I am nonmonogamous with a long term nesting partner, seeking casual partners for kink play. Casual to me means that there is no expectation of relationship escalation beyond kinky play dates/sexting and the communication needed to align schedules. The problem I am finding is that people think "casual" means "no boundaries or obligations about regular and respectful contact."

Most recently a prospective play partner and I had a date that needed to be rescheduled last week. Since we couldn't see each other, we sexted back and forth a bit that day into the next. Then it was the Thanksgiving holiday, so I waited till Friday to send a quick hello message. They didn't reply for 2 days, up to the day before our scheduled date. The day before the date I expressed I was feeling uneasy that I hadn't heard from them. We've had to reschedule three different times because of issues on their end (illness, car issues, etc.) and it had me feeling cagey.

They responded saying that they had not been checking their messaging app because they were with friends all weekend. Which is perfectly fine - except, the app lists their last logins in their status, and they logged in multiple times over the weekend (but didn't open my messages). I didn't mention this because I didn't want to seem like I was stalking their status (in my defense, I chat with others on the app too and was just checking periodically if they'd seen my message).

How big a red flag is it for them to fib about this? I am fine with the boundary of not messaging if they are busy with friends, but they could have said "I saw you sent a message but was too busy with friends to give it a proper reply." I am torn between it being understandable they want to save face, versus, if they lie about this what else will they lie about. Thoughts?