baroque_mongoose

This 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.

I used to have a very dear online friend called Magda, who, tragically but not really unexpectedly, died a little under two years ago in her early twenties. She had been chronically ill and disabled all her life; but it would not be an exaggeration to say that she was the arts-based version of Stephen Hawking, because she was a genius. She had won the Polish School Olympics (a nationwide academic competition) several times in different subjects, though languages and linguistics were her first love. She spoke English so well that I was staggered when I discovered it wasn't her first language; indeed, her vocabulary was better than that of probably more than 95% of native speakers. We were writing a book together, and we understood each other so well that both of us knew that either one of us could create a character and the other one could then just automatically take it the way the first person intended it to go. I will never forget the time I sent her the latest chunk I'd written, and she got all excited because I knew the word "fewmets". I thought that was very funny. I mean... hang on, which of us exactly was the native speaker here?!

Magda was a stunningly good communicator in all respects, and she was also extraordinarily kind and thoughtful. She loved roleplaying, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the games she played, and regularly spent hours online with new players (in the case of Shadowrun, I was one of them) helping them to tweak their character so that it was exactly what they wanted. With Shadowrun this was an especially impressive feat, because it has an entire bookshelf full of supplementary rule books; but Magda could still say, "Oh, you'd like your character to do X? There's this thing they can have which is in such a book, do you think that would work for you?"

She could pick up on everything instantly, with one exception; and that exception, on one occasion, caused a very large amount of angst. Magda, like me, was on the asexual spectrum; indeed, probably more so than I am. Consequently, she had no idea when anyone was falling for her; and, given what sort of person she was, it was only to be expected that someone would at some point.

We'll call him Kurt, which was not his name, but he was German. He and Magda had been getting on very well for a while, but what I didn't realise at the time was that he thought she was his girlfriend, whereas she thought he was her best friend. (I got on well with both of them, but I did tend to talk more to Magda than to Kurt.) So after a while he suggested he should come and visit her in Poland, and she was very happy about that.

Now Kurt wasn't exactly the most subtle individual on earth. So he showed up, and the first thing he did was to declare his undying love; unfortunately, the second thing he did was to accuse Magda's parents of not looking after her properly, and basically to go "let me take you away from all this". Magda's parents were actually looking after her just fine, and she had a very good relationship with them, so she asked him if he would please refrain from doing them down. Also, she made it clear she hadn't known about the whole undying love thing and she was, to say the least, disconcerted by it. Kurt then accused her of leading him on. She said she'd done nothing of the sort, because how could she if she hadn't realised how he felt? The whole thing turned into a massive argument, and eventually Kurt stormed back to the railway station.

At this point, they both had the same idea. Within literally five minutes of each other, this unhappy pair both hit me up on Discord, neither one aware that the other was doing the same thing; so I had to calm down two extremely upset people simultaneously. Thankfully I was able to do that to at least some extent (probably about as far as anyone could), plus managing to talk Kurt the rest of the way back to the station without killing either himself or anyone in Magda's house. Kurt eventually said he'd appreciate it if I never mentioned Magda's name to him again, and I said, fine, no problem. Magda, typically, reacted much more gently; she didn't really want to talk to Kurt again, but she didn't mind if anyone else mentioned him. By the end of it all I was on the ceiling, where I remained for the rest of the day; but I'd helped, and that was the main thing.

I still have no idea if he knows she died. He's not a bad bloke, just a bit abrupt; so I think he'd be at least a little sad if he did.