Scarleteen

So your online trying to meet people. Your talking to them privately. What do you say if your looking for a relationship? Or is that just creepy?

A lot of that depends on the details and context of the interaction. For instance, if this is a context (like a dating site), people aren't going to be shocked by getting (respectful) private messages. The same is true if the conversation is already in a flirtatious direction. But if it's a situation where the person thought you two were having a very different conversation, then switching from that to suddenly asking if they're interested can be jarring. If you've never looked at his stuff before, I highly recommend Dr. Nerdlove's site: he goes over a lot of scenarios on how not to be creepy when dating.

I think this is tricky because what kind of relationship we want with someone is usually very dependent on who they are and what we're like together. And if and when it isn't, *then* it can feel creepy -- like it doesn't actually matter to someone who we are, you know what I mean?

So, instead, I think that if and when we meet someone we think we might be interested in pursuing a deeper relationship with, what we will want to do instead is to simply do the work of exploring that, of seeing what it's like to try and build tiny parts of the kind of relationship we want with them; seeing if they want to, also, and how it goes when we do. Then, over time, if that seems to be working, and we both seem to be into it, that's when it makes more sense to start talking more about things like commitments or even just a more involved mutual pursuit of a thing. Does that make sense?