The number of times I have been delighted by witty banter only to find out later that I was “Flirting” is both unfortunate and disappointing.
“haha so what about that guy, huh?”
Me: what about him
“Well you seemed super into him”
Me: what why
“…dude you were flirting all night”
Me:
Me: Whoms't™™
I found out several of my female coworkers were planning on trying to get our male coworker to ask me out because “You guys kept flirting” but I was like “We were literally just goofing around. Like we literally just told jokes to each other. Literally just stuff that friends do, the same stuff you and I do.” I was definitely 100% NOT flirting but everyone thought I was
“You were laughing at everything TJ did!”
“He paper clipped a banana to the ceiling, Isabelle. That’s fucking bonkers”
This might be a good time for Ms. Psych degree here to step in and let ye all know that People Are Unable To Identify Flirting. There are double-blind studies to support this, if you instruct participants to flirt or not flirt with another participant, neither the second participant nor onlookers are able to accurately tell which instruction the first participant was given. Even if you get the flirting participant to rate their attraction to the person they’re flirting with, and only count trials where people are either flirting with people they find attractive, or not flirting with people they don’t find attractive NO ONE CAN TELL WHO IS FLIRTING OR WHO ISN’T.
I’ve heard that people actually have a *less than 50% chance* of guess whether someone is flirting or not.
Thank fuck this isn’t just me failing at humanity
SagePub has one such study here, dated 2014. There might be more recent work, however.
oh thank God! I also thought it was just me.



















