The Right Signs and Signals

In the looking for a boyfriend article, we gave the example of two girls flirting...

The girl with her vision intact knew which guys were showing interest in her and chose to encourage them to approach. The eye contact, the smile, the "smile with your eyes" are all approaches that are both good and effective.

The goal of flirting is to give a man enough encouragement to make him approach and swap some small talk and phone numbers. Too subtle and the intended target might not notice. A slight rising of intensity to ensure that a man notices is okay, like a simple beckoning him over, a broader smile, but too high and flirting ceases to be flirting and becomes something else entirely.

The girl in the example is looking for a date, not a one night stand, so gives out sufficient encouragement to bring the men to her side. A foolish girl with low self esteem or a craving for attention could send out signals that say "all you can eat buffet, come get it!" - examples of this would include but are not limited to shaking their booty while looking round and making eye contact, licking your lips provocatively while making eye contact with a man or moving your hands over your body in a sensual way during the scan of the room.

Such a girl would be guaranteed attention, which is not in doubt, but the attention would similarly be guaranteed to be not from guys who would like or expect a meaningful long term relationship.

Similarly, but more strangely, there are cases of girls who send out signals of encouragement (even just of an equivalent intensity of the girl in the example) indiscriminately in order to ensure that lots of men approach her, buy her drinks, give her lots of attention, dance near her and generally give her an ego boost. This is unhealthy on several levels; first, accepting drinks from lots of strange men could dramatically increase the odds of one of them spiking her drink from a statistical point of view. Secondly if these men all believe that she was specifically flirting with them, and only them, they will consider the other men an intrusion, but as the other men have the same idea they will also be reluctant to back down - it could lead to fights breaking out - and all because the girl wanted a bit too much male attention.

In summary while a modest amount of flirting is a healthy (and effective) thing, it is easy to go too far and turn it into a bad thing. Have enough respect for yourself to not cheapen yourself by putting on some sort of erotic display only to attract the wrong sort of attention.

Also when you do show signs of flirting, make it specific to one man at a time rather than being indiscriminate, as you don’t want to cause male rivalries or other problems.

An article inspired by Richard Ford