Thou shalt not flirt
Jan. 3rd, 2026 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseThis morning I got a DM on Discord from some bloke in the SCA. I recognised the name; he's a Norse mythology geek. That was all, though. We hadn't really interacted, so I couldn't think why he would be DMing me.
So the first thing he did was to ask where I lived. I said "Drachenwald", which is the SCA region covering everywhere from northern Scandinavia down to somewhere in North Africa (I think); only in the SCA could I get away with being quite that vague. I also asked him why he asked. He said he "would love to connect", and I thought... oh. Right. Would you, now? So I told him my age at the first opportunity.
He shut up for a bit and I thought I'd got rid of him, but no; he popped up again a bit later to tell me he's 15 years younger than I am and to show me a selfie (which didn't help - he looks rather disturbingly intense). He wanted to know more. So I told him about the disabilities, and the asexual-spectrum-ness, and the maths degree.
None of that has put him off. Which means that he might actually be decent friend material. I'm impressed.
Usually, though, this is not how it goes. Men who DM you without having previously interacted are generally so desperate for some form of romance that they're prepared to take their chances with a complete stranger, which is completely the wrong way round. No matter how much you like someone's appearance, you can't sensibly fall in love with them until you know them pretty well (emphasis here on "sensibly", since many people seem to do that anyway). And so one becomes very good at letting them down gently. You can, of course, just tell them where to go and then block them; but they aren't all scammers (though quite a lot of them, inevitably, are). Some of them are just hapless. They're so socially inept that they're struggling to find romance in the usual way, so they think they might have better luck online, without realising that there are social conventions there too... so they're surprised if someone is suspicious on being DM'd out of the blue.
I wish anyone like that all the best, but I also try to tell them as gently as possible that they're going to need to change their game. Finding a photo of someone online, deciding they're beautiful, and then showering them with romantic DMs... that's just not going to work, unless that person is equally desperate, in which case it's almost certainly not going to work for very long. The most likely thing that will happen is you get blocked without further ado. And, besides, even if the person does respond positively, you're getting a pig in a poke. Everyone has their flaws, but some sets of flaws are reasonably compatible and others really aren't. If you're a neat freak, for instance, you really do not want to live with me; I'm constitutionally untidy in the way that quite a lot of creative people are. It doesn't matter if you think I'm beautiful. You're not going to want to live with my chaos, and I'm certainly not going to want to live with you trying to tidy it up all the time. I know where things are, thank you!
There was someone on Mastodon around the middle of last year who tried. He was very persistent. Claimed to be in the US Army, went full Romeo (to the extent that I kept having to say things like "thank you very much, but I'm not yours!"), and wanted to talk to me off-platform. Except that I wasn't on Discord at the time and wasn't feeling at all like going back on there at that point, Magda having died fairly recently; and the only other alternatives I could find involved either having a smartphone (which I don't) or revealing my e-mail address (which I was not going to do for any reason). He was puzzled (or at least, he acted puzzled) about why I should think it was such a big deal whether or not he knew my e-mail address. I replied that it was a privacy issue, and he wasn't getting that unless and until I was sure I could trust him. I think, looking back, he was probably a scammer; I've heard since then that quite a lot of romance scammers tell you they're in the US Army (as if that were a positive). Anyway, I stonewalled him very politely, and eventually he gave up and went away.
So I updated my bio on Mastodon to say, basically, "please do not attempt to flirt"; it seems to be working well so far.
I may have to do the same thing on Discord. It's just... you don't really expect it when you get to my age.
So the first thing he did was to ask where I lived. I said "Drachenwald", which is the SCA region covering everywhere from northern Scandinavia down to somewhere in North Africa (I think); only in the SCA could I get away with being quite that vague. I also asked him why he asked. He said he "would love to connect", and I thought... oh. Right. Would you, now? So I told him my age at the first opportunity.
He shut up for a bit and I thought I'd got rid of him, but no; he popped up again a bit later to tell me he's 15 years younger than I am and to show me a selfie (which didn't help - he looks rather disturbingly intense). He wanted to know more. So I told him about the disabilities, and the asexual-spectrum-ness, and the maths degree.
None of that has put him off. Which means that he might actually be decent friend material. I'm impressed.
Usually, though, this is not how it goes. Men who DM you without having previously interacted are generally so desperate for some form of romance that they're prepared to take their chances with a complete stranger, which is completely the wrong way round. No matter how much you like someone's appearance, you can't sensibly fall in love with them until you know them pretty well (emphasis here on "sensibly", since many people seem to do that anyway). And so one becomes very good at letting them down gently. You can, of course, just tell them where to go and then block them; but they aren't all scammers (though quite a lot of them, inevitably, are). Some of them are just hapless. They're so socially inept that they're struggling to find romance in the usual way, so they think they might have better luck online, without realising that there are social conventions there too... so they're surprised if someone is suspicious on being DM'd out of the blue.
I wish anyone like that all the best, but I also try to tell them as gently as possible that they're going to need to change their game. Finding a photo of someone online, deciding they're beautiful, and then showering them with romantic DMs... that's just not going to work, unless that person is equally desperate, in which case it's almost certainly not going to work for very long. The most likely thing that will happen is you get blocked without further ado. And, besides, even if the person does respond positively, you're getting a pig in a poke. Everyone has their flaws, but some sets of flaws are reasonably compatible and others really aren't. If you're a neat freak, for instance, you really do not want to live with me; I'm constitutionally untidy in the way that quite a lot of creative people are. It doesn't matter if you think I'm beautiful. You're not going to want to live with my chaos, and I'm certainly not going to want to live with you trying to tidy it up all the time. I know where things are, thank you!
There was someone on Mastodon around the middle of last year who tried. He was very persistent. Claimed to be in the US Army, went full Romeo (to the extent that I kept having to say things like "thank you very much, but I'm not yours!"), and wanted to talk to me off-platform. Except that I wasn't on Discord at the time and wasn't feeling at all like going back on there at that point, Magda having died fairly recently; and the only other alternatives I could find involved either having a smartphone (which I don't) or revealing my e-mail address (which I was not going to do for any reason). He was puzzled (or at least, he acted puzzled) about why I should think it was such a big deal whether or not he knew my e-mail address. I replied that it was a privacy issue, and he wasn't getting that unless and until I was sure I could trust him. I think, looking back, he was probably a scammer; I've heard since then that quite a lot of romance scammers tell you they're in the US Army (as if that were a positive). Anyway, I stonewalled him very politely, and eventually he gave up and went away.
So I updated my bio on Mastodon to say, basically, "please do not attempt to flirt"; it seems to be working well so far.
I may have to do the same thing on Discord. It's just... you don't really expect it when you get to my age.
