See, it’s hard when we don’t get to witness it. It’s also hard because we’re talking about a waitress. I was a cocktail waitress and being friendly and flirty was highly encouraged (I worked at a casino). Being friendly is damn near a requirement for a waitress.
Still, I’d have never said what she said so maybe it was specifically a come on. Hard to say.
Yeah, I know. This is basically a burger and beer joint. Looks a lot like a VFW hall – not a classy place at all, certainly not somewhere you’d go for cocktails. Anyone out there from Madison – it’s the Village Green in Middleton. Best burgers in town, which is why I was there.
She might have been joking. I’ve never had a waitress ask for my phone number before, though.
I do think this illustrates something about the OP. The woman actually asked for my phone number, and it’s “hard to say” what she might have meant. And I’m not disagreeing with you.
In this case it’s not “hard to say” because she’s a woman though, but because she’s a waitress in a tavern. Part of the woman’s job is encouraging customers to return. She also naturally wants to get good tips. So there are a couple of obvious possible ulterior motives. If you’d met her at a party and she had asked for your phone number then it would be as clear as clear can be.
That said, she was being quite direct. I’d say she wanted you to believe she was interested. Now, whether she was being sincere or not is another question. If you want to ask her out then I’d say go for it, though. You’ve even got an obvious opening, asking for HER number since she already has yours. If she turns you down then no big deal. It’s not like she’s a coworker you’d have to see every day.
Well, that’s REALLY straightforward. I can only barely work together a scenario where this isn’t a serious indicator of interest. I mean, sure, a tavern [del]wench[/del] (sorry, too many D&D games and fantasy books) waitress is supposed to make them feel good, flirt a little, make them come back, but there’s only so many times you can ask a guy his number to get him to come back before there’s a rather… scenic backlash from ONE of them (especially in a place where uh… drunk horny guys frequent). Maybe she doesn’t care and can deal with the repercussions, but if so she’s probably one of the most daring waitresses in existence, this thing can be interpreted as genuine interest so easily it goes beyond flirting to be nice and attract business.
But that’s just my analysis, I could easily be entirely wrong here, it just seems a little too daring to be something she just does to get business.
Edit: Rereading the scenario, it’s not nearly as clear-cut as I thought (especially given the apparent age disparity), never mind.
This thread reminds me of girl I met in university who does not play the ‘signal’ game very fairly. We learned through a mutual friend that we went to the same school, started talking online and we agreed to meet one day.
We ended up looking through the campus store, getting coffee and other things like that. The thing is though, she always seemed to be standing very close to me, touching my arm, smiling the whole time. We continued to hang out for a few months, during which I met a lot of her other friends, probably >50% of them were males. I eventually asked her out (though I admit I must have waited too long and crossed into the friend-zone) and she said “thanks but no thanks, we’re friends”. Fine and dandy, but after that I started to see her in a different light. Whenever we’d hang out and meet yet another male friend of hers, I’d cringe, thinking the poor bastard probably went through the same ordeal as me. I get the feeling that she really liked male attention and tended to get a lot of guys like me following her around. Gradually we started seeing each other less and less, till the friendship just sort of petered out.
On the one hand, I think I could have handled it better, and made a more obvious move the instant I thought she liked me. On the other, I hated the idea that I was some boytoy she was dragging around to validate herself. But really, she was way too touchy-feely with me while remaining seemingly oblivious to the effect she was having.
I’d like to think I’m pretty good at picking up signals from interested women, but there was this one time that I was totally thrown off. I had been getting to know this one girl who had several classes with me for two semesters in a row. As time went on, we hung out more and more and we just seemed to click. She increasingly gave what I thought were signals that she was romantically interested.
So I asked her out one day. Thought I did it real smooth too.
Turned out she was a lesbian. Go figure! I couldn’t tell from the way she was behaving!
I’m terrible at reading signals. I was at a party once and only found out afterward (when several people mentioned it to me) that one of the women there had been flirting with me all night.
And I have mentioned in the past about how a female friend and I had decided to split an apartment (we both needed to move, and neither of us could afford a decent place) in what was originally a strictly platonic relationship. She only had to hit me over the head with a clue-by-four a few dozen times before I finally realized that she had fallen in love with me.
Reminds me of the time I was out with a platonic friend and she took my hand. We walked like that for a few minutes and then she put her arm around me.
It turned out she was having a panic attack and was grabbing me until we could get out of there.
Love the Village Green. Good chicken salad sandwich too.
That must have been disappointing, but it does say a lot about you that she reached out to you as a solid support for her during a panic attack.
I’ve only had a couple of panic attacks in my life and there’s maybe two people I can think of who could possibly be a sufficiently calming influence to make me think ‘I can get through this for a little while longer’ and keep it together. Seems you’re pretty special, regardless.
Two things I’ve noted in personal experience:
I don’t think it’s so much that women give off signals and men don’t get it, as both genders give off different types of non-direct signals and they’re bad at identifying the other ones (without making it a learned skill, which is certainly possible). Women seem to show off a lot more with touch (either themselves or others) whereas men, at least in my experience, seem to understand vocal tone better. Men seem always able to pick up on the subtle cues in other men’s tones; women misunderstand them all the time. A lot of women I know don’t even know how their own tones come off and have to ask me!
If the signals are being misinterpreted, it’s due to a LOT of “false positives.” Two girls can do the exact same “signal” but one will ‘mean’ it, and the other won’t. It’s bad enough that it’ll just create so much white noise that there’s really no reason to pay attention to the signal in the first place.
Obliviousness can sometimes work in your favor. It’s gone both ways for me, with the same person (my wife).
In high school, she sat behind me in math class. I was unaware that she had a crush on me, even though she once passed me a note that in retrospect should have made it clear. (I kept the note, because although I didn’t know there were feelings behind it other than friendship, it was an unusual event for me.)
When I saw her in a bar about six years later, I sat down at her table and held her hands across it for what probably should have been an uncomfortably long time. We ended up leaving together, and it wasn’t until years later that she mentioned to me that she wasn’t just there with friends–she was on a date with one of the women.:eek: