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.
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.
Oh no how dare they break the protocol for sex procurement, you fucking Andrew Tate ass freak.
fuck you
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.
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.
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.
OP literally says
i think we owe eachother honesty and decency and acting, for personal gain, indistinguishable from someone who is potentially interested is dishonest at a minimum, and up to cruel depending on how far it’s taken before the ulterior motive is revealed.
no, i’m not interested in hookups anyway, and covid means i will never be in a position to be flirted with for the rest of my life or the existence of the united states, whichever ends first. this is about how people treat eachother and what OP described is emotional advantage-taking.
Seriously this is you