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.
Thats not what flirting is and I’m concerned with how transactional some people seem to see it being.
That’s a horseshit accusation. Obviously that’s not what flirting in general is, and I never made a claim to the contrary. From the OP:
What is the relevance of mentioning or not mentioning their partner? Might we glean that the OP acknowledges something about the social nature of their behavior?
What sort of transaction are you trying to accuse me of asserting? I don’t want to fuck some asshole behaving deceptively toward me, I just don’t want to be deceived in the first place. I have no interest in any sort of “transaction” here, I want to be treated with an extremely baseline respect, not on a transactional basis but because I’m a human being, just like me treating other people with baseline respect should not depend on them doing something for me first or being somehow bound to do something for me after.
Where does this deception you keep harping on even come into it? There is no deception in flirting with someone even if you don’t plan to form a romantic relationship with them. It’s just playful banter, it’s not a promise to take it any further than the flirtation itself. The fact that you default to flirtation without a desire to take it further as being some form of deception is what makes it sound like you think there is something transactionable about it. It makes it sound like if someone flirts with you, that you then have an expectation of them that they want to go further than just flirting, when that need not be the case.
Just as flirting doesn’t bind anyone to to do anything later either. So again, where is the deception in flirting with someone when you don’t actually want to pursue a relationship with them? I would guess that most flirtation doesn’t mean the person initiating it is seeking anything more. You talk about baseline respect, but I think flirtation is inherently respectful when done right, it is giving another person positive affirmations.
If an omission would change someone else’s behavior, it seems deceptive.
What does that even mean?
I’m assuming you are referring to OP saying
What all of a person’s life story must they share and not “omit” before they should be given the green light to flirt with someone? There is all sorts of information that literally anyone would leave out of a conversation with a stranger (or even not a stranger) that would change the nature of the conversation. Omission is not deception.
Also, OP says they are up front about their relationship if it comes up and they wear a ring to indicate that status. They are not even omitting the information you seem to think they’re obligated to share.
Check time stamps, OP only mentioned wearing a ring and being upfront after I posted.
From the information available in the thread at the time of my comment I was getting a really bad vibe about someone intentionally omitting pertinent information so they could manipulate people into behaving in a certain way for their own entertainment; a lot of people wouldn’t feel comfortable being on the other side of flirting with someone in a relationship and I was worried. That’s clearly not the case with the additional information posted, they’re just having fun and it’s fine.
But it’s valid if someone doesn’t feel comfortable flirting with another person who is already in a relationship and omission would be hurtful. A long-term committed relationship isn’t some trivial thing, that’s a very important piece of information for a lot of people. Some of us would be reliving trauma if this kind of play was just dumped on us with no warning. Being open and upfront is 100% the way to go with this and OP is totally fine.
read OP again.
monogamous relationship OP is asking about flirting with people for some kind of external validation with no intention of disclosing relationship status or unavailability.
this is directly and explicitly deceiving and using the unwitting person.
Aaaaaand we have another person infected with incel thought. Flirting usually just isn’t about hooking up, people do this as courtesy or to be nice all the time. Thinking anything else IS transactional reasoning that sees everything as bargaining in the sexual marketplace. Gross. Gross. Gross.
the social purpose of flirting is to signal potential interest without risking as big of a faux pas or being unacceptably forward. OP is misusing this construct for validation.
Who are you to say what the social purpose of some widespread human activity is? I have to agree with SerialExperientsGay, that sentence reeks of incel “philosophy.” Maybe to someone else the social purpose of flirtation is to engage in a lighthearted and enjoyable way of helping people feel better about themselves and each other without risking the many emotional and physical dangers of a relationship or sexual encounter. To me, and to anyone I’ve ever met irl, including people I have flirted with both as the one who initiated it and as the one that started on the receiving end of it, OP is not misusing it at all, they’re doing it exactly as countless people have across different cultures.
euphemistic interaction is developed when forthrightness is taboo or dangerous. there’s discourse about it not being safe to be forward in feminist literature, i don’t understand where the incel jacketing is coming from.
if we didn’t have slutshaming culture and men would reliably take no for an answer we wouldn’t have invented the shitty neurotypical verbal dance.
Ok, i will try my best to answer this in good faith. I will not be able to be friendly because you make my skin crawl, but i will be honest and take the effort to clarify this.
First of all, this isn’t about neurotypical vs neurodivergent. I fortunately haven’t seen you do the thing were people just remote diagnose people they disagree with as neurotypical, but i still need to stress that literally my entire friend group, me included, are autists, and most of us, again including me, struggle with flirting to some degree, but we all still enjoy attention and validation. Which apparently makes us “attention vampires” in your opinion (you seriously wrote that itt, come on, wtf). Which just shits all over the way people in many transbian communities interact with each other, btw.
But you do not care about what women want, your posts are dripping with a disdain for “attention seeking” people that comes off as identical to how 4chan incels paint women as “attention wh*res”. Please do not hide this behind a call for “open communication”. Open communication also means you can and should ask people if they are flirting with you or if this is going anywhere. Most people, and yes, this specifically includes neurodivergent people, are not 100% literal and open all the time.
And when you are taking every sign of flirtyness as something that has to be treated super seriously, and that will lead to a devestating emotional crash when you are disappointed, i am sorry to say but you do come off as a desperate incel. I know that emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitive dysphoria can be a pain in the ass, i deal with this stuff myself, i’ve also gone through phases were i was lonely and sexually and emotionally frustrated, i get it, but jfc ease the fuck up about this. It’s not the end of the world when the person who complimented you doesn’t want to fuck you.
Speaking of which, there is also an implicit entitlement in your view of sexuality. Unlike incels, you seem consciously aware of the fact that people do not owe you sex, but on a deeper level it just rings hollow when you say that. You know you can’t demand intimacy from people, but you seem to hate that fact. That’s were all the bitterness seems to come from.
And yes, your view of relationships is ultimately transactional. Your posts make it clear that you think there is some kind of fuck protocol that you can dictate people to adhere to and that when people do not behave according to it, they have betrayed or slighted you. Ew.
The entire discourse around “deception” itt also stinks of internalized misogyny, specifically the concept that women are inherently deceitful and duplicitous. None of it is directed explicitly at women, but the gist is that you always have to be upfront about anything, are never allowed to be playful in any way and that everything has to be super serious all the time, and that is just deeply hostile to people who do not want to interact like that.
So, in short, you ring everybody’s incel alarm because you come off as bitter, entitled, sexually fragile, transactional in your views of sexuality and openly hostile towards behaviors that are coded as feminine.
Oh no how dare they break the protocol for sex procurement, you fucking Andrew Tate ass freak.
fuck you
This is a very one-dimensional way of thinking about social interaction. People flirt for all sorts of reasons, not all of them even about sex/romance. You can’t just narrow it down to a single purpose. But even within your narrow definition, you say yourself that flirting is about potential interest. It doesn’t mean anything definite. Assuming that the person flirting with you wants to take it further isn’t necessarily wrong, but they aren’t abusing the social contract if they don’t want to, even if it hurts your feelings. It certainly doesn’t warrant calling them an evil vampire.
OP is describing a situation where there is no potential. i have said in multiple other comments that good-faith flirting has no obligation to continue.
the only thing some of us are asking is for people to not initiate from false pretenses.
There is no false pretense. It does not matter if they never intended to advance beyond that flirting, that does not make it bad-faith behavior. Your entire grievance with the OP is that you feel you are owed a chance with someone because they are flirting with you, and they don’t owe you that at all.
Seriously this is you
Sorry to revive a comment in an 8 day old struggle session, but your comment hit home because I am really bad at telling when what I’m saying is considered by someone else as flirting (probably for neurodivergent reasons). I have been called manipulative by a lot of dudes in my life because they mistake me being playful and avoiding eye contact as flirting. It’s not fun. It sucks. It’s sometimes dangerous.
So basically I just want to say thanks for pointing out that people shouldn’t feel like they’re being deceived by flirting, because sometimes the flirter didn’t even realize they were flirting in the first place.
that is what OP literally described doing