Not that I really try to do this, but then again, I don't have to try. He initiated chat on gay.com He was local, cute enough (though from his own opinion of himself, I think he'd consider "cute enough" to be a put-down even though I don't intend it that way), and worked pretty hard to establish "kinky" credentials despite having nothing BDSM-related in his gay.com profile.
As I often do, he conversed by asking questions, because it's a way to keep other people engaged. Unfortunately for him, his questions were largely about my identity:
- What's your name?
- Where do you live?
- What do you do for a living?
- What are your hobbies?
Granted, the last one wasn't really an identity question, but after the first three, I had tried every way from "gentle" to "blunt" to tell him that I wasn't interested in revealing my identity to total strangers. I covered that in the first non-test post to this blog nearly four years ago. The only thing different now from then is that now I normally don't send pictures at all—I don't feel the need to do so, and I'm almost never looking for a hook-up, so I really don't care if people can't see what I look like and decide if they find me attractive or not.
When I didn't want to answer any of these questions, though, the poor boy was stymied. He's quite handsome from his pics, and like a lot of college-age boys, he seemed awfully confused when someone didn't try like hell to keep a conversation going with him. (I don't really mean to imply that he was full of himself, but it's true that handsome guys live in a different world than ordinary guys. They routinely get social and sexual opportunities that others would find rare or non-existent. When the situation doesn't work that way, they sometimes don't understand what's happening and misinterpret it as an insult of some kind. See the last bullet point in that post from four years ago.)
At that point, he got frustrated and wanted me to pick a topic. The problem with that strategy is that I didn't message him. I didn't have anything to talk about. People who initiate chat are supposed to have something to talk about, or else it's like calling someone on the phone and then asking that person what he wants. You called him!
I didn't mean to piss him off or even frustrate him, but once I finally got through to him that:
- I didn't want to talk about my identity, and
- I didn't have a chat topic prepared in case someone new started talking to me
...he got frustrated and pissy, lecturing me about how I should answer the questions to have a "normal" conversation. He could have asked a lot of BDSM questions (and to be fair, he asked some, but they mostly revolved around anal sex, which is not at the top of my hit parade), but the only topic he really seemed prepared to talk about was me. Guys tend to open up to other guys who are as cute as he is. I didn't, and it threw him off, and probably pissed him off—which, again, was not my intent.
Apparently I am mysterious and frustrating without even trying. If there's a lesson here, I guess it's "know more than one way to chat with another guy." It's like having only one pick-up line at a club: if it doesn't work, you can either try another way or just give up. "Repeating the same lines and then getting mad when the other guy doesn't cooperate" is not a high-percentage strategy.
