I’ve come to learn that 99% of the time it is a joke but for the sake of safety I take it as a joke 100% of the time which means I don’t pick up on both actual flirting and fake flirting (better safe than sorry)
I seriously wish all of that social construct stuff was just dissolved and we could just be honest. Like “hey i wanna date you” “ok” or “hey i wanna date you” “no thank you” “alright it’s all good.”
If I had to speculate, I’d bet fear of rejection has a lot to do with it and that the ones who are doing the majority of flirting also tend to have the least fear of rejection.
It reminds of a thing I once read. Was somebody writing it on the internet IIRC, so could have been BS. But it went something like: Their strategy on dating apps was very overtly sexual about what they were looking for. The kind of overt that a lot of people would find off-putting. But the person themself was not put off by this because every so often, it would work and someone would show interest back.
It’s not how I’d recommend behaving, but I think it paints a picture of the kind of person who would tend to be comfortable flirting a lot.
By contrast, most people are probably going to fall more in the realm of: Not wanting to flirt too overtly so that it feels less like a rejection if someone doesn’t respond in kind and not wanting to assume they’re being flirted at when they’re not because that could be extra embarrassing as a rejection. Leading them to flirt in less obvious, more ambiguous ways, which only compounds the problem from both ends.
There’s a painfully awkward scene exemplifying this in the TV show The Office. One character tries to flirt with another, another flirts back. Then the one character asks the other out on a date, but still in a jokey way and the other character is receptive. It comes crashing down when the one character tries to clarify that the date is real but pre-emptively acts like it isn’t, even though they wanted it to be real, and the other character, who is now embarrassed, says they weren’t serious about it even though they were. Because neither could face the embarrassment of rejection, they faked each other out.
My understanding as
is that humans in general are actually very bad at telling when someone is flirting and such:
https://phys.org/news/2014-06-flirting-hard.pdf
I’ve come to learn that 99% of the time it is a joke but for the sake of safety I take it as a joke 100% of the time which means I don’t pick up on both actual flirting and fake flirting (better safe than sorry)
I seriously wish all of that social construct stuff was just dissolved and we could just be honest. Like “hey i wanna date you” “ok” or “hey i wanna date you” “no thank you” “alright it’s all good.”
Why would I ever date you ;)
If I had to speculate, I’d bet fear of rejection has a lot to do with it and that the ones who are doing the majority of flirting also tend to have the least fear of rejection.
It reminds of a thing I once read. Was somebody writing it on the internet IIRC, so could have been BS. But it went something like: Their strategy on dating apps was very overtly sexual about what they were looking for. The kind of overt that a lot of people would find off-putting. But the person themself was not put off by this because every so often, it would work and someone would show interest back.
It’s not how I’d recommend behaving, but I think it paints a picture of the kind of person who would tend to be comfortable flirting a lot.
By contrast, most people are probably going to fall more in the realm of: Not wanting to flirt too overtly so that it feels less like a rejection if someone doesn’t respond in kind and not wanting to assume they’re being flirted at when they’re not because that could be extra embarrassing as a rejection. Leading them to flirt in less obvious, more ambiguous ways, which only compounds the problem from both ends.
There’s a painfully awkward scene exemplifying this in the TV show The Office. One character tries to flirt with another, another flirts back. Then the one character asks the other out on a date, but still in a jokey way and the other character is receptive. It comes crashing down when the one character tries to clarify that the date is real but pre-emptively acts like it isn’t, even though they wanted it to be real, and the other character, who is now embarrassed, says they weren’t serious about it even though they were. Because neither could face the embarrassment of rejection, they faked each other out.