People just aren’t very good at perceiving flirting.The decision of whether to disclose being on the autism spectrum while dating is always up to you. An ambiguous approach is less threatening, but ultimately not very effective. The science of flirting suggests that when you want to create sexual interest in another person and really want to get your message across, don’t mess around. People aren’t going to do it in obvious ways because they don’t want to be embarrassed, flirting looks a lot like being friendly and we are not accustomed to having our flirting validated so we can get better at seeing it. But as lead researcher Jeffrey Hall explains:īehavior that is flirtatious is hard to see, and there are several reasons for that. Once again, males were more accurate at recognizing when women flirted, but men generally tend to overestimate women’s interest, giving them more of a chance to be correct when women actually were flirting.Īcross both studies, the ability to detect flirting was probably lower than any flirty person would like. Observers who simply watched the interaction were even less accurate at identifying flirting than those who were actually involved. Of course, this could be because most of the time participants weren’t flirting, making it easier to correctly guess that a participant wasn’t making eyes.Īre outside observers any better at detecting flirting than participants are? Researchers had more than 250 people view one-minute video clips from the earlier interactions to see if they could accurately identify flirting in strangers. Those numbers are all fairly low, but people were much better at knowing when their partner was not flirting, accurately characterizing lack of flirting 84% of the time. But participants accurately perceived that flirting only 28% of the time, with males more accurate at detecting female flirting (36%) than females were at detecting male flirting (18%). Overall, almost a quarter of the participants flirted during their interaction. Afterwards, each participant indicated whether they were flirting or not and whether they thought their partner was flirting. To see how easy it is to accurately perceive flirting, researchers gave more than 100 heterosexual strangers the opportunity to interact for ten minutes. Protect your ego too carefully by maintaining complete deniability and you run the risk of no one receiving your too-subtle signals. Winking image via A key benefit to direct flirting approaches, especially for the person on the receiving end, is that they are clear and easier to interpret. The more obvious your flirting techniques, the more likely the flirtee picks up on your interest.
This may be because encountering a sure thing is one of the only contexts in which a guy with low self-esteem feels safe making advances, so he has to make it count. However, men with low self-esteem are bolder and use more obvious approaches than men with high self-esteem when the target is clearly interested and rejection risk is low. When the risk of being rejected is high, men with high self-esteem use more direct techniques than those with low self-esteem, perhaps because they’re less concerned with how being shot down may affect them. It isn’t surprising that a person’s self-esteem may affect how she or he approaches flirting. This ambiguity allows people to put themselves out there with less fear of embarrassment, rejection or damaged self-esteem. When done well, flirting is not overt or obvious and always leaves open the possibility that flirting wasn’t occurring at all.
Big surprise: men’s flirting is more motivated by sex, while women’s flirting is more motivated by having fun or becoming closer to another person. A person may flirt simply to pass the time, to feel close, to see if they’ve still got it or because it’s fun. To be clear, though, flirting may not have the explicit goal of having sex or even physical intimacy of any kind. Regardless of the technique employed, flirting aims to fulfill one purpose: stimulate sexual interest.
Flirting comes in many forms: a casual gaze that lingers a half second longer than necessary, a light touch, an amorous expression, an overenthusiastic laugh during conversation, or even some playful or overtly sexual banter.
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