preferences on the basis of a half hour acquaintance.
Best,
Anna
She hit send and took an angry swig of cooling tea.
Online dating could turn the most spangled romantic into a grizzled cynic. Wasn’t the internet supposed to herald a new era of ease and democracy in such matters? Instead it made the league tables, and winners and losers of the game, even more explicit.
Here was its stark reality: seeing that the person who hadn’t replied to your days-old message had logged in mere hours ago. Or noticing that the exciting entrepreneur who told you he was moving to Amsterdam, and thus sadly not free for a date, appeared to be very much still in the UK and available to other women.
Spotting that for all the ‘I want fascinating conversation’ claims, the site’s most popular of either sex were always the conspicuously beauteous. It was really ‘Am I Hot Or Not’, with some bullshit tacked on about how you liked crunchy peanut butter and the cool side of the pillow.
Oh, and men still tended to date five years younger than their own age.
Some people imagined Anna was grandly holding auditions, enjoying testing her market value. Or gadding round as if life was some Nora Ephron film, the world bristling with potential suitors you’d bump into while holding a brown paper bag with a baguette sticking out of it.
No, Anna was searching for a soulmate who probably didn’t exist, in a place where he almost certainly wasn’t.
Well-meaning types would say: ‘You’re the last person you’d expect to still be single! The world’s gone mad!’
Anna had to disagree there. For her, the world had always been this way.
11
There wasn’t really the conventional phraseology to describe what had happened to Anna, in terms of her physical transformation. If she said something understated like
‘I used to be heavier’
or ‘
I blossomed after university’
or
‘I was a bit of a duckling’
people nodded and said ‘
oh me too, I didn’t really come into my own until my mid-twenties’
, or similar.
But to end up looking like a completely different person, one born to a radically different genetic fortune?
That
journey was so rare as to only usually feature in saccharine films with makeover montages. Bonsai supermodels ‘disguised’ in dungarees, ready to remove the specs and shake their glossy Coke can-sized curls out of a barrette.
Anna had not been a plain child. Plain suggested unremarkable, average, easy to miss. She was very eye-catching. A combination of her inflatable size, oily complexion, orthodontics, heavy metal singer mop of untamed black curly hair and homemade outsize clothes (God how Anna came to hate her mother’s Singer sewing machine), made her stand out.
Seeing any glamorous potential in her future would’ve been deemed blind optimism, emphasis on the blind. Anna was, as her Rise Park peers often reminded her, fat and ugly.
She lost the weight when she was twenty-two. ‘The weight’ as opposed to just ‘weight’ seemed the right term, as her size had become a thing, an entity. Because Anna was A Big Girl. The fact followed her around and defined her. It was the monkey on her back that tipped the scales at an extra four stone.
The process of changing had been kick-started by a simple thought, after coming home in tears from a ‘Oy, Ozzy Osbourne – who ate all the bats’ heckle from a white van not long after she’d started her PhD.
She was intelligent and capable, and ran every other part of her life with rationalism and success. So why did adjusting the ‘calories in/calories used’ ratio to achieve an average BMI defeat her?
Like a lot of people who were overweight in childhood, by the time Anna fully awoke to the fact she was larger than other girls, it seemed incontrovertible.
Her younger sister Aggy was a whippet-thin livewire like their mother. Anna, they all said, was built like her dad. Their father Oliviero was a Central Casting roly-poly ‘baddabing geddoudamah
Best,
Anna
She hit send and took an angry swig of cooling tea.
Online dating could turn the most spangled romantic into a grizzled cynic. Wasn’t the internet supposed to herald a new era of ease and democracy in such matters? Instead it made the league tables, and winners and losers of the game, even more explicit.
Here was its stark reality: seeing that the person who hadn’t replied to your days-old message had logged in mere hours ago. Or noticing that the exciting entrepreneur who told you he was moving to Amsterdam, and thus sadly not free for a date, appeared to be very much still in the UK and available to other women.
Spotting that for all the ‘I want fascinating conversation’ claims, the site’s most popular of either sex were always the conspicuously beauteous. It was really ‘Am I Hot Or Not’, with some bullshit tacked on about how you liked crunchy peanut butter and the cool side of the pillow.
Oh, and men still tended to date five years younger than their own age.
Some people imagined Anna was grandly holding auditions, enjoying testing her market value. Or gadding round as if life was some Nora Ephron film, the world bristling with potential suitors you’d bump into while holding a brown paper bag with a baguette sticking out of it.
No, Anna was searching for a soulmate who probably didn’t exist, in a place where he almost certainly wasn’t.
Well-meaning types would say: ‘You’re the last person you’d expect to still be single! The world’s gone mad!’
Anna had to disagree there. For her, the world had always been this way.
11
There wasn’t really the conventional phraseology to describe what had happened to Anna, in terms of her physical transformation. If she said something understated like
‘I used to be heavier’
or ‘
I blossomed after university’
or
‘I was a bit of a duckling’
people nodded and said ‘
oh me too, I didn’t really come into my own until my mid-twenties’
, or similar.
But to end up looking like a completely different person, one born to a radically different genetic fortune?
That
journey was so rare as to only usually feature in saccharine films with makeover montages. Bonsai supermodels ‘disguised’ in dungarees, ready to remove the specs and shake their glossy Coke can-sized curls out of a barrette.
Anna had not been a plain child. Plain suggested unremarkable, average, easy to miss. She was very eye-catching. A combination of her inflatable size, oily complexion, orthodontics, heavy metal singer mop of untamed black curly hair and homemade outsize clothes (God how Anna came to hate her mother’s Singer sewing machine), made her stand out.
Seeing any glamorous potential in her future would’ve been deemed blind optimism, emphasis on the blind. Anna was, as her Rise Park peers often reminded her, fat and ugly.
She lost the weight when she was twenty-two. ‘The weight’ as opposed to just ‘weight’ seemed the right term, as her size had become a thing, an entity. Because Anna was A Big Girl. The fact followed her around and defined her. It was the monkey on her back that tipped the scales at an extra four stone.
The process of changing had been kick-started by a simple thought, after coming home in tears from a ‘Oy, Ozzy Osbourne – who ate all the bats’ heckle from a white van not long after she’d started her PhD.
She was intelligent and capable, and ran every other part of her life with rationalism and success. So why did adjusting the ‘calories in/calories used’ ratio to achieve an average BMI defeat her?
Like a lot of people who were overweight in childhood, by the time Anna fully awoke to the fact she was larger than other girls, it seemed incontrovertible.
Her younger sister Aggy was a whippet-thin livewire like their mother. Anna, they all said, was built like her dad. Their father Oliviero was a Central Casting roly-poly ‘baddabing geddoudamah
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