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.
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.
OP described doing it for external validation and the original question is about their desire for that validation against the feelings of the people they would be interacting with and potentially “leading people on a bit” in OP’s words.
OP is married to a woman and hasn’t specified their own gender that i’ve seen. They mention they’d be flirting with women in a hotel bar or the like. I don’t know if you picked up on that, you’re arguing against things I haven’t said or positions i’ve explicitly not taken, and the gender dynamic you’re attacking me over probably isn’t even the one at play.
you’re also convinced i’m trying to get laid when i’m not.
yeah fuck me for not being a social butterfly i guess. If somebody wants to act exactly like they might be interested in me when they aren’t, that’s some highschool bully shit. I’ve literally been harassed in that manner, and i don’t think being used for a quick dopamine hit is all that different. I have no way to tell the difference between fake interest and genuine interest, and if OP is going to flirt with me and then go “lol nope i have a wife and we’re monogamous” then that’s a really shitty experience they’ve put me through intentionally. As opposed to it organically not working out, which is sad but isn’t malicious.
you’re really muddying the water here, an exchange of compliments isn’t flirting on their own. There’s a back and forth escalation to flirting and the issue is the intent of the person considering climbing that ladder for purely selfish aims rather than a collaborative goal.
and that’s like, analogy to a physical ladder not a videogame thing.
e: the shitty neurotypical dance is a shitty neurotypical invention regardless of the rest of us maybe learning to navigate it sometimes, that wasn’t me diagnosing anyone other than the indeterminant majority of people who developed shitty cultural practices over time.
Pretending to like somebody to bully them is an entirely different thing than casually flirting with somebody for validation. You cannot treat everybody who does not follow your excruciating script that they cannot possibly know about as your schoolyard bully. This is automatically misjudging them. Grown up people do not usually act like teenagers and when you pretend we do, you will keep having interactions like this one because you misjudge everybody around you.
they’re both using another person to feel better about yourself. again, literally as OP describes.
all i’m asking is people don’t act completely indistinguishably from somebody who might be interested when they aren’t.
Incredibly uncharitable reading, given that you equate a simple misunderstanding about the most trivial bs with deliberate intent of hurting and traumatizing somebody.
did you read OP’s other comments? what they describe wanting is an ego boost gained by initiating flirting only interested in that boost. it’s not targeted abuse but it is using someone.
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