Last night I was supposed to have a Discord call with my best friend of almost 40 years. We do this every month, to make sure we stay in touch. It’s on the calendar and everything. However, I was feeling a little down (okay, a lot down) and I asked them if we could postpone a week. This happens from time to time for both of us, and it’s not a problem.

But what I didn’t do was ghost them by not showing up for the call at all. That’s not good manners.

Neither is leaving someone un-replied-to for days and days, especially when you know they’re active and doing stuff (because they’re posting about it on Fetlife).

Usually after a scene, and especially with someone new (or new-to-me), I’ll text them the next day to see how they’re doing. Nothing major, just “hey, wanted to see how you were doing after yesterday.” In most cases, they reply and we have a brief chat. I’ve been doing this for over ten years now — the check-up text, I mean — and I can count on one hand the number of times I haven’t received a reply.

What do you do in that situation, though? Do you send them another message and turn into That Guy (the one who continuously sends messages to a woman even though she doesn’t reply)? Do you wait a few days? Do you let it sit? Do you just ignore the fact that you were basically ghosted and just message them some other time, not bringing up the scene at all?

Generally I’ll go with the last one. If the person I spanked doesn’t want to reply, that’s their choice. But I don’t often spank people I don’t at least have some sort of connection with (Spanky Hawkins notwithstanding), and if I have a connection with you, I want to maintain that connection by having occasional conversations, and also by checking in on you after I’ve spanked you.

As you can guess from this post, this exact situation happened recently. I spanked someone — just with my hand, but it was a good OTK spanking — and the next day I messaged her to check in and see how she was doing. Crickets. I also knew she was going to be doing a more intense scene with someone else over the weekend, so on Monday I messaged her to make sure everything went well — I consider her a friend, and I wanted to check in on her. Crickets again.

I’m sure I wasn’t ghosted; if I had been, she’d have blocked me on social media. But this behavior has echoes of that, and I don’t care for it. I guess I’ll have to negotiate that, in the future, if someone I spank doesn’t reply to my check-up text within 24 hours they get punishment swats the next time. Maybe that’ll work; maybe it won’t. But I don’t like this feeling of being sort-of ghosted by someone I call a friend, and who calls me a friend right back.

If you have a connection with someone, and it’s a good enough connection to do a spanking scene with them, unless the scene goes badly (in this case it definitely didn’t) and you never want to talk to them again it’s good etiquette to reply to their check-in texts the next day. Not sure where good etiquette and politeness has gone these past few years, but it needs to make a comeback. Fast.