Over the years, my instant messaging apps have accumulated a ridiculous number of “friends.” A few thousand, at least.
I’ve never had the habit of cleaning out my contact list, so it just keeps getting longer. Most of them added me first. Quite a few only said hello once after the request was accepted. Some never even made it through a complete conversation. They simply stayed there in the address book, quiet and harmless, neither familiar nor intrusive.
A while ago, one of them suddenly messaged me.
I scrolled up through the chat history and realized he had added me back in 2019. At the time, we exchanged a brief greeting, and then the chat window went silent. Seven years later, this was the first time he had reached out again. I had no memory of him at all.
His opening line came with a level of forced familiarity that immediately felt off.
“I like bears. Are you a bear?”
My first thought was: does this person have no social awareness, or does he simply not care how he comes across?
So I replied:
“Sorry, I’m a pig.”
I thought that answer made my attitude clear enough.
Apparently not. He seemed completely unable to read the room and immediately followed up with:
“Then let me see a photo.”
I asked him directly:
“That direct? What exactly are you trying to do?”
He said:
“Make friends. Let’s see photos first. We can exchange.”
I asked:
“What kind of photo? Are you in heat?”
He said:
“Just want to see what you look like.”
Then he sent a “view-once” photo.
I didn’t open it. I had no interest in opening it. I told him I hadn’t looked, and even took a screenshot to show that I had never tapped it.
Then I asked again:
“What are you looking for from me? Dating?”
He said:
“No, just making friends.”
I said:
“Since when does making friends start with exchanging photos like we’re inspecting goods?”
There was an obvious pause before he replied:
“Whatever then.”
By that point, there was no reason to continue the conversation. It was already clear enough what kind of person he was.
I didn’t reply. I deleted him.
A few minutes later, he sent another friend request.
The note attached to it said only:
“Are you sick? It’s just a photo and you’re dragging it out, then you delete me?”
There was probably more emotional garbage after that, all in the same spirit: I was being difficult, pretending to be above it all, wasting his time.
Fine.
Blocklist it is.
I also reported the unfriendly message to the platform. To its credit, the platform handled it quickly.
The funny thing is, my photos have always been visible in my social feed. If he had genuinely wanted to know who I was, he could have tapped into my profile and found them in seconds.
He didn’t.
Or perhaps what he wanted was never the kind of photo sitting openly on a public profile. Maybe he wanted another kind of “private photo,” the sort exchanged through view-once messages. Both are called photos, technically, but we all know they are not the same thing. Whether that was the truth or not, I neither know nor care.
Many people say they want to “make friends,” but what they actually run is a different process entirely. First they check the face, then the body. If they like what they see, they continue. If they don’t, they disappear. Conversation is just a formality. Politeness is just packaging. The phrase “making friends” has become a worn-out fig leaf for something much more direct.
Adults can have desires. Adults can have preferences. There is nothing shocking about that. But some people insist on dressing up desire as friendship, screening as sincerity, and taking as straightforwardness. The moment someone refuses to follow their script, they turn hostile. Suddenly the person who won’t cooperate becomes the unreasonable one.
The internet has worn away a lot of people’s patience. People are used to short videos delivering a new hit every three seconds. They are used to dating apps where they can swipe left and right endlessly. They have become used to browsing human beings with the same logic they use to browse products. An avatar becomes packaging. Photos become the product detail page. Chatting becomes customer service. Not satisfied? Exit immediately. The next one is faster.
In that kind of logic, “getting to know someone” slowly turns into “filtering someone.”
Human encounters are reduced to a contest of efficiency. Unfortunately, the people actually worth knowing are often not the ones who rush most quickly into the next step. They may not talk much. They may not reply instantly. They may even have boundaries.
And these days, having boundaries can feel like an offense to some people.
Some people believe that once you accept their friend request, you should satisfy their curiosity. If they say they want to make friends, you should prove you are worth knowing. If they send a so-called view-once photo, you are obligated to return the gesture. As if failing to give them the response they want is the same as humiliating them.
That logic is strange.
A stranger went seven years without contacting me, then suddenly appeared and demanded a photo exchange. I refused, and he felt injured. I deleted him, and he felt personally insulted. Then he chased after me to curse me. From beginning to end, he never seemed to realize who had crossed the line.
Later, I thought about it and realized this type of person is not rare.
It is not that they are incapable of respecting others. It is that they never saw the other person as a complete person in the first place. In their eyes, the other person is first a type, a label, a preference, a possible way to satisfy a need. Whether that person has emotions, boundaries, or the right to refuse comes much later, if it appears at all.
That is why they can make “friendship” sound so respectable, yet reveal their real intention the moment they are rejected. A person’s decency is not proven when desire is absent. It is proven when desire is denied.
Someone who truly wants to know you will first be interested in you as a person. They will not rush to confirm whether you have the exact photo they happen to want to see tonight.
That, more or less, is what a lust-addled player looks like.
They are not unable to chat. They simply do not want to. They are not trying to know anyone. They are trying their luck. If it doesn’t work, they move on to the next person. After all, the contact list is long. Someone will eventually cooperate.
What they never understand is that the thing being worn down is not someone else. It is their own ability to build relationships with real people.
When everyone becomes just another avatar to swipe past, what remains in the end is only a longer and longer friend list — and one that feels emptier than ever.