Yep, I can identify. I never used to be able to tell for sure when a woman was flirting with me.
Then I got married, and now I notice it all the time.
Sigh…
I have the opposite problem. My flirt detection is overactive. I think that whenever a woman talks to me she’s flirting. Apparently though, most women want nothing to do with me.
Put me in the category of the flirting impaired, I would have trouble recognizing a good flirt if she draped her arm around me and told me she was flirting with me. I guess I feel that it is so unlikely that anyone would flirt with me that I don’t even bother to look for the signals.
Keith
Well at first I thought I was just one of those people who can’t tell when I am being flirted with. Then I read this list and realized no girl ever does any of these things to me. So, I am not oblivious to flirting, I am just not being flirted with.
Bah. Try being born with the insta-flirt gene. Several years ago when I worked in fast food, one of my managers accused me (in a friendly way) of ALWAYS flirting with all the male customers. I said I didn’t always flirt with all the male customers, and to prove it, I would not flirt with the next male customer. Guess what happened? He started flirting with me instead. Lesson learned: my manager was right again, darn her.
Now that I’m married and boring this doesn’t happen anymore Well, OK, that’s not entirely accurate …
Um, anyway, the part that got left out of of me: the ability to see actual pictures in those stereograms. I hate that I can never see the things everyone else sees in them.
Hey. A sail boat.
10 points to the first person to catch that reference.
Would that be Mallrats, Aglarond? Dunno.
I’m glad you’re going out. Maybe you’ll find some chemistry there after all…
Ogre gets the 10 points. Way to go.
Well, that’s something – at least I can see those “magic image” stereograms, even if I can’t detect a flirt.
Actually, I seem to be missing subtler things than those listed above. Turning toward you, laughing at your jokes, etc. are really pretty obvious things. I’ve been told, on the other hand, that I’ve been missing pre-conversation flirting.
I rule.
What IS it with straight guys? I was at a New Orleans bar this past week and was violently flirting with four businessmen—jeez, I practically had steam coming out of my ears, I was working so hard! Nuthin’. No reaction, other than pleasantries and helpful advice to my questions. For chrissakes, I was wearing a blouse cut down to here and a skirt slit up to there! Thank goodness I finally found a susceptible bo’ later in the week.
I keep thinking of Margaret Cho, who says the ONLY way to effectively flirt with a straight guy is to march up to him and yell, “STICK IT IN!”
errr…
:p, that is.
Apparently, I’m also a :wally.
It’s a SCHOONER
You’re not the only one. I used to be totally oblivious when it came to flirting.
When we fist started dating, my wife (obviously not my wife at the time) practically had to club me over the head and drag me home by the hair to get me to clue in. Which was odd because I was very interested. I just didn’t know that she was too.
I eventually learned how to detect flirting. It’s not easy. However, women can readily detect when another woman is flirting with a man. This can come in handy.
I’d suggest that Aglarond enlist the help of a female friend who can act as an interpreter. After enough “yep, that was flirting” and “no, she was just being friendly” you start to get the hang of it.
Well, I’ve got it even worse than any of you other losers. I can be trying to flirt with a woman MYSELF. You know: make eye contact, smile, wink maybe, that sort of thing. The flirtee will notice me looking her way and before we can actually make eye contact, she will immediately take an obsessive fascination with that blade of grass over there, or the grain of the wood on the table before her. She will stare at it intently, not daring to look up, but with those little eye-jerk movements that show someone’s attention is fully on their peripheral vision. But the lady is obviously trying to broadcast her intention to immediately enroll at Harvard and do her doctoral thesis on “The Table Wood Grains of American Drinking Establishments: A Marxist-Feminist Perspective”. Well, gentleman that I am, I take this as a sign that the female in question is not interested and is trying mightily not to give the wrong impression and encourage me. So I do the gentlemanly thing. I hide in the backseat of her car with a hatchet, wearing a ski mask.
Just kidding. I look elsewhere, of course. So why do I hear later from friends that this girl was really disappointed I didn’t go over and talk to her. She wanted to meet me. This has happened MORE THAN ONCE. Am I reading the signs wrong? Apparently so, and yet to this day I can’t shake the feeling that I’d be unwelcome when a woman gives me that “Uh oh, a sex-obsessed weirdo,” (which is accurate enough), “I better not encourage him” behavior. I’m a flirting illiterate - I’m inflirterate - and it doesn’t help that so many women flirt illegibly themselves.
I have been in a bar where I was sitting near a table that was shoved in the corner behind fifteen loose chairs, and seen a crew of women come in, climb over me and the chairs to sit at this most remote, inaccessible location in the room, and commence complaining that no one was asking them to dance. It was like they didn’t want any man who wouldn’t run the obstacle course: A pile of furniture in his way, the risk of rejection in front of fifteen other women*****, not to mention that this was a standard nightclub: The kind where the music is so loud that, to ask someone to dance, you have to put your head close enough to lick their ears. God forbid people be given the option of talking to one another. That would lead to things like charm, and seduction. Suggestive remarks and double entendres and footsie under the table. Not in this bar, bucko! We’ll stick to gestures like massaging our genitalia in each other’s direction to indicate our interest, the way God intended, thank you very much. People drink less when they have to be coherent.
So it’s bad enough I suffer under my inflirteracy, but the women of the world seem to do everything in their power to remain inaccessible.
*****[sub]Which isn’t so bad in itself, men are used to that - but if your “target” says no in so totally public a manner, you might as well leave the bar; every other woman in the place that you might have approached will now know she’s second choice, and that her friend’s all-important opinion (another puzzling aspect of female behavior, make up your own mind!) has already been to reject you.[/sub]
Any of you read Dilbert? In the Sunday comic this weekend, it had a good little bit about this…
In my case, I’m Dilbert, and every woman in the world is my cashier. Except usually, I don’t muster the courage to ask them out…in fact, I usually don’t realize they’re flirting with me (even fake flirting)… So, in conclusion, this Dilbert comic has nothing to do with me.
It’s still funny though…
Works for me. I have to find out where this woman hangs out at home. Then again, she probably has standards…curse standards…
How oblivious am I at times? I remember 5 or 6 years ago when my brother and his wife had a little barbeque to
blantantly set up hi sbest friend with a friend of hers. Only 8-10 people there. I remembre thinking at the end “Well, THAT obviously failed…”
Their second kid is a week old today.