Lately I’ve been getting a wave of unsolicited messages in my DMs.
Not collaboration requests. Not creative conversation. Not thoughtful engagement with my work.
Instead: greetings that quickly turn into questions about where I am, what I’m doing, why I’m not replying, whether I’m single, whether I have children, and increasingly, attempts to turn a private message thread into something resembling dating.
When I set a simple boundary—DMs are not for dating—I didn’t expect much drama.
But I was surprised by the response.
Some people understood immediately. Others didn’t just disagree; they questioned whether I was even entitled to set the boundary at all.
A recurring theme emerged: I should be grateful for the attention. I am unmarried. I am perceived as attractive. I am therefore, in their framing, “available enough” that interest itself becomes justification.
That part unsettled me more than the messages themselves.
Because what it reveals is not just interest.
It’s assumption.
There is a growing confusion in digital spaces between visibility and availability.
I show up online as a creative person. I share ideas, writing, work, and thought. That visibility sometimes gets interpreted as openness—not just to conversation, but to personal pursuit.
But those are not the same thing.
Interest is not consent. Attention is not access. Visibility is not invitation.
And yet, in practice, those lines are often treated as interchangeable.
What makes this more complicated is that it doesn’t always begin aggressively. It begins small.
A greeting. A compliment. A “how are you.”
And then it escalates.
Why aren’t you replying?
What are you doing?
Are you there?
Are you available now?
Where are you from??
Not curiosity—pressure.
Not connection—persistence.
One of the clearest distinctions I’ve started to notice is not who initiates contact, but how people respond once intent is clarified.
I’ve had interactions where I’ve stated a boundary or clarified context, and the response is immediate and respectful. The conversation adjusts. It ends cleanly. No friction.
In one case, someone expressed interest and they happened to be a lesbian, and I clarified my sexual orientation as straight. They immediately understood, respected it, and stepped back. No pressure, no insistence, no attempt to reinterpret what I had said.
That kind of responsiveness is simple—but it stands out precisely because it is not universal.
Because in other cases, even after clarity, the interaction does not shift. The boundary becomes something to test, work around, or revisit.
And that difference matters more than the initial message ever did.
Because it reveals whether someone is engaging with a person—or with their own assumption of access.
The problem with DMs is not that they exist.
It’s that they collapse categories that should remain distinct.
A DM can be professional, creative, friendly, personal, or romantic—all at once, with no shared agreement about what it is meant to be.
And in that ambiguity, some people default to the most self-serving interpretation: this is a space where I can try my luck.
What gets lost is that not every channel of communication is an open-ended relational space.
Some are not invitations.
Some are just messages.
Even without being a large influencer, platforms create a sense of familiarity over time.
Following someone. Seeing their posts. Occasional engagement. A comment here, a like there.
It can create a quiet illusion of proximity that doesn’t actually exist.
And in that illusion, attention can start to feel like relationship.
But familiarity is not reciprocity.
Visibility is not consent.
And repeated exposure is not permission.
I’ve had to block people who continued messaging after being told I was unavailable—asking why I wasn’t responding, insisting on replies, returning again after silence.
At a certain point, the interaction stops being conversational and becomes pressure.
And blocking becomes less a choice than an exit from escalation.
People often say: just say no. Just block. Just leave.
But that framing assumes boundaries exist in a vacuum.
In reality, boundaries are not single statements. They are negotiations that depend entirely on how the other person responds.
Sometimes people hear “no” as final. Sometimes they hear it as temporary. Sometimes they treat it as something to work around rather than accept.
And so what should be a simple boundary becomes a sequence:
polite response → gentle deflection → clearer refusal → continued persistence → eventual blocking.
Not because the boundary was unclear—but because it was not respected.
And often, especially for women, early politeness is not indecision. It is social conditioning. It is safety management. It is the learned awareness that escalation can have consequences.
So “just say no” sounds simple in theory.
It is not simple in practice.
In contrast, real-world interactions often behave very differently.
Just recently, in the space of a single day, I experienced multiple small acts of kindness from men in public: help with groceries, holding doors, brief assistance that was simple, bounded, and unremarkable in the best possible way.
Those interactions didn’t escalate. They didn’t persist. They ended when they ended.
Which is why this is not a “men vs women” argument. It isn’t about categories.
It is about context.
Because the same people can behave entirely differently depending on structure:
in-person interactions are brief, visible, and self-limiting
DM interactions are persistent, private, and easily repeated
The environment changes the behavior.
So why isn’t “no” always enough?
Part of it is cultural scripting.
There is a long-standing idea in some dating contexts that:
refusal is temporary
resistance is part of a process
persistence is proof of interest
“she’s just playing hard to get”
In that framing, “no” stops being an ending and becomes a stage.
But that creates a fundamental problem: it trains people to wait for refusal to soften rather than to respect it immediately.
And that is where misunderstanding becomes harm.
Because a boundary that is only accepted after repetition is not really a boundary being respected—it is a boundary being negotiated under pressure.
This is why cultural narratives that romanticize persistence after refusal feel deeply uncomfortable to me.
Stories like The Notebook, where persistence is framed as devotion, blur something important: the difference between changing your mind freely and being worn down into agreement.
Consent is only meaningful when “no” is treated as complete, not as a hurdle to overcome.
Otherwise, what looks like romance from the outside can quietly resemble erosion of resistance rather than mutual desire.
The part that stays with me most is the idea that I should be grateful for attention I did not ask for.
That framing turns discomfort into ingratitude.
It assumes that being seen primarily through a physical or romantic lens is inherently a benefit—even when it does not reflect how I want to be understood.
But being consistently misread is not a privilege.
It is a form of distortion.
I don’t think the answer is less connection.
Or less openness.
Or less interaction between people online.
But I do think there needs to be a clearer understanding that different spaces have different purposes—and not every form of visibility is an invitation.
Because if everything is treated as potential access, then nothing is allowed to simply be what it is.
And sometimes a DM is just a DM.
Not a door.
Not a signal.
Not a negotiation.
Just a message.
And it should be allowed to stay that way.
