Pardon me for sounding like an armchair psychologist here, but it seems to me like you have fallen down some weird rabbit hole where you are excusing your creepy behavior patterns with this concept of privacy. I suggest you take an honest look at how you behaved in this interaction, because “privacy loving” is neither a cause or justification for what you described doing in the OP.

Instagram and Snapchat play a vital role in the dating, no one is willing to share their # anymore. If you say you don’t have Insta or Snap all you’ll get is a weird up to down stare and the words “I’m sorry”.

If you really believe that, then tough shit: you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You chose to stay off insta and snap, so you have to accept the consequences of that choice. Your decision to try to spin up a burner account and hastily attempt to make it look legitimate was stalker-tier behavior. Not to mention that painting a whole class of people with such a broad brush as “no one is willing to share their number anymore” is dangerously close to incel bullshit all on its own. It is far more likely that no one is willing to share their number with you because you are pushing to get too familiar too quickly and they are rightly picking up on the major red flags.

The appropriate response would have been to be honest about not using it (and in general being honest is ALWAYS THE RIGHT MOVE when you’re meeting people, so long as sharing wouldn’t put your safety at undue risk), and to accept the odds of the weird stare you expect to get.

Because everyone is a unique person, and you don’t actually know when you’re going to run into someone with similar views as you about privacy, if that is really your true concern. But it seems like your desperation overrode whatever principles you purport to have in that moment. Changing who you are to try and get in someone’s good books is fundamentally manipulative and is a serious problem. You are never going to be capable of a healthy relationship until you nip that in the bud.

It sounds like you are young, so the good news is that most people have been a fucking idiot in this regard at one point or another, and it’s easily fixed! Accept that you fucked this up and take an honest look at how you approach interaction with others, and you will already be farther along the path to normal social relations than you think.

In a way, Instagram is a great filter for me. I tend to socialize with a lot of people from kids to the elderly. The type of Instagram-first people are exactly the ones I don’t want to spend much of my time on. People with common interests and the ability to relate to others of various generations are the type of people I want to spend time with, and they tend to show up in the same circles I hang out in.

When you’re dealing with a full set of more than 7.6 billion people, those sidelining people who don’t follow them on Instagram is a vanishingly small portion, and worth the privacy.

A person’s social life isn’t limited to being online. I’m in your age group. It’s really not that deep to meet people in person.

Hahah, damn, nice reframing! Have an upvote.

Fair point, hadn’t even considered that