I am an autistic male and at age 19 after I moved to a different town with my family after graduating high school I was recommended to online role-playing apps to make friends by an old buddy of mine from high school. I met and saw some very crazy people, and was introduced to the concept of text based role-play. Now, since I was autistic, I was naïve and very trusting of people, if someone was being nice to me and was being friendly or fun, I genuinely thought they were a good person. I also use forms of social media like Instagram or TikTok. Little did I know that there would be a bunch of people targeting me for their own desires or purposes. I would rarely get hit on or flirted with by women much older than me, and I didn’t understand it at the time, but mainly just ignored them. But then people younger than me try doing that. There would even be some people in a friend group that I joined would do. Two of them in particular at two different times were acting weird. One of them spoke to me in private DMS and tried to get me to get the game IMVU and download mods for her character in my character to have s*x.

At the time, I thought it was just something that would be interesting to the game. But I thank God now that I couldn’t even get the odds and I just ended up not getting the game. One even tried doing a role-play with me, which I just started off wholesomely, but then she randomly started making her character grind on me.

Now I want to make it clear that I never made any inappropriate advances towards them during the friendships. We just chatted about her everyday lives and I complimented them whenever they had self-esteem issues. One of them was supposedly being bullied by another girl, and I thought that I was standing up for my friend by telling that bullied to screw off. I ultimately rejected them, though they apologized to me after realizing what they were doing, and how it made me feel uncomfortable.

But they weren’t the only ones who were acting that way towards me. Every social media platform that I was on would have random younger girls who would somehow just find themselves attracted to me and then try to pressure me into relationships. Now I was only on role-playing apps talking to a lot of people and even just trying to build friendships. I had no creepy intentions or anything like that on there.

I just don’t understand what is it about me that makes someone younger want to manipulate me into doing something that could seriously get me in trouble? Has anyone else gone through something like this? If so, I would greatly appreciate your input.