No, She Is Not Flirting with You

She is actually just having an engaging conversation with you. Yes, I know, she is an attractive woman, but give me a few paragraphs and I’ll try to explain why that shouldn’t change your calculus.

The two of you are discussing at length how Westworld blew your mind, over drinks – wait, water – at your favorite Vietnamese restaurant. You ran into each other at a party last week for the tenth time, and you both decided you needed to actually catch up, for real this time. So here you are, grabbing dinner.

You find her really attractive, and talking to her is a lot of fun. You’re single, you’re handsome, you’re full of yourself – what isn’t there to like? At this point you figure that she must be flirting with you. But actually, you don’t know how she is feeling. You haven’t discussed it. You sure hope she is flirting with you. You are projecting your desire onto her feelings, and that isn’t right.

She thinks you are super cool, and does enjoy talking to you, but unbeknownst to you she is seeing someone else. She is worried that you might think this is a date. But like most things lustful, it goes undiscussed, layering a subtle social tension onto the dinner.

That social tension is not a good thing. It arises from mismatched expectations, which can only lead to trainwreck. Imagine having a friendship with Alex, where Alex is only friends with you because there is a possibility you might date. That is not the kind of friendship that lasts. Alex is just going to end up continually disappointed when you reject their subtle advances. You just want to be friends! and you probably could be, if Alex realized what they were doing.

Projecting romance can also manifest itself in far creepier ways. You’re in the club, lost in the music, and you observe a sneaky character insert himself behind a woman, rhythmically rubbing his junk on her. The woman looks at you, a deer caught in the headlights, her eyes signaling “help!”. You push the man off of her, and he complains – “she is into it!”. Her face turns to disgust. She isn’t into it. The fucked up thing here is that the guy actually believes she is into it. He is projecting his indecent enjoyment onto her. He thinks it must be mutual. And yes – this actually happened to me.

It may be hard to change the way that our brains are wired, but that is a terrible self-justification for failing to address a real issue with how we treat our peers. It is possible to make the unconscious conscious. The next time you have to ask yourself “is this a date?”, force yourself to provide a justification for your answer. The fact that their eyes light up when they speak words back to you is inconsequential. People do that all the time in conversation. It doesn’t matter that they were the one to ask you to dinner. Explore the possibility that no, they are not flirting with you.