A forty-one-year-old man messages me on an app. He offers me paid private content and adds: “I’ll send you my PayPal.”
No hello. No how are you. Not even a mediocre joke to forgive in a spirit of goodwill. Straight to PayPal.
The offer doesn’t shock me. What interests me is the confidence. One small step seems to be missing: finding out whether I am interested.
Lucky, according to whom?
I am sixty-one. He is forty-one. Perhaps, in his mind, that twenty-year difference is enough to make the offer irresistible.
I can’t know what he is thinking. I do know that it leaves me with a rather familiar feeling: I am supposed to consider myself lucky.
It happens away from apps too. Someone pays us attention and a small encouragement committee assembles around us. He’s attractive. He’s younger. He’s interested. What more do you want?
Perhaps to want to get to know him. A minor detail.
Being chosen doesn’t take away our right to choose.
What makes me stay
An image can attract me. But then I am interested in what happens afterwards. A voice. A reply that doesn’t sound copied and pasted. A conversation that takes an unexpected turn.
Someone who makes me want to stay another five minutes.
This isn’t a ranking of people looking for a relationship and people looking for something else. Two adults can want different things, including very simple ones. The point is to meet in that desire, rather than take it for granted.
His offer didn’t interest me. I didn’t need to invent a deeper justification.
A no without a closing speech
I said no. No lecture. No outrage.
I wasn’t giving him a score. I wasn’t pronouncing on his worth, his looks or how many people would have accepted.
I was choosing for myself. It is a possibility I appreciate more and more as I get older.
Not everything other people consider valuable has to be valuable to us. Even when it comes with a PayPal link.