I hate flirting. I just don't understand it. It's this weird social dance that no one explains but expects people to understand. It all feels hypocritical that comes with unreasonable expectations.
The biggest source of frustration for me comes from the fact that I have to act in a way that says I am interested while not saying I am interested. That just does not work for me.
I don't flirt. I don't even try. I don't want to be with someone flirty because from my past experiences, flirty people are also not straight forward about other parts of their true selves.
Flirty people also misinterpret a lot of my actions as a result of me not understanding flirting as well. Many flirty people from my experiences have assumed I am flirting. I was just being nice. I was treating them like a person. Just like I treat family like people. And friends like people. And strangers like people.
As a not flirty person, the number of times people have pushed me up against a wall and kissed me, or just jump to kissing me has been way more than I ever expected out of life. Each time has been equally confusing. I wasn't flirting. I was just treating them how I wanted to be treated.
I have no advice to give but I have some thoughts to share from my life experiences. People like being treated like people. People who make mistakes. People who have their own thoughts and feelings. People who are themselves. I've made more genuinely close connections with people, intimate or not, by just treating people as people. And it's really something as simple as that. Also having a genuine smile helps quite a bit too. When I smile because I'm enjoying the moment, I notice that it draws people towards me. It's a type of energy that draws people in and it makes me feel even better about myself too.
I've finally figured out how to install frogcomposband in a docker container. It's a fork of a game called Angband that's played in a terminal window. Angband itself has a long history. Somewhere around 30 years if I remember correctly.
It's setting is closer to lord of the rings but it has the insane complexity of a pen and paper, dungeons and dragons type game. A huge amount of races and classes to play and even the option to play an impressive amount of different monsters or enemies.
I think what I'm enjoying about it is that the graphics are just coloured numbers, letters and symbols. The playable character is just the @ symbol. It leaves room for the imagination to fill in the blanks which feels very calming.
When I was going through my Baldur's Gate phase, I noticed my brain was in complete overdrive after playing a session. I think processing the crazy details in that game was too much for my brain.
Now when I shut off the game I'm not overwhelmed and I still get my role playing game fix. It's nice.