Hey everyone! It’s number 69 lol. If you’re new to this newsletter, Queer Advice is a space where I answer questions from troubled gay people. This question is from a queer who got a really intense text from someone they hooked up with via Tinder and isn’t sure if their response was justified. Quick reminder: if you have a response to this post or something you wanna add, consider leaving a comment instead of hitting reply and emailing me directly. You are all so smart and insightful and I want the class to see your response!!
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xoxo, Maddy
i hooked up with someone from tinder and it was pretty good! they were great to talk to, very friendly, and the hookup was good for a first time meeting. we had pretty “vanilla” sex but i knew from talking with them that they were pretty kinky / had done many sexual things i hadn’t, which was intriguing to me. also, they’re basically my neighbor so i thought this could be a convenient arrangement. the next time we were going to hang out, beforehand they sent me a list of sexual acts alongside if they had done them or not and how much they liked them, and asked me to fill it out and send it back. i won’t lie, i freaked out. it made me SUPER uncomfortable to see this person’s (who i had met once!) very intimate details of their sex life, and they wanted me to share mine! another reason for the freak out is that many of the things on the list were well outside my comfort zone.
i replied and said i was not comfortable filling it out and that i didn’t want to come over anymore that night, i felt a lot of pressure (that didn’t exist) to perform those things that i wasn’t comfortable with and now i feel really bad and weird. also i think the list in general made me feel a lot of pressure - like what if i went over and didn’t even want to hookup but i had just shared all these things that i want to do? but i can’t help but feel a little like a prude. like maybe i should just appreciate that they are so open?! did i mess up here or was my response valid? should i reach back out and try to salvage things? they seemed a bit caught off guard and upset at my response and i feel really bad, but it felt like SO MUCH, i haven’t even shared that level of detail about my sex life with ex partners.
Potentially a Prude, 24
It’s totally reasonable for the person you’re having sex with to want to talk with you about sex. At the same time, sending a whole-ass intake form in advance of a second date is a pretty intense move and I can see how it sent you into an insecurity-inducing comparison spiral. Personally, I would not want to commit this level of sexual history to a text message because my own specific lez community is so small and overlap-y and I just know that one of my exes would see that I gave our time together a 3 out of 10. What your question really brings up is the danger of having important conversations over text, especially when you don’t know each other very well and the information being shared is vulnerable. My guess is things would have gone differently if your date had waited until you showed up and been like, “So what are you into?“ or introduced the survey before sending it along. It’s just so easy to misunderstand someone’s intentions and tone when you’re not talking in-person. You can’t gauge each other’s comfort levels in real-time or laugh together or do anything to cut the awkwardness.
Your feelings are valid, ofc, but you’re also making some assumptions about your date and sex in general—namely, that you’re a lesser sexual partner because you haven’t “done as much” as them. When I was in my early 20s and some of my friends started going to play parties or otherwise leaving the charmed circle, I remember thinking they must be these ultra-confident sex gods and that’s how they could have so much sex, seemingly on demand. Now I realize that they were simply prioritizing sex and asking for it in a way that felt strange or unimaginable to me. It’s also important to remember that people who are into kink and BDSM have a culture of directness and a lot more on-ramps to sex. So part of the conflict here might be that that your date is just moves at a different speed than you, and has a lot more practice talking about sex with new partners. Most of all, it sounds like you’re looking for different things—they want to do stuff do stuff, while you’re looking for a simple roll in the hay. That’s okay!! Nobody is better or worse because they want certain sexual experiences and not others.
Okay so now for the final part of your question: you feel embarrassed about the way you reacted, and you’re not sure if you should try to salvage things or allow this relationship to slip into the ether. I can’t make this decision for you, but something I’m hearing you say is that you read your date’s text in the worst possible light and projected bad intentions onto it. If you want to open a possibility for friendship or a neutral neighbor situation, you could send another text and say a version of what you said to me—”I’m sorry I blew up at you last week. I felt really intimidated by the survey, it seems like you want to bring equipment and safe words into this and I’m more of a fingerbang and cuddle person.”
It might go over, it might not. The only certainty is if you don’t try, you will be diving behind hedges and checking your mail in the dark to avoid them until one of you moves.
I think your advice was really on point! Obviously LW's discomfort is valid, but I don't think the text is that out of left field. I think this will vary a lot depending on how different people approach these things! I meet people on apps explicitly to have kinky sex with and there's preferences I'd like to check are compatible even before we meet. I think there’s something really powerful in LW’s inner conflict though. When they mention that the text was more detailed than stuff they’ve shared in the past with exes…maybe this is an opportunity to reflect on how they communicate about sex in general. Are they happy with it? Are they uncomfortable with certain words, concepts, acts? If this goes further, it could be an opportunity to experiment with being okay saying no to things. Because that’s what the text was! It’s okay to not be into anything on the list. Maybe the person will still wanna hang out, maybe that’s not what they’re looking for. It’s also okay to ask for something else! This sort of communication in a low-stakes platonic relationship can be a way to learn to be assertive with your desires.
One time i sorta hooked up with my neighbor coming back from karaoke and then tried to schedule another time to hang and basically got stood up bc she was seeing some guy instead and ended up talking to my OTHER neighbor (her roommate and bestie) who was like "oh yeah, she's...complicated" and then proceeded to basically vomit up everything about this girl that made her kind of crazy and and impossible to deal with and by the end of it i was like "my guy you need to move out".
but long story short i told her i wasnt interested if she was gonna always flake, and i almost never saw her after that, even tho we were like next door neighbors in a little apartment cluster.