Actually, the mountain of evidence for spoken language being instinctual has been growing bigger and bigger since generative grammar burst onto the scene in the 1950s. Granted, the specific grammar structures and words of a person’s native language(s) are learned, but they’re picked up in a totally unconscious manner through mere observation, not studied, memorized or learned through intense practice. Reading, yes. That’s a fine analogy, since the particulars of it are determined by a person’s culture, and they’re generally forced into learning it at the appropriate time whether they want to or not.
I don’t know how to flirt. I do flirt, I think, I just don’t really know I’m doing it at the time.
I’m not so great at “reading” people; I may subconsciously get the message, but I have hell of a time interpreting it. I usually don’t know when I’m flirting and I pretty much never know when someone else is flirting with me (I’m slightly better at seeing when someone else is flirting with someone else).
My opinion is that flirting, like other forms of communication, is something that is based on instinctual behavior but does (or can) involve a type of learning. I’d say we are predisposed to a type of behavior that you might call flirting (though I think “flirting” may be a narrower piece of a larger behavior).
Personal anecdote: I was out at an event with an older lesbian friend of mine (I’m a youngish straight male) and after the event she and I were talking about, among other things, the difficulty of signaling our interest in women (she had the problem that they tended to think she was straight). In the course of the conversation I mentioned that I have a really difficult time telling when a girl is into me. She was immediately like: “What about that blond girl you were talking to tonight?”
My response was “What blond girl?” She said she saw me talking to a blond girl she estimated to be in her early twenties. She thought we probably knew each other and she said her immediate reaction on watching our conversation was “Damn, someone’s getting laid tonight.”
The thing is, I still have no idea who this could have been. There weren’t that many people there, and most of them were older. I thought I remembered everyone I talked to there, and I would have assumed that if I knew her I definitely would have remembered talking to her.
My friend was sure she was flirting and thought I was as well. I don’t even remember the exchange I had with this girl much less whether we were flirting. I do remember many of the other interactions that night, many of them innocuous and boring. I’m not entirely surprised that I didn’t catch on that she was interested in me, but I’m quite surprised that I have no memory of this girl at all (and we pretty well established it wasn’t any of the other girls I talked to there, she knew them but didn’t know this one).
I find it strange when people say things like “I’m not so great at ‘reading’ people”. Do you not observe what people are doing when they are talking to you? Are you not able to interpret when someone is attentive vs when they are aloof and disinterested? Are they smiling and all touchy-feely? Are they shuffling nervously or looking around?
I naturally assume that when a girl is talking to me, she is interested on some level. It may not be a “take me now you stud” thing but people have better things to do that talk to people they don’t like.
That is not to say that I’m a freakin mind reader. If a girl is not particularly outgoing or is intentionally being aloof, I may have no idea that she likes me until one of her friends tells me “she thinks you’re cute” or after a few drinks and we’re making out in the back of a cab.
I think once I started to get a little self confidence, I started flirting. I don’t really think I did it… or remember doing much of it when I was younger.
It may seem strange to you, but I do have difficulty with reading people. I can’t quite describe it. All I can say with some level of confidence is that I seem to be less good at it than a lot of people I know. I feel that it’s not so much that I am completely unable to read people, it’s just that I often don’t receive a clear message in the more conscious part of my brain. I think it often happens too that I get the message but then don’t trust it, like for example “She seems interested in what I’m saying…But maybe not?”
No, I don’t. I didn’t learn to look for things like shuffling nervously or looking around until I heard or read somewhere that those things signal disinterest.
An example: when I was a kid, I usually didn’t look at people when they were talking to me. I didn’t see any significance in stuff like facial expressions, so why should I? I eventually figured out that people expect you to look at them when they’re talking to you, so I do, even if it still doesn’t really give me much more information than just hearing what they’re saying.
I can look for stuff like facial expressions, but for me, that’s very much a conscious effort. I mentally talk myself through it- there will be an internal dialog something like, “OK, he’s smiling, that’s good. Make eye contact but don’t look too long” running through my head if I’m trying to do something like that. AIUI, for most people it’s more automatic than that. It’s exhausting, too- I compare it to being in a dance recital. This is why I hate any situation where it’s important for me to make a good first impression on people. The internet is a godsend- I can meet people in a situation where I’m not so disadvantaged by not having the right body language or understanding anyone else’s. Then when someone I met on the internet meets me in person, maybe they like me enough that they’ll be willing to overlook those things.