I know what you’re thinking: Really? Jack, the guy who comes across like he’s got all the game in the world, doesn’t get women?
First off, slow down. I never said I don’t get women. (But sometimes I don’t; they’re extraordinarily complex.) What I’m referring to specifically is my occasional inability to read a signal. This deficiency doesn’t affect me as much now as it did when I was single. Being happily married, I don’t find myself on the receiving end of signals from available, interested women every day. I notice them when they do occur, and I am generally intrigued, though given the nature of my relationship it’s not something of which I am generally able to take advantage. The irony, of course, is that being married affords me the clarity that allows me to read signals – something I didn’t always have in my single days.
I’m a pretty straightforward guy. I always have been. I value honestly, and I never cared much for the games society requires one to play when dating. If I liked someone, I would tell them so. If I had a good time on a date, I would probably call the other person the next day, rather than allowing for some arbitrary post-date waiting period. Maybe that eagerness killed off promising relationships before they had the chance to get off the ground, but if being in a relationship required me to change who I am as a person so as to better conform to what was expected of me, I was usually content to hold off until I found a more suitable partner.
It is this straightforwardness that is partially to blame for my occasional inability to read a romantic or sexual signal. If someone thought I was attractive, it would have been a lot more expedient for them to simply say so, rather than perform some manner of complicated interpretive dance. I understand that some people – for the purposes of this post I’m talking about women, though I am not implying that this does not apply to men – are afraid to take a risk lest they be rejected, or are unwilling to be completely honest about their sexual desires for fear that they will be judged. But the fact is, not every man knows what to do with a signal of interest when one is thrown their way. This has certainly been true of me at various points in my past.
I’d actually forgotten about this phenomenon, this wealth of missed opportunities, until I was chatting with our friend Nastassja Kinky, and she mentioned having “a huge blindspot” when it comes to reading signals from flirty people. Suddenly I was reminded of several instances, most of them during my college years, in which I missed a signal, and with it the opportunity for relatively effortless sex.
Don’t get me wrong, even then I was more than capable of reading a signal under the right conditions. But in my younger days – think age eighteen, newly arrived at an institution of higher learning, surrounded by attractive, sexually-available women, and completely at the mercy of my overacting hormones – asking me to focus on body language and other subtle cues was like asking me to stay awake during my 8:00 AM class. Simply put, it wasn’t happening.
During my first semester in college, I found myself participating in a group project with three other students. One was a fairly attractive blonde woman of nineteen. We knew each other from high school where she was a year ahead of me, though I don’t believe we spoke to each other more than twice. Our desks grouped into informal circles, this young lady was seated across from me, and I noticed that when we spoke she maintained eye contact. Her face was warm, more than friendly. She didn’t hold eye contact with the other two students in our group as long as she did with me, and I found that promising.
I also noticed that she got very fidgety everytime we spoke. She would play with the hair scrunchie she kept around her wrist. She would drum her fingers on the top of her desk. She would touch her face or rock slowly in her seat. These subtle movements seemed to betray the confidence she demonstrated in holding my gaze, but at the time I did not understand their significance.
A few weeks after the project had wrapped up, one of the other students in our group asked me if there was anything going on between her and I. When I told him no, he posited that she liked me, as she was throwing off very obvious indicators of interest. It turns out that fidgeting is a common means of releasing tension, including sexual tension that occurs during flirting. Unfortunately, when I failed to follow through, she’d lost interest and presumably found some other guy to date or just fuck who knew how to read a signal. Lesson learned.
When I was twenty years old, an old friend of mine returned home during her summer break from school. She and I had known each other since we were seven years old, and while high school didn’t find us as close as we were during elementary school, we still considered ourselves good friends. During her visit, we hung out and got caught up on the previous couple years. Remember, this was the mid-nineties, and social networking was in its infancy. Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter were years away. Although we both used email, for some reason we weren’t regularly emailing each other.
We also went out several times. I say “went out” to indicate that we turned off the television and actually left whichever house served as our meeting place. We went to the movies. We hung out at the mall. We went to the beach. I must state for the record that at no time did any of our outings take on the connotation of a date. We each paid our own way. There was no romance, nor was there any intimacy or closeness beyond that of two friends. Sometimes we would call mutual friends to join us. There was no good night kiss at the end of an evening out. There was no pressure; we were simply two individuals spending time together, one of us male and the other female.
She also mentioned her tongue stud several times. The first time, it was just the usual mindless, boring, getting-to-know you chit-chat:
So what have you been up to so far this summer?
Oh, not much. Sold my books back, booked my flight home, got my tongue pierced, put my car in storage and flew home.
With each increasing mention, she was a bit more forward, and it was obvious that she was coming onto me. Sorry, let me rephrase that. It’s obvious now. At the time, not so much. This is easily the case of missed-signal obliviousness of which I am the most sheepish, even some sixteen years later. In fact, when she and I ran into each other at a party in 1999, I was embarrassed at my earlier failure to get a clue. She didn’t mention it.
You know that a tongue stud is really good for oral sex, right?
Yeah, I saw Pulp Fiction. So what?
So why did I miss this particular signal? I’m guessing that a major reason was our long-standing platonic friendship. Because of the fact that, while we were in elementary school, we attended each other’s birthday parties, had dinner at each other’s houses at least once a week, and played Transformers in her enormous backyard, I assumed that she didn’t view me as a possible sexual partner. I knew that sex was a potential friendship-killer, and it didn’t occur to me that she could have been as capable of emotionless sex as I was.
As I mentioned above, when it occurred to me that I missed out on the chance for some head (at the very least), I was stunned. Oh, and she eventually told me. She eventually said outright that she was giving me signals. She wasn’t upset; she was more amused that I didn’t reciprocate. I pleaded ignorance, and told her that, due in part to our friendship, I wouldn’t in a million years have thought that she was scoping me out in that fashion. Lesson learned. I’m just going to say it, guys: If a woman makes repeated mention of her tongue piercing, she may be willing to suck your cock.
Oh, and she had a boyfriend at the time. So there was also that.
Some years later, there was a grad student with whom I was friendly. I’d known her for a year or so, as she had been a T.A. in one of my classes. She was a couple years older than me, which probably made her twenty-four or twenty-five. She was pretty, bespectacled with black hair usually tied back in a pony tail. We’d talked on several occasions, and we seemed to have a lot in common, notably comics and movies. At the time, I was content to consider her a friend, especially given that I was dating someone semi-seriously.
That’s part of the reason why I missed her signals. They weren’t overt signals, really; sometimes I’d be hanging out in the cafeteria or on the quad with a few friends. She’d come up and say hi, and despite the fact that she knew some of my friends it was clear that she was saying hi just to me. I didn’t realize this was a sign of interest, and in fact I’m not sure I even noticed that she was only addressing me. But my friends noticed, and once again it took an unbiased male to bring to my attention exactly what was happening.
As previously stated, I was technically unavailable. Though you might not believe it, I wasn’t the sort of guy who was constantly on the prowl for other women. Therefore, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to realize that she was interested in me. This actually happened a lot while I was in a relationship; actively dating someone usually boosts one’s confidence, and regular sex takes away some of the urgent “I need to get laid” desperation. Both of these factors increase a man’s sex appeal. Therefore, attached men are frequently flirted with, whether they realize it or not.
After my friend brought to my attention the grad student’s behavior, I observed for a couple weeks, and came to the conclusion that he was right. She and I hooked up a couple times when I was single. Unlike my old elementary school friend, however, she was most definitely not capable of separating love and sex. Which sucks.
I’m not clueless solely when it comes to reading signals sent by single women. In my mid-twenties I missed an opportunity to have a threesome with a married couple.
I’ve blogged about this incident in greater depth, but suffice it to say that the same social constraints that caused me to overlook opportunities with the aforementioned single women also led to my being a spectator while two of my friends had sex, even though they were open to more. Look, they didn’t make an actual verbal invitation, and I didn’t want to get my ass kicked.
In conclusion, misinterpreting or overlooking a sexual or romantic signal is something that happens to most of us at one time or another. There’s a very fine line between being so clueless that you miss an obvious overture, and being so clueless that you see one when it has not been made.
Great conversation we had 😉 and I love your perspective on the topic.
Hey! I need that pin!
I will say that girls in general are tricky because we usually want the guy to make the first move, BUT it has to be in a way we are receptive to. Too over the top or too creepy and we cringe and run!
Neo has been my litmus test when it comes to being flirted with. He will tell me “that guy was flirting with you” in a grocery store or wherever. And usually I will be SO shocked and tell him he’s completely insane, that it most certainly did NOT happen.
But, as time goes on I have to trust his very good judgement (he is insanely good at picking out social cues of all kinds) and I will now actually consider it a possibility when he points it out.
Now, when I’m on my own…this is new territory. I usually want to keep my head to the ground and just try not to trip over myself. LOL! Blogging and Twitter have helped me in this area. And of course, I always have Neo to be my judge.
I love my husband but he is CLUELESS to when he is being flirted with. To the point I nearly whooped a girl in a bar because he just doesn’t consider himself attractive. Now in his defense when he was with his first wife, he did not care about his looks or himself. When they split even I didn’t recognize him and he was present at the birth of my oldest and his godfather. Yeah.. HUGE change. So physically he has changed, mentally I still have to be going HELLOOOOO she is hitting on you. Which is a lot of the reason why when we swing I am the one to approach his partners because he is too scared to.
I love the way your mind works Jack. Jake has been working on being better and picking up social signals of late and it is paying off for him. I feel like I am more in tune with this kind of thing although I often hold back from ACTING on a signal because I am pathetically shy.
Your stories about your college experience with other couples struck a chord. When I was that age I was desperate to explore with another woman. One night I shared a room with another girl at a mutual friend’s house. She kept saying things like “I wonder what it would be like to kiss another girl” etc. Stupid me said “I dunno and went to sleep” I have squirmed every time I thought about that incident.
I loved this post. I’m like that now. Someone has to come right out and say something before I know that they’re hitting on me or whatever. But I’m a wuss. I’d much rather not understand and then beat myself up later than misinterpret them and be wrong. One day, I will learn to ask – and probably ruin the mood entirely, lol.