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.
Dating already sucks and is miserable. Self-consciously going into an interaction with the goal of deceiving someone for attention is a shitty behavior. No, that does not oblige you to fuck them or whatever, literally no one here is saying that and such an idea is ridiculous and disgusting. What some people (myself included) are saying is that that initial action, the pre-meditated deception, is hurtful to people for no good reason.
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.
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.
Seriously this is you
that is what OP literally described doing
incel ass logic
I remember in the past seeing passing mention that hexbear had an incel problem but I mostly disregarded it because it seemed like it would get shut down quickly. I also have a lot of empathy for lonely men (and all lonely people) in this fucked up society even if I have zero tolerance for using that as an excuse for misogyny. But every now and then a thread will come up that really does confirm there is still an undercurrent of incel “thought” even on hexbear.