It’s happened to a lot of us. We see a friend request pop up on our feed, and we don’t necessarily recognize the person–they might look vaguely familiar at best, and we aren’t sure whether to let them friend us or not. So, we decide to (naturally) go about stalking them a little bit. We flip through their pictures, and may even figure that they are a “normal” person, and that there wouldn’t be any particular harm in allowing them to be our friend. So we accept them.
For a little bit, they’ll lie low, potentially only popping up in your feed every once and awhile. You imagine that they’re probably just a friend of one of your acquaintances, or that you may have met them at a party. But eventually, they slip your mind, because you have a startling number of real people concerns, and you’re not really all that worried about this internet acquaintance. And then it happens. They message you. It usually starts off as a “Hi” or a “How are you”, something vague and general, so that they can get a response from you. From my perspective, I’ll sometimes scare myself into thinking that if I don’t respond, something bad will happen to me, whether it’s from the person I’m ignoring, or from karma in general, so I’ll usually respond in order to be polite. Granted, sometimes it’s just a person trying to be polite. Most of the time, it really seems like it isn’t.
The conversation will suddenly get personal, asking us where we go to school, what we are majoring in, where we live. And while this conversation might be appropriate for strangers to have on an app like Tinder, Facebook Messenger really isn’t the place to start hitting on people that you’ve never really met before.
Of course, some of these new “friends” on Facebook are internet predators, but there are probably some others who simply want to use Facebook as a sort of dating app. But even so, messaging people that you don’t know, and basically forcing your conversation onto them, is not okay, especially if they politely decline your offer. Dating in the modern age is difficult, I get it. However, just because you find someone’s profile attractive, does not mean that they necessarily find yours to be. And if they decide not to message you back, don’t bother them, don’t ask them about their significant other if they have one, and just let them live in their lives.
You want people that you’re interested in to feel safe and comfortable, and if you’re really interested in them, I would suggest downloading Tinder to see if you match with them.