That was my previous best guess at the norm! It’s what would make sense on priors, and what matches my observations. And it was what I would have expected if there hadn’t been such unanimous agreement in this thread that, no, mutual escalation is totally a normal thing.
If that is what people mean when they talk about “the dance of flirtatious mutual escalation”, I wish they would describe it accurately—it’s a dance of “one person escalates and the other passively approves”. That is decidedly not a dance of mutual escalation, it is not a back-and-forth, and it requires both different models and different strategies.
If that is what people mean when they talk about “the dance of flirtatious mutual escalation”, I wish they would describe it accurately—it’s a dance of “one person escalates and the other passively approves”.
There are various dance styles, they probably meant this one.
I only go further when I detect mutual escalation because I got tired of attracting the kind of person who won’t reciprocate in the escalation process. this makes me attempt to date many fewer people and I think my matching SNR is much better for it. Previously I tried to date people who didn’t escalate in return and it wasn’t great, lots of waiting for ”...so do you want to hang out or...” type moments.
more speculatively people may be having difficulty describing the surface and moving parts of a subspace of human behavior which is both fairly complex and is submerged in noise just enough to not be clearly visible, so in general I’d expect any concrete claim to be a small update that doesn’t completely remove noise
Sounds like you might be able to provide a data point on the main question I’m curious about: roughly what fraction of people (or people of your preferred gender) mutually escalate at all?
That was my previous best guess at the norm! It’s what would make sense on priors, and what matches my observations. And it was what I would have expected if there hadn’t been such unanimous agreement in this thread that, no, mutual escalation is totally a normal thing.
If that is what people mean when they talk about “the dance of flirtatious mutual escalation”, I wish they would describe it accurately—it’s a dance of “one person escalates and the other passively approves”. That is decidedly not a dance of mutual escalation, it is not a back-and-forth, and it requires both different models and different strategies.
There are various dance styles, they probably meant this one.
I only go further when I detect mutual escalation because I got tired of attracting the kind of person who won’t reciprocate in the escalation process. this makes me attempt to date many fewer people and I think my matching SNR is much better for it. Previously I tried to date people who didn’t escalate in return and it wasn’t great, lots of waiting for ”...so do you want to hang out or...” type moments.
more speculatively people may be having difficulty describing the surface and moving parts of a subspace of human behavior which is both fairly complex and is submerged in noise just enough to not be clearly visible, so in general I’d expect any concrete claim to be a small update that doesn’t completely remove noise
Sounds like you might be able to provide a data point on the main question I’m curious about: roughly what fraction of people (or people of your preferred gender) mutually escalate at all?