My husband recently left our marriage and I’m doing okay but I miss male company. I’m totally not ready to date but a couple of men in my life, one from work and one who was a close friend years ago, suddenly started giving me a lot of attention. I like the attention. It’s been a big help getting me through these early days after being left.

If I make a profile on a dating app and say that I don’t want to meet, will I only get men who want to send me dick pics?

But these two men are not men I want to keep texting and spending time with. They’re both lovely but broken. Work guy has a girlfriend and old friend has a wife and small child. Ugh. I didn’t know work guy had a girlfriend until a couple months in. By then we were texting daily, for hours in the evenings, usually finishing up about midnight before seeing each other at work the next day. And guy with wife, because we’d been close friends previously, I thought he was just reconnecting and seeing how I was after hearing through mutual friends that my husband had left in a spectacular way. But no. both have made unambiguous declarations and that made me sad. I wish they were better men.

Since I already knew these men IRL, I didnt feel the pressure and anxiety I know I would if I had to go meet stranger. I’m just not ready, not even for coffee. But I’ve been really enjoying the texting and with work guy, I was enjoying the flirting. I was having frequent and often long text conversations with both men. I was getting compliments and good morning and good night messages. I liked getting to know work guy better; we’ve been sharing books and music and stuff like that. It’s just really nice for me right now to feel attractive and desired and know someone is thinking of me.

So, I’d like to find men who might like to text and chat and flirt but without the expectation that texting will lead to anything. If I do happen to make a connection, I’m open to the possibility of more, but not now, not for a good long while, so I don’t want that to be the primary expectation at the outset. And I want them to be single and not trying to fuck around behind their partner’s back.

Am I being unrealistic? Are these men out there? ? Have you done this – either responded to someone who only wanted to text or initiated the request?

Reddit is perfect for this. Try the r4r subreddit and r4r30plus. Most posts will be from guys, some looking for text buddies, and yes, some will be married too. You can make your own post and as a woman, you should get lots of interest. Kik seems to be the messaging app of choice for Reddit so you might want to consider downloading it. Hell, there’s even r/kikpals.

Disclaimer: I’ve never tried those subs myself but have responded to posts on other subs for other stuff. posted by foxjacket at 7:00 AM on

This. Right at the start of your profile, so there are no confusion, and no-one’s time is wasted*. Depending on where you are, you may want to search over a wider geographical area.

They may have constituted fantasy, training-wheels types of relationships, but they obviously did engage your feelings

Maybe not – you can always find someone willing to do this. At the same time, you were definitely in emotional-affair territory with the first two men, and you were operating at a level of intimacy that was very much out of step with your actual, real-life relationship conditions. There is a certain risk that engaging in long relationships of this kind will not help you get ready for whatever comes next in life, but become a refuge from it instead – a place where you build up idealized and unrealistic ideas about what a relationship life with a real person who’s physically present and committed would be like, a place where you stop working on yourself and your relationship skills vierailla tГ¤llГ¤ sivustolla because you’ve got a dummy relationship right there in your text stream that’s sorta-sorta not meeting your needs.

So I’m going to say that even if you do pursue having a romantic-texting-partner/faux-semi boyfriend, that you couple it with therapy and other work on yourself, so that you get to a point where you’re no longer needing this external validation and sense of companionship – especially not with inappropriate partners such as people who are already in a committed relationship. And don’t be surprised to find that that category includes a lot of the people online who would want to do this. posted by Miko at 5:56 AM on [3 favorites]