If you had asked me several years ago, “Hey, can you ever imagine DM’ing a random girl on Instagram?”, I would emphatically say no. Then I would continue, ranting that Instagram is a vanity trap designed to steal your data, serve you ads and keep you scrolling for hours searching for a belonging that the app will never be able to show you.

So then how did I find myself having typed out a nice message, sitting and deciding whether or not to click send? I knew it was fruitless. I wouldn’t get a response, certainly. To make matters worse, if I sent the message, I would instantly join the legions of other deluded single men, thinking that just because these women were on the Internet, they were at the least, open to the idea of an unsolicited message. On the other hand, it was uncharacteristically bold of me to even consider. “This is quarantine,” I told myself. Now is not the time to hide in the digital shadows, waiting for a moment that may never arrive. “And besides, I’m being nice.” My mental model of other people gives wiggle room for being nice. If someone was nice to me in an unsolicited Instagram message, I’m sure I would respond very positively.

Though, in the interest of full discretion, I’ve never received an unsolicited DM before. That’s mostly easy to explain, because I am a man. And although some men receive unsolicited DMs, my Instagram persona does not neatly fit that mold. I do not try to be hot online, nor do I try to keep up with the latest Internet trends or pepper my posts with hashtags. I’m not particularly Internet popular; my Instagram friends are all mainly people I know in real life. If anything, I hope my profile signals that I am thoughtful, creative, and maybe even a little bit funny. Perhaps that was the reason that I thought I might fare well against the troves of other men that regularly entered the DMs. That somehow I was different from them, that I wasn’t a fade-sporting clout-chasing fuccboi. Of course, that is something that me and the fuccbois share. We think that we’re different from all the other ones. Also I kind of look good in a fade, but that is neither here nor there.

I do wonder who all those other men are. Not the cliche men who spray DMs unapologetically praying for bobs and vagene every night. I mean the ones who are closer to me. The ones who are in their mid-20s. The ones who think they have a good handle on themselves; who are looking for something more with someone special. The ones who feel like typical dating doesn’t or wouldn’t work for them. The ones who see the promise of connection through the Internet, not in a creepy way, but in a wholesome way. The ones who view sending an unsolicited DM as not just an honest way to connect with someone you don’t know, but also as a marker of personal growth. Maybe those are the people I should be seeking out. We could start a small online community, call us “The Nice Guys”, and every time a woman gets sick of dating a douchebag or an asshole, they could ask us, “The Nice Guys”, if we have anyone more suitable for them. This is ridiculous, of course. The irony of a group of men who self identify as “nice guys” isn’t lost on me.

24 hours after sending the DM, I still hadn’t received a response. So, after feeling more than the expected amount of shame, I unsent the message, erasing it from the memory of my messages pane. Like it never happened. Of course, it did happen. And you know what? It wasn’t so bad, stepping out of my comfort zone. Maybe we should all be sending unsolicited DMs to our Internet crushes. It might just help us grow.