In Actual Fact…

“You have 2 new messages.” Outlook interrupts me, just, just at the moment I’m about to finally start on that translation I’ve been putting off for days.
The first message is, of course, some nonsense resulting from a job interview, the second, much more importantly, is this week’s internet dating ‘best matches’.

I love reading singles ads. Especially when you’re not actually single.
“Listen to this one.” I’ll say whilst reading the paper in bed on a Sunday morning; “Generous male, 65, seeks sexy female 18-30 for …trails off. What? What’s that look for? I mean, it’s terrible… Terrible. Obviously. It’s, er, it’s a particularly damning example of a patriarchal society whose mores accept, if not positively encourage female sexual servitude.”
“Which is bad.” I clarify hastily, whilst making a mental note to add more to my pension fund at the next available opportunity.

The e-mail I’ve just received from a (free) internet dating service is much, much better – there, a computer uses a complex algorithm to completely ignore your potential partner’s “specified features” and instead send you a set of photographs of the most bizarre women in Southern Germany (I haven’t altered the search criteria for years). This time however, it seems to have come up trumps - and not just for comedy value either. My ‘match of the week’ is looking for someone just like me. In fact, exactly like me. She wants someone my age, with my height and build and hair and eye colour, with my interests and hobbies (well, the ones they’re allowed to print). Her ideal man is a perfect Identikit of me, no wonder it came up as a 100% match.

Intrigued, I read through her details. She’s a tall, slim brunette. Oooh! For, whilst “Intelligent”, “Able to form coherent sentences” and “Doesn’t have affairs with driving instructors” should be first on my list of ‘What I find attractive in a woman’, in reality, I always say “tall, slim and dark-haired”. Apart from wanting to appear to be the sort of amazingly shallow man who only considers purely physical characteristics, I’m not entirely sure why. The girl in the personal ad does, however, sound witty and intelligent too, and her interests overlap scarily with mine. I’m suddenly acutely aware that I’m no longer just looking at the advert for laughs. I’m not sure if I should click on the link to the photographs of the girl.

“It’s just a photograph, it’s not like I’m actually going to do anything about it.” I say to myself and click on the link. Thankfully, it’s not a close-up, artfully-photographed shot of some bohemian beauty, but a holiday snap of a normal, everyday-looking (if tall, slim and dark-haired) girl, a jacket tied unflatteringly around her hips, halfway up an Alpine path. I’ve taken hundreds of photographs just like it.
In fact, I took that photograph.
And the next one.
And the next one.
I exhale.
“Well,” I say to myself, after contemplating for some time, “It’s probably for the best that she’s finally looking for someone else. After all, it can’t have been easy to get over me. Yes, I know she was the one who told me to sod off because she couldn’t stand the sight of me any longer, but still…….” I click on the next photo. I haven’t seen it before; it shows her holding a small person. As does the final photo showing said woman and child in a room which I decorated and we jokingly called the “kinderzimmer”.
Ah.
I oh-so-casually save the picture to disk and enlarge and enhance it in Photoshop. I don’t in anyway spend days comparing the shape of the nose and ears of the small person with mine at a similar age. Neither do I frantically try to calculate certain dates (plus nine months) compared to the age of the small person in the photo. I certainly don’t contact the woman in the photo for the first time in three years and end up congratulating her on the birth of her nephew. And if I did, I came up with a really great reason why, despite the fact that my life is abso-bloody-lutely fantastic, I might have ‘come across’ her personal ad.