In the unlikely event a woman reads this.
We are stupid creatures. Be direct. I reiterate, we are stupid. Or scared of being labeled a creep. Same result.
So, be direct.
Now that I’m an older, very married guy I look back at the times in my late teens and twenties when women were trying to flirt with me and I was pretty clueless about it.
Hello. I’m a woman. And I’m also a dumbass who thinks she has no shot with pretty much anyone. Plus I’m easily embarrassed.
Plus if I’m interested I’m like “Ugh i don’t want to be a creep who’d approach someone for their looks”, projecting because I get uncomfortable if someone finds me attractive, completely ignoring in the moment that if you don’t do that you’ll never get to know the person.
This behaviour makes no sense. Just wanted to reassure(?) you that guys don’t have a monopoly on stupidity.
Here is the thing, this is terrible flirting. Men are not clueless or dumb. We have been told by women that a woman looking at us or smiling at us or being nice to us is not her flirting. It is her being nice because society has told women they have to be that way all the time. So now women have to use their adult voices and actually say what they want and actually flirt back.
Well, some of us are also clueless when it comes to reading female interest, or were at an earlier point in life
That is again not on you unless the woman very clearly said hey I like you. This is because we have taught women that you flirt by being subtle and coy and we have taught young men to ignore that.
Also, women flirt for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with actual interest. They’ll flirt at a restaurant to get better treatment. They’ll flirt because they’re bored. They’ll flirt because they want to see how you’ll react and talk about it later w/ their friends. I’m convinced that women flirting isn’t a good indicator at all for interest, I need actual, verbal confirmation.
My wife had to be pretty direct with me before I got the hint. When we met, she signaled to me to come over (she was w/ a group of friends), asked for my number, and texted me first. I have been conditioned that approaching a woman in a group is generally a bad thing, asking for their number is creepy unless we’ve already hit it off, and texting first can also be creepy unless it’s for a specific reason (e.g. I had a good time, want to do X?). But women get to do all of those things. I’m happy to initiate (and I did for our first real date), I just don’t want to be labeled a creep.
So I just treat any kind of flirtation as an indication that they want something from me, and avoid acting until I know what that something is. So please, be direct. It’s not that I don’t notice the flirting, it’s that I’m unsure what you’re looking to get out of it. Verbal confirmation confirms it, and at that point (you don’t need to say “I like you,” but something like, “I’d like to get to know you”), I’ll be much more interested in reciprocating (speaking as a generic man here, not my married self).
this is terrible flirting
Absolutely.
Men are not clueless
A LOT of us are, though…
smiling at us or being nice to us is not her flirting. It is her being nice because society has told women they have to be that way all the time.
Usually correct, though sometimes it IS and other times it’s just her being nice voluntarily. Such is the mysteries of interpersonal interaction!
women have to use their adult voices
Boo! Adulting sucks! /j
Hands down, some of us are just deaf to flirting. Because it’s portrayed as so much more uncommon that a Girl flirts with a Guy. You are 100% right. But I’ve seen dudes getting hit on with a Baseball bat, and they were like “Whaaat? You sure?!” I tried to help a Girl Friend of mine out to set her up with another friend of mine. Bro was dumb as a Golden Retriever but twice as loyal. And now they are going steady for years.
I saw this girl staring straight into my eyes. I almost told her Arch btw, but the memes told me not to.
jk, I tipped my fedora and said a passing hello. No room in life for a trad sub
I think the pendulum of gender empowerment has swung in women’s favor so much that for alot of guys, there’s the fear of coming across as a creep for even trying to flirt or staring too long at a woman. At my work, there’s a fairly sizable amount of women, but the dangers from acting interested towards any women could cost you your job.
We had one lady who got a security guard fired because she said he made her feel uncomfortable, not that any incidents had happened at all, she really couldn’t even say that he had said or done anything offensive, she just had a bad feeling because he seemed “weird” and reported it to HR. Just the feeling of uncomfortableness is enough to get somebody dismissed in some places.
Granted, that’s at a workplace and workplace romances probably aren’t a good idea anyways, but society in general has primed me to think that any advances towards women are unwelcome, unless they’re not. You’ll never know unless you risk getting reported just for trying. So the incentive is to just not try unless it’s blatantly obvious, because I know I could easily misread basic kindness for sexual interest. Even going on walks, I have to avoid walking behind women for fear they’ll think I’m following them or that I’m being a creep.
In day to day encounters between plebs, women have all the power in relationships in Western society, men are like dogs on a leash. If you want to show us interest, just give us a pat on the head, scratch our chin, or something.
We had one lady who got a security guard fired because she said he made her feel uncomfortable
I have seen guys report women to HR because of actual, verifiable sexual harassment (physical touching, etc.) and be laughed out of the HR office because “women cannot sexually harass a man” and “men always want it”. Many of these men were also punished for attempting to report, with some even being fired.
They asymmetric societal standards currently in place are insanely misandric and bleedingly hypocritical.
Use your words
Use your mouth
👁️👄👁️
