Either through memes or comments I keep seeing this sentiment pop-up from time to time. And I’m wondering what your (yes, you) consensus is on it.
I for one am too pessimistic to do anything with potential hints. Like even if there is a good chance I still just don’t want to risk it.
I had a woman flirting with me yesterday at the bulk food store. Happened to be at the coffee grinder, and she was struggling with it, and I just spontaneously teased “you broke it I’m telling”!
This led to a little bit of banter and talking about recipes, which led back to how she likes to get her coffee here.
I told her how I like ro enjoy my morning espresso.
She smiled and gave me that flirtatious side look and mellifluously intoned “I’d sure love some morning espresso… Brought to me in bed…”
The words floated off my lips “is your kitchen floor cold? Should I bring my slippers?”
She immediately looked shocked, faced directly at me pie-eyed. “I should have known better. Typical response from a man.”
I was fucking gobsmacked.
Don’t ever tell me that men don’t pick up signals, we have been trained… by women, to never pick up signals.
I’m seeing a lot of “acting on a not-a-hint is way too dangerous” comments. I’m curious as to what you think acting on a hint is. They almost never mean “let’s make start boning with no further communication”.
Just ask “are you flirting with me?”
How am I supposed to tell that you’re actually hinting and this isn’t just you? I’ve literally had that happen where a girl seemed super into me. Constantly talking to me and coming up with every reason to be close to me or touch me. I asked her out and she had a boyfriend and I’m just like “alright I’m never asking a girl out again this shits infuriating”
So now I just don’t even think about it much. Occasionally I’ll see a pretty girl and want to interact with her but then remember my experiences and go back to not caring.
Tbh, it sounded like she was into you
It’s happened multiple times with multiple women and I’ve resigned myself to believing it’s clearly something about me that no one is willing to tell me is a problem so I’ve just given up entirely ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
something about me that no one is willing to tell me
Let me try: You’re decently attractive, quick to offer help and have a meek and gentle nature. Sounds like you? These women were looking for a shoulder to cry on without giving anything in return. She was touching you because things weren’t going so great with her boyfriend.
One problem is that it’s very socially unacceptable to mistake not-a-hint for a a hint. Maybe people should stop trying to ‘hint’ and be more direct.
It’s worse when they do that shit on purpose like it’s some stupid power move. I catch wind of that and I’m immediately flaccid. All interest is gone. I don’t need that shit in my life.
This right here. I do not try to take any hints. If you like me say so.
Hints are bad, my relationships have all been with people who say what they want in plain English.
I’m a woman and not so good at picking up anyone’s “hints”. And when I do try, it rarely ends up being the intended hint.
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I’m male, and bi. I’m about equally bad at picking up on hints from men and women, but it seems more common with men to just flat out state what they want, either immediately, or after I miss their clue, which I’d presume to be cultural.
I’m bad with social clues in general, so I dunno if it’s a male-thing, or a me-thing.
@VeganCheesecake It’s a bit of both. I think the relevant concept here is Ask Culture versus Guess Culture.
I’m not sure if @FatTony is talking about romantic hints or all hints, but I think in many cultures women are socialised to be little a bit more Guess Culture than men, even if it doesn’t come naturally. The same goes for LGBTQ+ in cultures that are repressive. And of course some nationalities tend towards one or the other.
As someone whose natural state is very Ask, I found this concept really helpful. Sometimes I straight out ask the Guess people if they are hinting to me.
That’s a fun way to put this into concept!
The funny thing is, despite often being bad at ascertaining what is being hinted at, I have very much been raised in a ‘guess’ culture, a family that found itself to be very high-brow and fancy, which lasted until the companies went bust, and the debt caught up to them.
Anyway, that leads to me, while having lots of problem with reading ‘guess’ people (unless they grew up in similar circumstances, that usually helps), also apparently being pretty hard to read for many conversation partners.
In the end, I found that jumping over my shadow and just spelling out what I’m trying to say, ask, or think I’m being asked, usually resolves things.
@VeganCheesecake yeah I was raised in a mostly ‘guess’ family as well! They think I’m oafish.
You’re right it does cut both ways. My ‘guess’ ex thought I was super hard to read because they couldn’t grasp that I literally meant exactly what I said not some extra hidden meaning.
These days I’m with another ‘ask’ person so the only stress like that is figuring out what our mothers are trying to get at.
My mother’s actually pretty approachable in that regard, she’s a surgeon from a mostly working class family that married in. Anyone else can be pretty difficult though. Especially the part of the family that didn’t crash and burn financially, though they life on the other side of the country, luckily.
I’m usually a bit taken aback when I meet a ‘guess’ person that gets legitimately offended when being asked stuff directly, because pretty much everyone in my circle is pretty chill.
I guess everyone is living in their own world, in the end.
That’s interesting how it’s linked to social class so clearly in your family!
Come to think of it, the guessiest guesser in my life is from an industrial factory-labourer workingclass background, but different country. They experience direct requests as confrontations, so they are very easy to inadvertently hurt. It used to exasperate me, until I read the above concept.
Yeah, kinda curious, might also be one families customs vs the others, though. Might also be a family that became wealthy at the turn of the last century, and then got stuck in the way they thought they where expected to act, enforced via ‘traditions’ taught. Dunno, really.
The guessiest person I ever met was actually the mother of my last partner. She was, on the one hand, usually offended by direct requests, while also very much assuming and extrapolating things from anything indirect one said, to the point where she often became incredibly offended by things no one said, but that she heard. It was exhausting, to a degree, and my first instinct was that she was looking for things to be offended about, either consciously or subconsciously, but I also feel that I can’t really judge someone for the way they perceive the world.
I think once you get a group of people all guessing it normalizes it within a family as well maybe?
It really is a perception thing I think, but yeah it can feel incredibly exhausting for us, instinctively oppo and I guess frustrating for them.
I had some insight once when a sibling was complaining about how they kept making excuses not to pick up a gift they’d accepted and they seemed genuinely angry the person was still offering and hadn’t “taken the hint” they don’t actually want it. It’s flabbergasting to me but seems like that’s really how they see things.
Proviso, comment is based on old memories.
There was some research done on how women flirt. Women particularly put out IoIs (Indicators of Interest). These include things like hair flick, lip touching etc. When a woman is attracted to a man, the rate of IoIs goes up, sometimes 200-300% baseline.
Unfortunately, the catch is the baseline. Women vary widely on this. Some normally use 2-3/hour, others all the way up to 120/hour. This is where men can often get in trouble. A woman sending them 60/hour might be a 20 flirting outrageously, or a 120 who is actively disinterested. Trying to advance things will get vastly different results with these 2 women.
Because of this, a lot of men get risk adverse. Even if they pick up on the hints, they are not sure if they are reading them right. Conversely, a few men go the other way. These men tend to have a disproportionate, problematic effect on women. This is why most men don’t think that sleazy, overly handsey men aren’t much of a problem, but women vastly disagree.
Basically, men are stuck in a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” situation. Even worse, the men who figure things out tend to find a good partner and pair up, taking them out of the pool.
To add to the confusion, what women say they want, and what actually works can be quite different. The same applies to men. However, since men are generally expected to make the first move, they tend to screw it up a lot more (and get burnt).
Even worse, the men who figure things out tend to find a good partner and pair up, taking them out of the pool.
Why does this get an ‘even worse’ qualifier?
Because it leaves the blind leading the blind, leading to really stupid ideas getting too much traction. Both in being too aggressive, and being too passive. Neither work well.
It also creates a biased pool, which helps fuel the really negative views of women.
It’s the same effect as happens in weight loss groups. Those who succeed tend to move on. Those that hang around and gain “authority” tend to have failings.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing for the people involved, but bad for those left.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/
This is about only hiring the top 0.5% of software engineers, but it applies to dating too! The people in the pool the longest are the least attractive.
The Apple Vision Pro will fix this. You’ll get a ❤️ symbol above people’s heads when they are interested in you.
I know a girl who hinted so badly that she wants me to send her nudes but kept laughing afterward. Until one day I told her that I would send her then she said she was joking and acting like a horny man. That’s one example of many I have in my life where a girl would tell me that we should be boyfriend and girlfriend, then when I proposed to go out with her and gave weeks to choose from where I know she had no work, she replied that she is a busy woman and keeps her day offs to her many friends. I was devestated and felt like a creep. I also had a female friend who had forever hinted that we should fuck, and when I went to her house she showed up to me covering her boobs behind the door of the shower wet covering her boobs with her hands , and I immediately apologized and said I didn’t know she was in shower, and she said it’s okay come in. So I go in thinking she wanted action, but guess what? After I kept pushing and hinting she said she was just being herself and never wanted shit. I can go on and on with such stories. They all made me literally too numb to give a fuck anymore and I wouldn’t pick up a hint if a girl I’m with started masturbating in front of me unless she made it clear she wants me to join. Anyway, I gave up on this shit long time ago. I came to terms with the fact that females and males have different brains when it comes to sexuality
Men cannot afford to go through the process of trial and error to learn to follow hints. The risks from misreading the situation are far too high.
Uh yeah, they can. That’s exactly how it was done before the Internet. Yes, it’s embarrassing, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
You misunderstand, he’s one of those guys that thinks he can accidentally rape someone by misreading social cues.
Ah.
I’m an autistic woman, and I’ve found great success in leaning into my autistic tendencies. By that, I mean just being blunt and upfront. One of my favourites is that if I’ve got chemistry with someone I don’t expect to see again, before I bid them farewell, I’ll give them a note with my number on and say something like “I had a great time hanging out with you tonight, would you like to go on a date with me sometime?” And then I hand them my number and scuttle off like a crab because I can only put on a cool face for so long before I crack under the anxiety.
dog bless you
May dog bless us all.
awoooooooooo
Aspie man here, it’s harder for us to do that. I have a friend who I gave the standard, “Hi, my name is MapleEngineer and I have Asperger’s. That means…” speech to when I thought she was hinting. She said, “Ok, you don’t like hints?” “No.” “Ok. I’ve always found you attractive and have fantasized about sucking your cock. We should get together.” We did. It was awesome.
Life would be so by easier if the normies didn’t muddy the waters so much with their hints and clues.
Oh yeah, it’s why I mentioned I’m a woman - it’s certainly relevant to my experience here. I don’t have to worry about being perceived as threatening - if I flirt with a woman in an upfront way like I described, I never feel like there’s a risk of frightening her. Whereas on the flip side, if a guy asks me out, I’m always a bit on edge because of the small minority who are not safe to politely turn down. “Privilege” is definitely the wrong word for this, but being perceived as non threatening does make some things simpler.
I have been accused of being incredibly dense because I mask by playing all new relationships with women as completely natural. The woman I mentioned in my comment was hinting hard but I played it neutral. After I had a couple of hours to think about it I went back and said, “I have Asperger’s and here’s what that means. Here’s what masking is. I mask by playing hard neutral. I think you might be hinting. Hinting doesn’t work with me. If you’re hinting you need to stop and just say or ask what you want to say or ask. I won’t be offended. I will probably say, ‘Yes’ (I’m a sexy Aspie and I always say, ‘Yes’. )” So she just asked, I said, “Yes” and we had a good time. She told me that she had always found me and my attitude toward sex very appealing but thought I didn’t like her because I never flirted or expressed any interest. She said that in the almost 15 years we had been acquainted I had never even touched her. I said I thought it would be fun if the first time we touched was a kiss. The first time we touched it was a kiss. Now I’m waiting to find out if she’s going to go with me on a short road trip with one or two nights in a nice hotel this weekend.
I could’ve written this comment word for word. It really does make things a lot easier to just be direct, being able to do this is one of the very few outright advantages of our non-standard brains imo!
maybe it’s more, women feel like they have to give hints because being direct can receive judgment or not be safe. so it’s not that they’re bad at hinting it’s just that they have to use hints a lot more often than we do, and I can’t pick up a hint to save my life
Women resort to dropping hints when they’re too scared to risk rejection by being direct.
They also respond to rejection with accusations of sexual assault as if that’s just the perfect way to save face(as if saving face is necessary).
This is not an incel community
Irrelevant.
I don’t why my comment has appeared as a reply to this.
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