.”

And yet I know several happy couples who found each other online. Maybe finding a mate is more efficient this way? Standing conspicuously alone at the bar of the Sail and Anchor is old hat; best you go online with your preference for a tall, vegan, climate sceptic and filter out the unsuitable riff-raff from the start. Perhaps we should think of online dating as a sophisticated way to address the ancient and fundamental problem of sorting humans into pairs.

I check the blind daters beside me. His pasta has arrived. He eats with gusto. Slurping noisily, he spatters the table with sauce. Clearly unimpressed, she grabs a serviette, dabs at her sleeve and mops the table.

“Excuse me for a minute,” she says, exhaling a thinly-disguised sigh.

“The toilets are over there, aren’t they?”

His phone chirps a little song as she strides away.

He answers, craning around to check she’s out of earshot.

“Not bad,” he confides. “But yesterday’s was better.”