this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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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.
Seriously this is you
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.
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.
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.