If you’ve been around long enough, cast your mind back to 2003. A time before YouTube existed or smartphones. All people had back then was a phone that could send texts and online dating was probably viewed as a ‘little bit weird’. This was a time when things like AOL messenger and ICQ were popular. When people signed on you’d hear a noise and just like pavlov’s dog, your synapses were trained for those sounds. Now you can go on apps and swipe away to your hearts content if the mood takes you and there’s no shortage of low attention span choices.
But this wasn’t 2025. It was 2003… and I was online. A company called Lycos had pumped a big wadge of boodle into it’s online dating site which it called Love @ Lycos. It was a place where people could basically flirt online and possibly even meet. They ran an advertising campaign on TV and out of curiosity I created an account, but never really took it seriously.
When I created my account I didn’t even include a photo of myself. I was playing around with some flash animation so I put that in there but I think it just uploaded a static image saying something corny like “Sexy Girls Apply Within”. Cringeworthy stuff, truth being told. You have to remember though, this was an era where the masses hadn’t really fully got on the internet yet, it was still sort of niche. Well, it was in my eyes anyway.
I remember thinking to myself that the interface wasn’t bad and the account was free, so that was good. You didn’t know who was real or fake so you had to take it all with a pinch of salt, but I spoke to a few people on there. I didn’t assume any of the photos were actually of the people in the profile, but that didn’t stop me from browsing at the time.
I was in between jobs with some time on my hands. It was a bit of a filler in between looking for jobs and watching Bewitched repeats on TV. One day as I was browsing through the profiles I stumbled across a photo of a woman I liked the look of so I messaged her. It was a coin flip whether that was actually the person in the photo but that’s all you had to go on back then. There was no cross referencing on Facebook or video calling way back in 2003.
With these sort of sites it’s a bit of a lottery who does and doesn’t reply anyway and I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I got a reply. Messages were exchanged back and forth and I remember in the photo she had an iron in the background which made the photo seem more plausible. After a bit she gave me her AOL messenger username and even though I wasn’t on AOL I had it too. It seems quite bizarre looking back at that now but messengers back in those days were pretty cool things and a lot like WhatsApp except it was on your computer and not on your phone (deep down I wish that was still the case as I hate that god damned app lol).
We talked a lot over the next week or so. When you talk to someone new and find you get on, even on something like messenger, it sort of overtakes your thinking when you’re younger. I recall she wanted to meet up at the end of the week but I couldn’t make it on the day she said, so we didn’t do it until the week after. She seemed disappointed at the time, and I distinctly remember her saying, “I’ll have to put my new floaty top away then”. That’s what she did have to do as I still couldn’t meet her that week anyway :).
The thing with online dating is you never tend to live right next door to each other. I lived in Birmingham and she lived in Dudley. I remember her assuring me she didn’t have a Dudley accent. I thought to myself, “If she doesn’t have a Dudley accent, what accent does she have then?”. Where she actually came from in Dudley I’d never heard of before and for privacy reasons I won’t write it here either.
Anyway, we sort of met halfway in Birmingham at a pub. I got there early and waited around for her. She sent me a text saying, “I’m getting a lift so don’t judge me when I turn up in a poo car”. I didn’t see the car, so I never reached the point where I could turn into Simon Cowell and pass judgement. I wouldn’t have given a toss if she’d turned up in a tuk tuk… as long as she actually turned up.
And turn up she did! We’d talked so much on messenger the prior couple of weeks or so it seemed almost surreal to actually meet her as you already know so much. I remember her telling me she liked Toni Braxton. She was into her animals and she had a pair of Chinchillas as well as a dog and a horse. I never met the horse but by god I met the dog… more on that later.
So there we were in this pub/nightclub place. I thought the way it would play out is we’d chat, have a few drinks and then if we got on, meet up again. Now as I said before, she lived in Dudley and didn’t want to go home on her own in a taxi, so I went with her back to hers and we ended up just talking and half falling asleep in each others arms. It was sweet and I was already quite smitten with her.
We carried on chatting in between and I met up with her again. Back then there were no such things as Sat Navs, I didn’t know that area and map reading wasn’t one of my strengths so to save all the hassle I just got a taxi over there. I did this a few times and I had some pretty interesting conversations with various taxi drivers as it used to take about 45 minutes to get there. One time I was with a taxi driver that got lost and by the time we’d arrived it had taken nearly 1.5 hours to arrive. To make matters worse he charged me £35 which was a boat load of cash back in 2003, especially as I was in between jobs at the time.
It’s amazing how many different characters drive taxis. One day I had a journey with one heavily into marijuana and very talkative, then another time I had one with a guy who loved to conserve fuel, it was like economy was his favourite subject. Another time there was one who used to tell me all about self defence things he’d learned and another who told me about his gambling holidays in Las Vegas.
Side Note: During my time in Dudley, I learned various ‘Dudleyisms’ including sayings like, “They don’t grow potatoes like that ’round ‘ere”. She got me to say this in my Brummie accent which I think she found rather amusing at the time. Going to Dudley was like visiting a different country that was only 30 miles up the road. I think they also said things like “Bostin'” and I seem to remember a pub called “The Bostin’ Fittle” or something similar. She called Merry Hill, ‘Merry Hell’ and referred to where she lived as ‘the back end of beyond’.
What people will do for love eh. Anyway, she was so lovely to me and we got on so well, all I thought about for the next couple of months or so was her. As Frank Sinatra would say, she got under my skin. She had an alsation, I think it’s name was Zak (or it could have been Zach, I’m a bit hazy on that detail). As soon as I used to put my foot on the first part of the path on the lead up to her house, it would have a tremendous bark that would have made any god fearing citizen run in the opposite direction.
The first time I ever met Zak, she said, “I’ve just got to get him used to you”. This made me think, “What happens if he doesn’t get used to me? Let’s hope she can deliver on this reassurance”. Zak was the man. Well, actually he wasn’t – he was the dog and I’d joined the pack without telling him first. I remember one night when I got up in the morning and went downstairs, Zak had jumped over the gate into the kitchen and hidden my shoes. I like to think that this was Zak getting used to me and having a little bit of fun at my expense.
The older I get, the more I like dogs and once he’d hidden my shoes without eating them, it made me chuckle. As Samuel L. Jackson said in Pulp Fiction, “Personality goes a long way”.
The good news is during this time I got a job. I had to really as there was no way I could carry on seeing this woman and still go out without having any income coming in. I didn’t enjoy the job, but I enjoyed her company, so that made the job seem a bit better. When I used to get into work in the mornings, almost without fail I’d get an email off her by the time I’d logged in. I got used to these nice messages and they set the day off on a good tone.
As I said before, I didn’t like my job. Somehow I’d got myself typecast into tech support at Jaguar, answering tech calls all day. I’m not really a big phone person, so calls dropping in endlessly reminds me of what a bloke once said in Wife Swap. “You’ve been sent by the devil to give me a preview of hell”, except in my case this was how I felt about my job. Really, what I wanted to do was become an entrepreneur but at that stage I hadn’t figured out how to fit the pieces of that particular jigsaw puzzle together.
Whenever I’d explain to someone what I wanted to do, I’d have this inclination to want to explain it visually. I think that’s how I best understand things, so I get my pen out and start drawing things out like some mad professor who has just consumed too much absinthe. I have since realised most people find entrepreneurial ambition a bit droll. Nobody really wants to hear about work after they’ve finished it for the day, but for me, I knew life held something else in store… and it wasn’t being shackled to a desk being told what to do by some employer I could run rings around if I could just find the right opportunity.
When you have purpose, nothing is too much of a bother and at that time in my life she was my purpose. It seems a bit crazy to say that now, because I would never let anyone else get in the way of what my objectives are now, and I think it’s dangerous to put all your eggs into one basket, but that was all I really cared about at the time. Call it love … or lust… whatever you want to call it depending on how you look at these things, when you feel strongly about someone most other things pale into insignificance, especially at the beginning.
I carried on seeing her and I even memorised the 30 mile route to her house in my car, without a sat nav. If you know me, that’s a major accomplishment and I tend to get proud of that kind of thing. With regards to her she was very interesting and smart. She also had a sense of humour and I found her decidedly stimulating at a mental level. This is unusual for me as I find a lot of people quite boring (lol). Oh… and I was attracted to her but that goes without saying. I always looked forward to seeing her and at the time I remember thinking how lucky I was (oh dear).
Fast forward a few months I was out with her one night and she had her handbag with her, which she put down on a chair. I think she was going to lapdance for me, which is actually a good thing, but I didn’t realise this after a few drinks and was concerned about protecting her handbag, which is such a ridiculous thing to recall as I’m typing this. I don’t know why I gave a shit about a handbag at the time, but there it is. I don’t like the idea of people nicking things out of handbags or anything like that in pubs, so my handbag protecting superpower kicked in.
This didn’t go down well at the time and for some strange reason it seemed to trigger an argument of sorts in the taxi on the way back. We were probably drunkenly talking about handbag and lap dances. Anyway, I remember somehow agreeing that alcohol was to blame, when it very much wasn’t, so the next time I met her I had to moderate my alcohol intake which was ridiculous when I look back on it now.
I wouldn’t moderate shit for anyone these days because alcohol just does not affect me in that way.
Anyway, I met up with her again and we didn’t have what i would class as a bad night. Business as usual… or so I thought until the weekend rolled around and she told me she wouldn’t be meeting me that week and was going into town with one of her friends. As we’d seen each other every Saturday up until that point I knew something was off and indeed that proved to be the case.
An impulsive decision transpired and I decided to drive over there to speak to her, which was a decidedly bad idea as I drove 30 miles both ways for nothing as when I got there, she wasn’t in and was having tea at her parents house down the road and I hadn’t really considered that she might not be in that evening. I asked her to just come out and speak to me for a few minutes, but she wouldn’t and I remember finding that disappointing. This was someone that had previously pranced around like a cat on hot bricks waiting for me to arrive, but my impromptu appearance was now viewed as an inconvenience so severe she wouldn’t grace me with her presence #BadTimes. I shouldn’t have gone – people hate surprises, especially when they don’t want to see you anyway, so that was a lesson learned.
I tried calling her on the LAN line, but these were the days of dial up modems and she’d already dialled up. Why I didn’t call her on the mobile, I don’t know, but I did eventually get through. She was probably annoyed at me for calling at all, but I remember her saying, “This is new for us”, referring to us actually talking on the phone and I interpreted her tone as seeming annoyed with my persistence or just me in general.
I wasn’t a big phone person, that much is true and to this day I still prefer to see someone face to face or message them. I think a lot of people are like this as peeps seem to spend more time tapping away on WhatsApp or FB than talking don’t they? I’m actually pretty good on the phone once I’m warmed up, but after years of working in support I preferred to be left alone with my thoughts than two-way chatting and I’m pretty protective about my time. Maybe I had a kind of phone PTSD from answering 50+ calls a day or something (ha ha).
Writing is different. You can sit there and furrow your brow, ponder and do it all at your own leisure. There’s something nice about that, it allows you to say exactly what you want to say without being rushed. I digress…
I got invited over the following week for closure, like a lamb to the slaughter, but you know what.. I wasn’t capitulating at that point. I don’t quit on anything easily and failure is rarely an option, so I just naively went there to make things right. Yep, I was still looking forward to seeing her despite the odds. I did something I would never do now and I took her flowers like some sort of sucker. She opened the door to me and everything seemed quite normal at first.
We drank some wine, chatted, then the conversation turned when she had to do the awkward thing and terminate me in the same way Arnold Schwarzenegger does when he’s looking for Sarah Connor. I didn’t realise it at the time but she was about to put the nails into the coffin. I tried to reason with her, to salvage our relationship which I thought was very much worth saving, but she’d already made her mind up. The only person that didn’t realise this was me.
How could she end things with me when we get on so well. How could she end things with me when I love her. How could she end things with me and be without me. What in the actual fuck… are the sort of things that go around in your head when you’re being unceremoniously dumped.
It’s a story as old as history itself.
I went to sit on the sofa next to her and I’ll always remember this. She screamed at me in a high pitch, like I had done something terrible but all I’d done was drive 30 miles to hers with flowers and gone there to talk (which was an exercise in sheer futility). She was clearly uncomfortable with ending things with me and I was a bit slow on the uptake.
But here’s the thing, it was all out of the blue. There were no big warning signs or weeks of disagreements. It was like flipping a light switch on a relationship. I went from being Mr. Perfect to Mr. Yesterdays News in the blink of an eye. I reluctantly left her house and as I drove off I saw her clutching the flowers I’d brought around. Somehow it just didn’t seem right and was one of the saddest days of my life up until that point.
By email she did tell me shortly afterwards that she “wasn’t all that and a bag of chips“, which is one of those sayings that I felt like I’d heard before but never used. I don’t know how I was supposed to respond to that either. Maybe something like, “Yes, but would you compare yourself to a lovely pickled egg?“. Are pickled eggs lovely? I don’t know, I’ve never tried one, but anyone that mastered the art of pickling could surely command a princely fee. Whatever the scenario, I wasn’t in the habit of comparing love interests with food that commonly accompanies cod or haddock.
After this, looking back on it now, I slipped into a kind of depression. I absolutely hated my job and kept thinking she would realise it was all a big mistake and sort things out with me. This never happened of course and I don’t know if she met someone else shortly after, but at that moment in time I remember being quite lost.
When you feel that way, it’s almost like grieving except the other person is still alive and very much getting on with their life. The person you want to speak to about how you are feeling is the one that doesn’t want to know you anymore. That is hard to take and the worst thing is I didn’t really have any closure as I never knew what, if anything I did so badly wrong that I deserved all that.
When relationships end, people around you say things like, “I’m sorry to hear it” and at first they’ll listen to you, but after a few days they don’t want to hear it anymore and if you continue talking about it they begin to avoid you like a bad habit. “Oh no, not this again”, they think as they see you appear, anticipating what’s coming next. Without feelings attached to something, there is no empathy from others and the cold, hard truth of it is that with things like this you are very much on your own and you have to come to terms with it in your own way and at your own pace. Every case is different and there are no fixed rules on how long you should feel about something.
Sometimes it never goes away and that’s just the way it is.
Everyone has to face this with relationships that run their course… and death. It’s nothing new.
Personally, I got lost in my own thoughts. I wallowed in them in the same way someone does when they spend too much time in a swimming pool without any sun lotion on. All you’re doing is getting more burnt, but you don’t realise that until you get out.
I went around in a complete daze. One day my aunt called around; I made her tea and gave her biscuits. I did all the hospitable things a person does when a family member visits, except one thing. She was talking to me about something and to be honest with you I was probably just nodding in the right places because my mind had gone sub-aqua. I was mentally underwater, trying to solve a fucking Rubix Cube that couldn’t be solved.
After a while my aunt said, “Dean, you haven’t been listening to anything I’ve been talking to you about, have you?” to which I replied something like, “Of course I have“. In response to this she then said, “Go on then, tell me what I have been saying“. I then realised at this point all I could recall hearing was something about a boot of a car and someone wearing a fluorescent jacket, which was never going to pass muster. Regardless, I still said that pitifuly scant bit of info that had made it through my eardrums and hoped that was enough to pass the listening test. It wasn’t – my aunt then promptly left because I was effectively in a trance. On balance, I can’t say I blame her.
I spent some time trying to piece together where it went wrong and in the end I concluded I hadn’t got a fucking scooby. None of it made any sense whatsoever. It would be better in these situations if you just had to do a test and if you got below a certain score they said, “Sorry you got 78 out of a 100 and the minimum pass rate is 80, so off you fuck”. That would be much easier to come to terms with – something measurable.
Imagine how easy life would be if that’s how it was:
“Yeah dude, the marriage didn’t work out because I got 73 out of a 100 and I needed 80 to avoid divorce”
“No way Tom, can’t you resit the test?”
“Yes, maybe I could do that. I’ll check in the morning Frank”.
But life is never easy, not like that…
I have always led my life with the best of intentions towards people. I am human and I make mistakes, but I know I’m the real deal, so the truth is there was nothing I could have done. I never realised that back then so it cut away at my self esteem and I couldn’t focus on anything for a while. Every day I went to work every fiber of my being didn’t want to go in there and listen to prats on the phone tell me their problems, because I had problems of my own.
It was a great relief to me when they ended my contract at that place. I’d been getting in late and my cards were marked. They gave me zero notice so I had to delete a shit ton of emails off the computer at work before I drove off into the sunset. I actually drove to the kebab shop and had a chicken burger to celebrate being ‘terminated’. Chicken never tasted so good.
There was a guy at work who was leaving shortly before I realised I was about to be terminated. I remember him saying on his last day, “Do you want to go for a beer after work” and I said no. I couldn’t tell him why but the reason was I wanted to get home to see if she’d messaged me, that’s how lost I was. I did this every day for quite some time, because when you feel like you have lost something important to you, the only thing you can cling onto is hope.
Fucking hope, for all that’s worth (it’s only as you get older you realise hope isn’t worth anything and you value yourself more. You realise you are a fucking diamond, but that’s a whole other story).
So what became of the girl from Love @ Lycos that I met and fell I love with, you may ask?
Some time after she appeared one night on my AOL messenger, got chatting to me. We had a nice chat then out of the blue she told me she’d met some soldier who she ‘couldn’t pin down’ because a bird with wings needs to fly… or something. Yeah, that didn’t feel great, being told that, it was like one of those chats you see in a film where the person rubs it in that they’ve met someone else, as if you didn’t already know. Why not go the whole hog and get a big block of salt to rub into a gaping wound while you’re at it.
Shortly after that she moved to Leeds. You know the bit in the Godfather: Part 3 where he says, “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in”? Well, I heard off her again and ended up meeting her 3 times in Leeds. One of the times I even went to her house, but nothing became of it in a real sense. The last time I went to see her I became ill on the train, so I wasn’t myself and we just ended up falling asleep in separate beds in a hotel room, which wasn’t exactly the height of excitement for either of us, truth being told.
Whi
lst out at a pub with her, one time in Leeds, I did accidentally knock over a bottle of budweiser on the table which dispensed said beer onto her lap with the same kind of precision only reserved for the likes of a marksman, making any would-be onlooker think she’d wet herself if she got up too hurriedly. She took it all in good spirits though and I remember being proud of her for retaining her sense of humour in the face of wet crotch adversity.
I heard off her again a 2 or 3 more times over the years. The last time was her suggesting we met, but it never happened. I don’t think I ever got an apology for the way she ended things with me either, not that I expected one after all that time. I find that people don’t apologise much these days, it’s a sorry state of affairs (couldn’t resist the pun).
I think in the end she blocked me after I asked her how things were, like I hadn’t already been rejected by her enough already lol. In the end you realise there is nothing to be had. For those that do it’s a bit like betting on a 3-legged horse in the Grand National. You might have a 1000-1 slip but it doesn’t mean it will ever pay out.
It was Felix Dennis who said, “Never go back. Never go back. No-one is waiting and nothing is there”. Actually, that’s so good I will post it here below as he was a bit of a poet doncha know:
It’s all a shame isn’t it really, how things works out sometimes but these are the trials and tribulations of life that few people truly escape. I never forget anything that happens to me but I learn from it all and honestly, that is all any of us can do.
I learned to love myself again and it’s all a learning curve. I am still sentimental and nostalgic, but nowhere near as much as I used to be. I got sick of people that treat others badly and speaking personally, I cut them out of my life, which wasn’t always an easy decision. I just haven’t got time for people that don’t value me, because I know my worth.
And if you have ever gone through anything like this, which the vast majority of people have, you should know your worth too. Don’t let anyone treat you in a way that is less than you deserve. I’m not just talking about relationships either, I’m talking about family and (often so-called) friends as well.
Going back to Love @ Lycos – it was a cool site, I’m glad i used it and I regret nothing. In an alternate universe I could have met the woman of my dreams. That’s the dice you roll when you play the game of dating and love isn’t it.
Did Lycos live up to its billing? Well, yes and no. I can’t say that it was impossible to find love on there as I’m sure there would be people together to this day as a result of that site. They had a good TV advertising campaign back then which would have attracted new people actually interested in dating.
The bit where it probably fails is that it’s all a bit random, but then that’s what life is and I don’t think you can put a bunch of traits into an algorithm and have it spit out the perfect partner, so I don’t think online dating has advanced a great deal since 2003. If anything it’s become dumbed down with swipes and apps, making these things more of a pickup paradise, for want of a better expression.
People that desire something more meaningful are probably better off bumping into someone in supermarket and talking to them about the price of cabbages or something. Some people are also addicted to using dating sites and have been on them for years – I think some of them don’t actually date anyone, they’re spending all their life looking for the virtual equivalent of Prince Charming, which is pretty sad.
Newflash: He/She doesn’t exist on a dating site.
The odds aren’t great, if you’re looking for love online in several wrong places, but you have to be in it to win it. As for this story about Love @ Lycos, well it could have been about anyone. Maybe I made it all up for entertainment/illustrative purposes and I have an overactive imagination? I’ll leave you to decide that one for yourself.
Until next time dear reader. Let’s play this one out with a song called Ignition by R Kelly… and if my story is to be believed, I’m only including it because we had this thing going between us at the time related to the track . It’s a bit unfortunate R Kelly is now a high profile criminal but this was more innocent times: Can I get a *beep beep*…