Back when I was still single, I was on dating sites and a fetish social media site called Fetlife. (The latter was a terrible idea, but that's another topic.) Naturally I got a lot of messages and propositions.

Over time, especially on Fetlife, I noticed a pattern: a handful of men would send out the same message every couple of weeks or so, whether I'd respond or not. When I pointed this out to them, they'd apologize and said they didn't notice. Two weeks later, I'd get a new message from them.

Obviously these guys are just making the rounds, going down a list of single (or sometimes not) women without paying attention to whether they've reached out before. Oh, and Fetlife's layout makes it easy to check whether you've spoken to someone already. They just aren't checking. That takes time away from their grand strategy of cold messaging dozens of women at once.

In situations like this, blocking them is justified. We've come to think of blocking someone as mean or some grand judgment of their character, but that's not the case here.

I'm not saying you should have strong feelings about hurting the feelings of random horndogs online. But it's clear these random horndogs aren't paying much mind to you, and you don't need to wait for a smoking gun to distance yourself.

It's likely these cold callers won't even notice you've removed yourself from their stack. Blocking will save yourself and them time and headaches. This is especially true if you were like me and felt the inclination to call out dudes for being so bold, as now you won't have the temptation.

I learned to be quite liberal with my block button, and you should too.