this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
928 points (98.2% liked)
Funny
13876 readers
864 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Does he usually walk up to random people on the street who aren't wearing headphones to try start conversations? π¬
Judging by replies to that thread⦠yes, quite a bit. One woman described how she had to wear ear protection after ear surgery and a guy removed that to talk to her from behind. She was in pain for 2 days afterwards.
Someone... touched what some stranger is wearing to remove it... and it wasn't an emergency???
What the fuck is wrong with people
entitlement. women are objects for men to interact with and men are owed their attention when they want it. you have ear protection? well that interferes with me seeking female attention, so off it goes. that's the mindset we're dealing with.
Oh my god, that's awful
What is lightly married?
It's a thinner batter - think tempura rather than chipshop fish (or corndog if you're of the USian persuasion).
Idk I've known married couples that preferred to live far apart or other married couples who were casual partners but needed marital benefits
lol, maybe engaged? So like wearing just the engagement ring instead of both rings?
Soo.... Just regular engaged?
But with a chance
I think it was jus a joke...
20 years in. Nobody is taking it that seriously any more.
H..How can someone come even close to think it is a smart move to stand behind someone, invading personal space (at minimum with their arm), grabbing and taking away ones belongings aka the headphones and then expecting that person will be happy to have a nice chat with you which results in a date?
Because they think they're hot shit and have an ego the size of Jupiter. In their mind, they're the catch and someone would have to be a (insert slur) to turn down such a gracious offer from the world's most attractive "alpha male".
Some people really are just that stupid I guess.
Cavemen like that only understand a wack on the head, and even then they think the woman is into them.
Sounds like she suffered consequences while the man who harmed her suffered no consequences.
We should be able to easily call police and sue for damages in such situations.
Of course not, just hot women who can't wait to speak to him. Except, y'know, those bitches who blow him off immediately. But those bitches are just getting in the way, the really hot chicks are still waiting just for him.
It's strange to me that this would be considered out of bounds. "Pickup artists" aside, this really ought to be more normal.
I wish someone would do that to me in real life. I'd tell them about how a popular coffeeshop in our city is run by a straight up cult and the employees are all members whose wages go into a "shared purse" controlled by the cult.
Because unlike the guy in the OP, I recognize I'm not the main character. I'm the NPC in the tavern who sends the protagonist on a side quest to take down a cult.
But then it turns into a moral lesson when it turns out that cult was actually a cooperative and the person who told you the original rumor a real estate developer that wanted the property
Maybe a Generation and location thing, Gen Z here from Western Europe and i definitly would not dare/think about trying to pick up a person outside of a space thats specificly labled for dating.
For me its kind of a consent thing, outside of specific dating spaces i cant be sure that the other person wants to be botherd with dating.
Yeah 90s born here and the idea of just wandering up to someone while theyβre out in the street, shopping or pretty much anywhere that isnβt like a bar (and even then unless they give some sort of indication) and running a line is wild.
My mates older brother in high school would insist that sort of stuff is how you do it. Fuck that. I hate people, mostly sales people or weirdos, bothering me when I clearly have every indication about my demeanour not to talk to me, do it. So why would I? Itβs weird.
You should just talk to people to be nice. If it turns into something else, then great! But I hate when somebody starts a conversation with me and they have an agenda: like, they want me to give them money or join their religion or something like that. Just talk to people because it's a nice thing to do!
And if somebody's giving social cues that they want to be left alone, then...don't do that. Because that wouldn't be nice.
But I didn't say anything about picking a person up except to explicitly exclude it from what I was talking about. The comment I responded to was specifically about starting a conversation.
They probably misconstrued "pick-up artists aside" as being very specifically about literal "pick-up artists" rather than as a generalized hitting on someone in public thing.
I do agree with them, though, in that it's very culturally dependent on how okay it is. I remember from a long time ago now one of those "kids today are always glued to their phones" memes where somebody just responded with a photo of a commuter rail car from the 50s where every single person in the photo was reading the newspaper, and I have a similar story from my dad about my grandfather: My grandfather worked in NYC for over 20 years and he commuted by train. During those commutes, he sat next to the same man, twice a day - on the way there and on the way back - for years, and only once in at least a decade did they ever speak to each other. "Are you finished reading that?" Those were the 5 words that man spoke to my grandfather, who handed him the paper he had finished reading, and they never exchanged another word again. I don't think they ever even looked at each other.
I would also add that it's a very extroverted thing to do, and not in the sense of social anxiety or something, but in the sense that introverted people burn mental and emotional energy in social interaction, and by trying to engage with a stranger in a random conversation, you might be using up the spoons they have that day. I'll talk to random people in public as well, but I keep it to one-off statements that people can either leave be or reciprocate with if they want. A joke about the traffic in trying to navigate the grocery store, that sort of thing. I'm very good at talking with people, I learned it from working a service industry job as a teen, to the point where I was basically the public face of a company, but I find it EXHAUSTING to do. I'm an introvert, pure and simple, and social interaction simply takes energy to do. At the end of the day, all I want to do is isolate myself so I can recharge and unwind.
Plus, there's the whole "women having to handle a man" aspect. Women have to treat men differently and behave differently to protect themselves when interacting with men (ones they don't know in particular), and so a random stranger trying to start up a conversation is A Situation that they have to analyze. It goes back to the "women would prefer to be in the woods with a bear" thing. Women would rather a random bear try to start a conversation with them in public, or something.
Best friend he ever had. They still never talk sometimes.
Probably it is just Americans being Americans.