Being blocked sucks.

You can’t respond to this conversation because [username] has deactivated their account, you’ve blocked them, they’ve blocked you, or they are on a timeout.

Recently I was talking to someone on Fetlife about spanking. We exchanged about ten messages, and then after she sent the eleventh, I was notified that I couldn’t reply because either I’d been blocked or the user had deleted their profile. I later discovered, through some rather rudimentary detective work, that she had blocked me.

I wish I knew why.

I was polite and friendly. I didn’t say anything weird or untoward. I wasn’t pushy about wanting to meet or play (I mentioned it one time, early on, and when she didn’t respond in kind I didn’t ask again). I don’t think any of my Fetlife activity was offensive during the time we were talking.

But there it was.

I mean, sure, maybe she’s on a timeout. Maybe she did something that was against Fetlife’s TOS. But it’s more likely that she blocked me.

Look, I get it: women have to put up with a lot of shit on social networks, and Fetlife is especially bad at times. That said, ghosting someone is extremely impolite. It takes a minute or two to write a post that says “hey, thanks for talking to me, but I’d like to end this conversation now.” I know that sometimes that leads to men saying disgusting or hateful things, but in my case I usually just send back a message that says something to the effect of “I understand, thanks for taking the time to talk to me.”

Maybe I’m extra-sensitive to being blocked in this way because of how I got super-ghosted a couple of years ago. I swear I wrote a post about it, but I can’t find it, so let me recap: I approached someone new on Fetlife, we talked intensely for about a week, we went on one date, she was supposed to come back to my house, and then she disappeared without a trace. I found out later that she’d blocked me on Fetlife. I was devastated — I’d put a lot of emotional energy into this person, especially for just a week’s worth, and to be completely shut down like that without even being told why? I mean, would it have killed her to just say “I’m no longer interested, but thank you for your time”? Even if it was a text, and not said in person, it would’ve been something.

Women are not in any way obligated to explain why they don’t want to talk to me anymore — “no” is a complete sentence — but if we could all move past the ghosting/blocking game and just communicate, it would be a delightful change.