Note: The original author of this article is describing the phenomenon from the perspective of India, but a lot of it is much more universal than that—and it illustrates so well how darn near impossible it is to socialize romantically on the Internet.
https://fiftytwo.in/story/hi-dear/I can’t remember my first creep, nor, sadly, can I remember how seeing that first message felt. What I do remember is being 12 and 13 years old, feeling flattered and impatient to tell my friends about my inbox hauls, anticipating their cracking up with me at every “Will u do franship?” and “Lukin nice.” I remember the crackle-beep-trill of dial-up modems punctuating sleepover giggling, PC screen glowing in semi-dark, our parents asleep in the next room. I remember comparing inboxes with prettier friends, hoping (anxiously! insecurely!) that the creeps had come through for me. And bless them, they always did. As we made our way from Hi5 in 2005 and 2006, to Orkut in 2006 and 2007, and finally to Facebook where we practiced seeing and being seen for a decade, the creeps came everywhere.
To be clear, though, Mohan is not a creep.
Mohan is a 26-year-old software engineer who sincerely wants to build friendships with women and is open to more-than, but he specifically doesn’t want to creep anyone out. When we spoke on the phone, he was pacing the terrace of his family home in the small Tamil Nadu town where he grew up, and where he’d returned last year when the first lockdown began. He told me about a girl he once messaged on Facebook with whom he ended up chatting for days. When her responses grew shorter, Mohan perceived a drop in interest. He stopped trying to keep the conversation alive. “I was definitely interested in her but I didn’t want to freak her out,” he said. “I don’t want to freak any girl out by sending messages often.”
We do tend to get freaked out, and for good reason. Mainstream Indian portrayals of heterosexual romance unambiguously charge men with initiating courtships, but they either fail to account for consent or, famously, encourage violating it. Meanwhile women, each of us having experienced a rattling array of violations at the hands of male strangers, have been conditioned to simultaneously expect to be (even long to be) pursued, and to be wary of our male pursuers. For us, this means the work of finding love is impossibly tied up with the work of avoiding danger. For Mohan and other well-intentioned men, “the problem comes in finding a border,” he said. “If we cross the border, it will feel like we’re stalking the girl. But if we aren’t reaching the border means our existence won’t be known to the girl.”
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