The Cool Thing About Flirting

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]So, here's the cool thing. You can't tell if someone is flirting with you, and that's the way that flirting is designed. There's a really cool experiment where they took two people who were flirting. They recorded them, and they had a neutral observer watch the people who were flirting. A neutral observer is only able to detect flirting 30% of the time. This is kind of confusing for people, but I think we need to understand what flirting is designed for. So, a lot of times when we are into someone, that's like dangerous territory. We feel anxious, we're not sure how they're going to respond, and rejection really hurts. The way that human beings have learned to solve this, the way that we feel safe indicating our romantic interest, is by flirting. So, flirting is is sending a signal that is easily missed and potentially picked up.

[00:00:46]That's actually way safer than transmitting like a boorish signal, a creepy signal, like, you know, walking up to someone and saying, "Hey, I'm really into you. Will you spend the rest of my life with me?" That is really creepy. So, flirting is actually designed to be missed. So, if you're trying to flirt with someone, and people are missing it, the best thing to do is to continue to try to flirt. I'd try like two or three more times, and sort of send low signals, and then you can escalate a little bit. If it's really not working, and you're interested in someone, you can be a little bit more explicit. But, the whole point of flirting is that we want to send a signal that is a little bit ambiguous, and we don't want to put someone in in a space to like reject us outright. So, the cool thing about flirting is I send a signal, they're not quite sure what I mean by it, right? So, when I invite them up for coffee, like, it's not clear whether that means coffee, or that means sex, or what that means. And so, then they send an ambiguous signal back. "Oh, yeah, I'd love to come up for coffee."

[00:01:41]Now, in my mind, I'm not sure, is this person expecting coffee at 10:30 at night, or are they expecting something else? And so, this back-and-forth interaction that involves ambiguity is actually how people feel each other out, feel safe, and form emotional connections.