Transcription
So I've been hearing lately that flirting is a high-risk activity. Starting a conversation with a stranger is creepy. That showing interest in somebody might get you canceled. Not sure that smiling is allowed, but definitely don't make eye contact with anyone.
I'm a Clinical Psychology PhD, and what I'm hearing from people is that flirtation is so dangerous that it's probably safer just to avoid it entirely. But hang on. This is completely wrong. Flirtation isn't risky. Flirtation is what we humans invented to reduce risk when we try to connect. Once I show you the concepts, it's going to make complete sense.
I struggled personally with flirting when I was younger. Pretty sure that's one of the prerequisites for getting into a PhD program. I obviously wanted to improve, but I didn't want like, shallow hacks or tips. I'm driven by psychological curiosity, so I wanted to really understand the underlying nature of flirtation, like what is it exactly, and like, how does it work? So for nine months, I read every research article I could find. And at some point, it all fit together, and flirtation actually made sense to me. I could see why things had gone wrong when I was younger, 'cause I was breaking the unwritten rules of flirtation.
I'm going to share my major findings with you. I'll teach you the three core principles that guide the science of flirtation, and then I'll show you the scale that I use in my sessions to apply these. Once you get it, flirting will make way more sense, and it becomes what it's always intended to be: not scary, and hopefully fun.
Principle one: When I was in college and first meeting people that I liked, I was naturally warm and smiley and nice. Basically, all positive signals all the time. But as far as dating, that never seemed to work out. It didn't make sense to me at the time, like, what was going on here? I came to the obvious conclusion: don't send any positive signals if you like people. This strategy was equally unsuccessful. Surprisingly, I had no luck when I ignored and frowned at people that I liked. I was confused and frustrated, and eventually, I got sick of trying.
Then one day, I stumbled onto something. I started teasing women the way that I just tease my guy friends hanging out, and out of nowhere, they started flirting back. So what happened here is that I'd figured out the first scientific principle of flirtation: warm ambiguity. It wasn't that teasing is how you flirt; it's that teasing is an ambiguous communication of interest. It's a mixed message, part push and part pull. It's called a tease. It's lightly poking fun at someone while sending a ton of positive warmth signals. Without those smiles and that warmth, teasing is actually social aggression, and it's going to make someone feel bad about themselves. We need to put a lot of warmth behind it.
But warm ambiguity is more than just teasing. It can involve a whole range of behaviors that, in essence, they suggest but they don't confirm interest. Whether or not you're into someone is unclear, depending on where you find yourself in the process of getting to know someone. It can look pretty different. If you've just recently met someone and you're being really friendly, that could mean you like them, or it might just mean that you're friendly to everybody. You're warm, but the message, it's ambiguous.
Or that ambiguity could be the classic mix of signals you've ever seen. It with body language. A smile from the side is more flirtatious than one that's direct. You would never do a smile from the side as your photo for a corporate profile. It's the ambiguity that matters: that push of the body turned away with the pull of the smile and the eye contact. Smile and body towards is friendly. Turned away and no smile is unfriendly. Turned away and smiling is flirtatious because of ambiguity, the mix.
With ambiguity, your intentions are never certain. But you need to know for certain why this matters so much. People say they hate mixed signals, and on one level, yeah, it's true. But let's be honest, you actually love them. Humans are drawn towards uncertainty because we feel this pull to resolve it. We want to close the open loop. "I like you. Can we date?" is simply not very interesting. It's a story with no drama. "Do they like me, or am I reading into it?" That's way more compelling. People will sit around puzzling through the evidence with friends for hours when the message is ambiguous. What does this mean? Do they like me? Do they not like me? I've seen people develop crushes simply from being unable to tell if the other person liked them or not.
But ambiguity fulfills an even more important purpose in flirting because we never directly said we were interested. We simply suggested it. We hinted at it. And in fact, early meanings of the word flirt emphasize that it was playing at love. We don't know how serious someone is when they flirt. And because of this inherent ambiguity, we have the safety of plausible deniability. We suggest interest and then we observe the response: either reciprocation or not. We can't get harshly rejected. We can't fall off because we never actually stepped out on a limb. This is the key. Flirtation provides us safety, and that's why we invented it to begin with.
Ambiguity is central to flirtation, but ambiguity alone is not enough. It'll help, but without the second component, you'll end up getting stuck in one spot, like college me was soon to find out.
Principle two: When I discovered teasing, I used it with no subtlety or flexibility because I didn't understand it. When I playfully teased people I liked, they seemed to enjoy it, and so I kept on teasing, and things would go worse, and I could see they're enjoying it less. I then would keep doing it, and eventually, people would stop talking to me entirely. So take a second and wonder why this would be. Maybe you can figure out better than I could at the time.
Our connections with people are not frozen in space, especially early on, when trying to understand and explore where this particular relationship might be going. You can imagine this like a radio dial where there's a lot of static, but you can also faintly hear music playing. As you turn the dial, the static drops, and we start to get a clearer signal. When we flirt, it's the same thing. This is what we do: we slowly turn that dial, and the song becomes easier to make out. As we move along the scale, we tend to become more and more obvious about our romantic interest. We reveal very little early on, partly because we have little interest early on, because like, who the hell is this person? And also partly because we're playing it safe. We don't yet know if our curiosity is returned.
And as we interact more and we start to feel safer, flirtation requires reducing the ambiguity and becoming more obvious. Less static, more music. Moving gradually allows us to connect, but to do so safely. When I kept on teasing, I broke this rule. I never showed the vulnerability of hinting that I actually liked anyone. I was frozen halfway along the scale: too much push, not enough pull. I left the dial turned halfway to the station, and after a while, it was just too much static and not enough music. No surprise, people were not into that. The impression I gave was of somebody who was fun and playful, but not actually interested in them. And so, without progression, the initial spark fizzled out.
All of which leads us to the third principle of flirtation, and the one where people tend to make the costliest mistakes. People commonly ask me how to tell if someone likes them or not. Personally, I would love to talk in great, great depth about it, but the shortest possible answer is this: it's all about investment. Is the other person investing into the connection with you? I don't mean money; I mean time and energy that could be invested elsewhere is instead being invested into the relationship. Like, if someone talks to you for 30 minutes at a social gathering, it means they've turned down many other things they could have been doing with that time. That's an actual costly signal of interest.
And as we gradually escalate in flirtation, we take small steps to reduce the static and reveal our growing interest. But we also need to see the other person is doing the same thing. That they're reciprocating. Are they alongside you, or have you pulled too far ahead? I had a friend once who was difficult to take walks with. Personally, I love walking, but he would get all animated by a topic and talking a mile a minute and start racing off, like he was so wrapped up in his head that he didn't even see that I was like, lagging way behind him, or I'd stopped to tie my shoe, or that maybe co-stuff had gone by. Essentially, he had been walking alone, talking to nobody. I was left behind and annoyed.
So when it comes to flirtation, it's the same basic idea. We have to walk with people. This means we have to pay attention to where they are and what pace they're comfortable progressing. Otherwise, like with the walk, we risk moving too fast and then losing contact or upsetting them. The safest way I found to do this is to ask: Is the other person matching my investment? If you talk to someone at a coffee shop and they aren't equally engaged in the conversation, then they are not matching your investment. So don't ask them out. If you send long texts and you get a one-word answer, don't start giving tons of compliments. They have not matched your investment.
In the science of flirtation, you progress slowly and only when your investment is being reciprocated. Otherwise, you can expect bad responses. Like with walking, you only move as fast as the slowest person. On a good walk, it's okay to go fast, it's okay to go slow. You can stop regularly, that's okay. You can enjoy the view, you can rest. It doesn't matter what matters is that you do it together. So remember this: no escalation before reciprocation. This promotes safety for everyone involved.
There's one crucial step required here to make sense of all this information and reduce the risk in dating. You've got to use all of these elements at the same time. It's complicated because what's appropriate at one stage is actually a problem at another. In order to make this easier to understand, I found it was helpful to put all the elements together into a visual representation that I called the flirtation scale.
The scale lays out the path from no romantic interest on one end all the way to undying declarations of love on the other. It breaks down the progression into stages, showing the types of warm ambiguity flirting signals you typically see at each stage. That way, you know where you stand, you know whether you're communicating appropriately, and then also whether your investment is being matched. This can really help you understand the areas where you struggle or whether it's time to change flirtation behavior by turning that dial to be a little more obvious.
I want to be very clear here. This is not a dating hack. It's not a series of tips on how to flirt successfully. Rather, it's a representation of the underlying nature of flirtation as it exists in human history. It conveys a model of flirtation based on all of my research and analysis. Obviously, people will improve their flirtation and dating, but that just comes from having a scientific base framework that helps them understand the way things work, and then using this. Like now, they can see how problems arise when you are breaking one of the principles or if you struggle with a step on the scale. If you understand this, I hope you can participate in the joy of connection from a position of safety for everybody. After all, the whole point of flirtation is to reduce risk, not to create it. It is specific, typically a way of testing the waters without the risk of any radical social consequences. I do not want any cancellations happening.
If you'd like me to go into more depth on the flirtation scale and maybe see how it's used in action, like, just leave me a comment and I'll do that. I'll create a new video. But if you're curious now, after you write about the flirtation stages and the flirtation scale in chapter 7 of my book, "Dating Without Fear." It's on Amazon and Audible if you're interested.
Okay, one last thing. In order to actually get started applying these principles of flirtation, you've got to start at the beginning. You won't even have a chance to engage in flirtation until you take care of the problems at the very start. So watch this video [Music] above.