Hi friends. Is it fucked up to flirt with someone with no intention of taking it further? I’m in a long-term monogamous relationship. Sometimes I crave a little validation from strangers. I’m not going to cheat on my partner, but I do have a need to feel desirable to others. I don’t feel like a bit of flirting is a betrayal of my relationship, but I’m less confident about how other people feel. Like, I don’t want to waste someone else’s time, but I guess maybe I am leading people on a bit if I chat with them without mentioning my partner.
You should talk to a therapist to help you figure out why you have this urge to hurt random strangers to make you feel better about yourself.
Are we assuming OP is going to like ask for someone’s number and call them beautiful just to ghost them or something? What about being flirted with by a random person you never talk to again hurts?
I am trying to see if my idea of flirting is off from the majority
I used to have this flirty interaction with a boy on the regular, I was gently teasing him by not complying with his job, and being like “aha, im not showing you my ID. teehee.” nothing that was more than five seconds of interaction. Well, one morning he decided to ask me out and I had to tell him I had a boyfriend.
The people who observed this were telling me like “oh that’s what you get” and I’m like ??? it’s not like I was telling him I wanted to [invitation to redacted sexual act] or something geez. I wasn’t out to hurt the dude or anything, but that is what ended up happening. 😅
your story sounds indistinguishable from signaling interest to me. he asked you out not to a hotel room, so unless you’re leaving out a lot i’m not sure why you’re going from 0 to sex act there.
Oh yeah to me that’s fine being playful can certainly be flirty but no it didn’t mean you were “asking to be asked out” or something
“Talk to a therapist to make your behavior conform to my expectations” is a deeply ableist idea.
Complete misunderstanding of what I said. I said talk to a therapist to address the underlying issue which inspires this harmful behavior, not the behavior itself.
No, i understood you fairly well, you were just being an ableist shit like everybody using the “go to therapy” line.
Recommending therapy is inherently ableist? No.
Doing it like a snarky, condescending redditor to shut people up is.
But that’s not what I did at all. It was a sincere recommendation made in good faith.
I’d recommend you stop violating rule 8 from the code of conduct:
You should just stop violating rule 4. Also no, i will not take the most charitable interpretation when somebody is acting openly ableist and gives off incel vibes, i will call it as it is.
I’d like to chime in here to say that you weren’t exactly observing this when you accuse me of having the “urge to hurt random strangers”.
That’s my opinion of what you described. Using other people, and making them feel bad, explicitly for the purpose of boosting your own self-esteem. That’s not something I assumed, that’s what you described wanting to do.