I was at the mall today and some teenage girls (probably late high school/college freshmen, hard to tell) were sitting by my boyfriend and I in the food court. My bf went to go use the bathroom and the girls started flirting with me and trying to talk to me. I have appalling social skills as is so it was hard for me to say what I wanted to and I was also very, very uncomfortable. They asked me how old I was- I know I look older than 20, but I was honest and I was like "Umm, I'm 20" and they started being all giggly and weird and asking me other questions that made me uncomfortable. I didn't want to get up and leave without telling my bf where I was going so I sat there and took it until he came back.
When he sat back down I put my arm around him and tried to lean in close to him and stuff, it's not socially acceptable or the norm where we live for us to kiss or hold hands, we'd probably get attacked, to be honest, so I tried to make us look as much like a couple as we could without any PDA stuff.
They stopped hitting on me after that but they were staring at us a lot. I felt really violated for some reason. I really don't like being attractive, as stupid as that sounds, because women tend to assume that I'm straight and therefore they think it's alright to flirt with me. It makes me super uncomfortable. It happens a lot, especially now that I'm losing weight, and lately I've been putting myself into more and more social situations.
How do I deal with this? It's very frustrating.