“Stranger: Hello
Stranger: Hey
Stranger: M or F?
Stranger: Age?
Stranger: From?
Continues”
My friends always used to advise joining online dating platforms as a young woman and who has not had a relationship, I always wanted to be in one. I don't want to start my school traumas why I never got Prince Charming, why people never found me desirable enough. But memories are boomerangs. They keep coming. One fine day in December 2023, I was doing my usual book reading, and then suddenly I thought about how people interact in a space where they don't know each other, nothing. I did know about other spaces where people share their lovely bios and aspire to get ‘love’ ‘seems love’ ‘not love but casual’ and so on because desires are limitless and I have learned that it's not bad to not be in the box of normativity.
But how about a site where there is no need for registration, no bio, no photos, nothing, just a name, whatever you want to, and then the engagement with any random person, random chats?
I can't say whether that was out of curiosity or my urge to explore my sexuality or something else, I typed in Google Random Chats.
That led to this cause of me writing a story. The first site I got in a blink (I'm not going to tell you the name, as I don't want this to happen with anyone else).
It took me one day to understand how the site works and two days to decode why people are messaging F or M just after their Hey.
So after these two days, I finally engaged with people without skipping them, and the first thing I got to know was that people were in a hurry. Many of my friends can disagree, but I think people are losing the values of love, respect, and friendships, they just want to run into your pants as soon as they can. With time I realized that there is no problem in doing Sex and not falling in love. Sex can be for pleasure, with a person with whom you might not be in love the consent aspect is anyway important. But then in random chats when people say give me ‘Love’ what love are they seeking or asking, this led me to my second observation that people are lonely, they want to love, they want admiration, consideration, and everything that they have learned and felt they will never get.
Society, can I say the unjust society has told us who is loveable and thus not just the women but men, and other gender identities who have been ignored for years. I tried to engage in the conversations and there were many observers, I don't know if that's politically correct/appropriate or not, and there is a cancel culture in the winds. I'm in fear of writing, but I will, and maybe if people criticize me I can learn new things.
Anyway, going on with the story, I learned that in online spaces the violence seems different, for instance, if the person is female and of a different language, the male counterparts think it is okay to abuse as the opposite party can not identify the wrongness, it was okay to type rapist as their name, to ask I can rape you and you will enjoy that process and so on. I am not an expert in kinks and other sexual desires, orientation, and so on but for me, it was not anything but the violence people face due to several factors and gender identity is one of them.
Did I not learn about myself and my sexual desires? Yes, I did. What if I say the idea of sex is missing in my head, or maybe the ’type of sex’, the moment I think of sex I imagine nature, books, kissings, hugs, holding hands, and then just this. People have tagged me a lot, I don't know if I call myself an asexual person, that's something I am still finding.
However, in those almost two months, in those random people, random chats found three people who used words like, can I, if you are comfortable, let's just talk if you want. The rest wanted to have my snap ID which I never signed in. Some people abused me when I asked ‘Can we just talk’. And most people whom I skipped because their names go like rapist, beater.
And this is the start of this story. On February 2nd, 2024, I found one man, the funniest among all of them, considered one, the one who said ‘Then what, is it a bad thing’ when I said ‘I am a feminist’, and with whom I talked about five hours with two skips mistakenly and again found him, the one who didn't ask for snap ID, either wanted to ‘cum’, and the one whom I told that ‘Maya’ means illusion.
For those hours I found out a lot about myself, what personality impresses me, attracts me, what activities I like doing, and many other things that the words are incapable of expressing. Those hours felt like a rom-com movie I never wanted to skip or fast forward, but to just engage with. I shared my name and one dumb email ID whose engagement is limited to me only. And then we got skipped. Since then I have been waiting for his email, with a similar fear of whether I have closed the door correctly, did I switch off the gas stove, did I close all the switches. I don't know about this, nor can I now do anything about this. I may get his email, I wish I could. I am going to remember him for life. He is Rob and he doesn’t bite.
#LoveAndDesire