Here are two models of “the norm” when it comes to flirtatious escalation, assuming both people are in fact interested:
“Mutual Escalation”: both people go back-and-forth making gradually more escalative moves. One might tend to escalate first, but the other will at least match escalation level.
“Active/Passive”: one person makes roughly all of the escalative moves. The other person passively approves/disapproves, and the active participant tracks their approval when deciding to dial up/down.
Multiple people (including agree-votes and offline) have told me that the first is most common. Multiple people (including agree-votes and offline) have told me that the second is most common.
What I really want to know is:
Conditional on mutual interest, what are the relative frequencies of these two kinds of flirtatious escalation?
Are there particular settings/cultures/etc in which those frequencies are very different?
These are both fairly difficult questions to answer, because of major confounders. First and most obviously, it’s hard to tell how often an “active/passive” flirtation is just one person not being very into the other. Second, communication is hard even when people are not making a point of obfuscating it, so we should expect both that people are too subtle in their hints (or sometimes accidentally hint when not intending to) and that people are too clueless to pick up on hints (or sometimes pick up hints which were not sent in the first place).
I’m interested both in whatever personal experience people have bearing on the question, and in data or unusual experiences which somehow sidestep the confounders.
Some Priors
On priors, I would expect that:
Flirting is a skill
The large majority of people are both bad at it and know they’re bad at it
People who are both bad at it and know they’re bad at it are usually very hesitant to send escalatory signals (if they even know how to, which they might not)
That’s why, on priors, I personally strongly expected the active/passive model to be most common. Specifically, I’d guess that the mutual escalation model mostly applies when two people who are both good at flirting run into each other. That’s probably most fun and a great thing to optimize for, but the large majority of a skilled flirter’s encounters will be with people who are not themselves skilled flirters, and will therefore be active/passive.
The main way I’d expect this prior model to be wrong is if typical flirting skill levels are much higher than I thought.
Some Data
A quick google search turned up a tangentially-relevant study on an easier-to-measure question, with this table:
| Partner Gender | Partner Actually Flirted? | Accuracy At Guessing |
| Female | Flirted | 18% |
| Female | Did not flirt | 83% |
| Male | Flirted | 36% |
| Male | Did not flirt | 84% |
This says that, for instance, in the cases where a female was flirting (according to her), the guy she was talking to usually did not think she was flirting; only 18% actually thought she was flirting in such cases. High level story which the data suggests: mostly, people have a prior that nobody’s flirting, and that’s usually correct, but when people do flirt the signals are usually not nearly strong enough to overcome that prior.
This is one of those typical social psych studies where n is unimpressive (<100 participants), and it’s a bunch of undergrads, and the operationalization is dubious in all sorts of ways for generalization purposes (they were paired up and talked for 10 minutes before separately answering a survey), etc. It should be taken with an awful lot of salt. That said, it is at least extremely clear in this case that the large majority of hints which people send out are not received.
That study doesn’t directly address my main question, but it is at least strong evidence that the large majority of undergrads are not very good at this whole flirting business; the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty abysmal. It’s at least evidence against flirting skill levels typically being high.
Some Better Answers?
Mostly I want to hear what other people have to say on the question; I don’t expect my priors or my quick google search or my own experiences to provide particularly reliable answers here.
I do mutual escalation if I’m really into them, approve/disapprove when I’m not sure if I’m into them, or like if they’d be safe to flirt with. But even with mutual escalation, I usually match what they (the guy) is doing, maybe go a tiny bit further, depending on how I feel that day. This is likely confounded by how I can get attracted to someone if we spend a few hours talking, even if I wasn’t attracted when I first met them. I think I was more likely to do mutual escalation when I was younger too
Preamble: The below assumes interactions between a heterosexual man and woman, can’t comment usefully on other scenarios.
I have no idea about the answer to the first question, but would bet serious money that the answer to the second question is yes.
The reason why, in previous conversations, I had said I personally wouldn’t escalate much without some positive response from the person I’m attempting to flirt with, is because of my personal ethics and expectations around social conventions, which I assume are culturally influenced. I am strongly averse to being pushy about sexual interest, and expect the most likely response if my interest is not reciprocated to be the equivalent of silence—not giving some definitive indication to me the equivalent of “I’m not interested in you, please stop” because that risks a very negative reaction (from a generic male, not from me specifically, but the person I’m flirting with in this hypothetical has no way of knowing what I’m like, and would understandably prioritize safety over clear communication). My way of analyzing a response is, if I get no response, that means stop, if I get a negative response that also means stop, only if I get a positive response of some kind is it OK to continue.
Obviously, this is not the only way the ambiguous signal of “no response” could be interpreted. In a culture where it is strongly expected that women do not express sexual interest of any kind because that is shameful, the dynamic would necessarily be different, because a non-response is the expected response even when the woman being flirted with would like to indicate interest. Similarly, if the social expectation was that if someone would prefer I stop flirting they will say so, I would feel more comfortable interpreting a non-response as “it is OK to continue”. I imagine there might be a culture where that expectation exists, although I don’t know of a specific example.
Also relevant: I expect (due to gender stereotypes confirmed by conversations with women around me, and comparing their responses to my own under the assumption that I’m not too different from most men) women to be more attuned to social subtleties and subtexts than men. Basically, their sensitivity to potential alternate interpretations of the meaning of words or actions that are not surface-level obvious is higher. As a result, I expect them to be able to pick up my indication of interest fairly easily, as long as I’m being not-particularly-subtle by my own estimation. What I’m doing will be plausibly deniable, but still likely clear. I also expect women to do things they think of as not particularly subtle and easy to pick up on (which another woman might notice) that are completely missed by the person they are attempting to flirt with. There are many instances where a woman interprets a behaviour as “this person likes/supports/does not like/does not support me” and my response is “that is just one possible interpretation, what you’re reading something into might have been unintentional or not related to you. You could be right, but I would put a lower probability on it than you seem to be”. This is particularly true in terms of sensitivity to subtle indications of dislike/opposition, but true more generally.
Speculating about cultural change over time, I expect that our (US/Canada) past culture, which put more pressure on women not to “be too forward”, and gave much more latitude to men to pursue women both subtly and directly, would have been more permissive of a man fumbling his way through flirting, getting no response, and continuing regardless, than our current culture is.
Re: your third prior, “People who are both bad at it and know they’re bad at it are usually very hesitant to send escalatory signals (if they even know how to, which they might not)”
I think this falls into a binary distribution. The experience of women I know is that when in their early 20′s, they would get a large number of very clumsy attempts to indicate sexual interest. At the same time, most men tried flirting only rarely. From the typical young woman’s perspective, the experience seemed to be “I get hit on constantly by distasteful men”, while from the typical man’s perspective it was “I rarely try anything with anyone, I don’t want to come across as one of the men that causes problems for women by being an ass”. I reconciled this by modeling the situation as “among those who are low-skill at flirting, which is most people, there are a majority of people who flirt rarely and selectively, investing a lot of effort and emotional weight into each attempt, and a minority of people who take a shot at everyone who crosses their path, basically taking the same approach as a spammer where a 0.1% success rate still yields a sufficient number of successes to be worthwhile”. The experience of the recipients of the “flirting” (although arguably that isn’t what’s happening, it doesn’t have the subtlety or skill you’re thinking of) is that ~all the attempts are terrible by men who aren’t interested in them as an individual at all, and this influences their impression of men in general. In any case: There are at least three possible responses to “I know I’m bad at flirting”—one is to spam the world with low-effort attempts to get a positive response, another is to be very hesitant to attempt to flirt, a third is to attempt to skill up. I’ve seen all 3.
something tangential that came to mind while reading this: flirting with a room is an extremely useful skill. It allows one to keep ambiguity but make some of it spatial between people rather than probabilistic. “I could kiss someone right now,” after succeeding at something, for example, has some strategic ambiguity, but is a prime opportunity for someone to say, eg, “same, honestly”. If those were said for real, they’d be slightly exaggerated, likely actually meaning “I am thinking positively about the act of kissing someone as a celebration” and “I am also thinking positively about that scenario, and I am leaving ambiguous whether it’s you I’m thinking about kissing”. then you could escalate with, eg, “well come over here then!” and not making any further effort; if it goes through, they might come over. This would only happen in a group where you’re already at steady state of having accurate maps of each others’ versions of this sort of leaving-free-variables-in-your-meaning-for-someone-else-to-set ambiguity thing, it’s not a new-friends sort of thing to have happen unless you’re in a particularly spicy group.
I think that looking at flirtation in isolation is a mistake. Flirtation is a behavior attached to some motivation. That motivation might be coercive (“I want to sleep with that hot person, let me flirt with them and maybe it will happen”) or it might be a genuine express of interest (“I really like that person, I’m going to go talk to them and not hide how I feel”, which comes across as flirting) or it might be something else (“The person in the lab coat told me I have to flirt with a person for 10 minutes as part of a study to get extra credit in Psych 101”).
So I don’t exactly know how to answer your question, but I read this feeling like it’s leaving out the most important questions:
Do you have a romantic interest in a person?
Do you want to sleep with them?
Would you be open to romance/sex with them?
How safe do I feel letting the other person know how I feel?
Have you tried expanding out of Anglo-Saxon culture? Here in France, flirting is a more common and comfortable mode of interaction, a form of adult politeness, without the underlying cultural codes that make it awkward in the US.
Painting with a coarse brush: Americans value childhood over adulthood, equate sex with violence, and polarize gender roles. The French value adulthood, see sex as a refined pleasure, and tolerate emotion in men.
A lot of this might be very cultural.
Sources:
Clotaire Raspail, “Culture Codes”
Personal experience: 23 years in the US, 23 years in France.
Hm, to clarify...
Like, we can imagine that I (in the UK) might flirt with someone by telling her “you’re very pretty”, and she’d likely receive subtext like “philh is possibly interested in going on a date with me, or kissing me, or having sex with me”. (Or something. I don’t claim to be an expert in flirting.)
Is it that in France, it’s common for a man to tell a woman “you’re very pretty” (or “tu es très jolie” according to Google translate), and it would still have that subtext? And maybe additional stuff like “in the UK there’s a higher bar for expressing that subtext than in France; in the UK you’re not supposed to express that subtext if you’re in a relationship with someone else, where in France it’s fine”?
Yes, this is exactly what I’m getting at, and why motivations for flirting matter.
Indeed, the solution is to create masters programs for flirting!
Anecdata:
My wife is usually much better at telling when a girl was flirting, and when bets are made, she confirms later with the person on the side (these are usually people she already knows and so people who trust her, but also she maybe can read their particular tells, confounding the result). I often would read the same signals as “she’s just having a good time with me/the person” and be wrong. I’m not sure if I have the same advantage for men, I do more often bet on them flirting than she does, but I usual am unable to have independent confirmation, it’s random men we observe being possibly flirty.
Maybe it’s just the case that both of us see our genders as more flirty than the other does, and that bet pays on average? I’m not sure, that doesn’t feel like it explains my wife’s accuracy or my inaccuracy in predicting female flirting (although my prediction did get better through time).