As someone who was interested in long-term relationships (and who has been in one since the before the invention of Tinder), I have a theory on what’s up with banter.
In practice, I dated women. In theory, I wasn’t against dating guys, but none of the small number of guys I was into seemed to be into me.
The women I tended to get crushes on tended to be (1) sword fighters, (2) enthusiastically geeky, or (3) rather uselessly for my dating life, butch lesbians.
I really, really, really did not want to date the “consent is anti-sexy” crowd.
With all the said, here’s my old personal model for dating:
My eligible dating pool was mostly friends-of-friends.
There’s probably an element of social proof here.
That also meant that I needed to hang out in places with a sufficient number of friends-of-friends of the appropriate gender and orientation.
Most people weren’t into me, but enough were. My job was finding them, and deciding if I was also into them.
This requires the skill of “identifying interest.” Which is harder than it it looks, because some people are deeply interested in everyone on a non-romantic level, but this is easy to confuse with romantic interest.
You can increase the number of people that are interested in you by dressing better, staying in shape, or whatever, but it’s an 80⁄20 thing. Be the best version of yourself that you can be with 30 minutes of effort/day and some enjoyable physical activity.
Once you think you might have mutual interest, this is where the whole bantering/flirting thing comes into the picture. You have two people who have probably both already decided that they’re interested in each other, and you’re verifying that mutual interest. So you take turns saying increasingly flirty things until there’s no plausible deniability left.
One special caveat for queer people: You also need to somehow communicate, “Yes I am into your gender and no I will not freak out.”
This is my best model for how this used to work, given (a) my particular circle of friends-of-friends, (b) the people I was interested in dating, and (c) the pre-Tinder dating scene. From what I hear from single friends, we may actually be entering the post-Tinder era for an increasing number of people, because many dating apps are a double-sided lemon market.
There may be some hypothetical people out there who can seduce using banter alone. But in my narrow personal experience (see the caveats above), banter was almost always used to confirm pre-existing mutual interest without accidentally rejecting people.
As someone who was interested in long-term relationships (and who has been in one since the before the invention of Tinder), I have a theory on what’s up with banter.
But some caveats, since apparently everyone’s dating pool is bizarrely filtered:
I’m monogamous and relationship oriented.
I’m a guy.
In practice, I dated women. In theory, I wasn’t against dating guys, but none of the small number of guys I was into seemed to be into me.
The women I tended to get crushes on tended to be (1) sword fighters, (2) enthusiastically geeky, or (3) rather uselessly for my dating life, butch lesbians.
I really, really, really did not want to date the “consent is anti-sexy” crowd.
With all the said, here’s my old personal model for dating:
My eligible dating pool was mostly friends-of-friends.
There’s probably an element of social proof here.
That also meant that I needed to hang out in places with a sufficient number of friends-of-friends of the appropriate gender and orientation.
Most people weren’t into me, but enough were. My job was finding them, and deciding if I was also into them.
This requires the skill of “identifying interest.” Which is harder than it it looks, because some people are deeply interested in everyone on a non-romantic level, but this is easy to confuse with romantic interest.
You can increase the number of people that are interested in you by dressing better, staying in shape, or whatever, but it’s an 80⁄20 thing. Be the best version of yourself that you can be with 30 minutes of effort/day and some enjoyable physical activity.
Once you think you might have mutual interest, this is where the whole bantering/flirting thing comes into the picture. You have two people who have probably both already decided that they’re interested in each other, and you’re verifying that mutual interest. So you take turns saying increasingly flirty things until there’s no plausible deniability left.
One special caveat for queer people: You also need to somehow communicate, “Yes I am into your gender and no I will not freak out.”
This is my best model for how this used to work, given (a) my particular circle of friends-of-friends, (b) the people I was interested in dating, and (c) the pre-Tinder dating scene. From what I hear from single friends, we may actually be entering the post-Tinder era for an increasing number of people, because many dating apps are a double-sided lemon market.
There may be some hypothetical people out there who can seduce using banter alone. But in my narrow personal experience (see the caveats above), banter was almost always used to confirm pre-existing mutual interest without accidentally rejecting people.