• Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    Me, casually interacting without any actual romantic interest whatsoever: *Flirt Level: Legend*

    My wife, who I adore: “Flirt with me!”

    Me: “You are pretty and stuff.”

    It’s so difficult to flirt when all I’m thinking is “I love you more than life itself.”

  • Azuth@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    I feel this. I’m not socially awkward, can speak in front of a crowd just fine, but my brain just can’t figure out what “flirting” actually is. I’m aware it’s a form of conversation different from normal talking that expresses attraction, but as for how it’s different, how to do it etc.

    I’m in the dark and no friend of mine has been able to give a clear answer.

    • mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Flirting is a natural first step in human reproductive strategy. It is composed of several back and forth fitness tests that act as a filter for quality partners.

      I know it doesn’t seem like this but it really is.

      First you need to be accurately aware of what your best physical features are, yes I know it sounds petty but humans first check of ‘hey do I want to bang them?’ is always a physical once-over.

      If you have full lips, smile and talk in animate ways, giving them a chance to focus on your face.

      If you have gorgeous hair, it helps to touch or play with it a little, show off your silky locks.

      If you have nice forearms (yes some people are way into that) then wear short sleeved shirts and occasionally touch (or better yet, get them to touch) your arm, drawing their attention to it.

      Now for the talking:

      Ignore cheesy pickup lines unless everyone is already drunk and/or friendly, you want to be sincerely interested in hearing about their life. This is probably your most potent flirt: legit being interested in them as a person.

      It’s sad that this has to come after physical check IRL but you can sometimes bypass that online.

      Don’t be eager to share aggrandizing anecdotes about yourself, this is almost always a turn off. On the other hand, if you can get a wingman/woman to occasionally drop a few tasteful mentions of cool things you’ve done, that can work really well.

      Compliment them on things that they have put effort into, and contrary to popular belief that doesn’t always mean her appearance. Naturally hot girls will have been told on the daily since toddlerhood that they are pretty so they are tired of it but instead may respond well to compliments on her choice of dress, as this something they choose and likely have spent a good part of their life learning how to maximize the effects of their outfits. This works ESPECIALLY on 9s and 10s but you need to be up on fashion for it to impact the best.

      Naturally hot guys on the other hand aren’t so guaranteed, some of them have never been made to feel hot so if this is your angle then you can try complimenting their looks and see where it goes, but again the real hook is complimenting something they obviously put effort into.

      Humor: If you have a good sense of humor, it works like the top mentioned ‘physical bests’ because humor, I joke you not, is a great reproductive fitness test as it indicates a clever mind. If someone is laughing sincerely with you in a flirty situation, there is a good chance they want to bang your stuffing out.

      People who laugh easily and deeply, over things that others also fund funny, come off as relaxed and interesting.

      Not all humor works of course, but this is part of the fitness tests. If someone you are on a date with starts cracking cruel or bigoted jokes, you know where their mind is. Also: don’t do these things yourself, but that goes without saying.

      Next, if you are getting positive signs: Smiles while sideways glancing, lip displays (like how women look in lipstick ads), ‘pigeon toe-ing’ (google it, it’s hard to explain, also it’s mostly a woman’s sign. Men’s version of pigeon toe is them leaning forward in the chair, interested) then it is time to take a big risk: Lightly touching their arm or shoulder. Also keep in mind YOU should be giving off these kind of things too, sideways glances at their hair or outfit (avoid constant boobvision, they know you’re staring), cute little fluff statements that almost but not quite approach being cheesy pickup lines

      This is the real test, you will see how your touch causes them to react. If there is EVEN the SLIGHTEST bit of coldness then back down and go back to conversation. You can almost feel in the texture of their skin whether or not they want you to touch them. If you live with a cat or a dog you may be familiar how they can make their skin kind of rough in the places they want you to scritch, but kind of slip out from under your hand when they don’t, that’s the same with humans just a bit harder to notice.

      If the genuine interest, flirty looks, and positive touch response are all there, congrats you have successfully flirted!

      • MantidSys@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        It’s times like these that I’m glad I am autistic. You neurotypicals really over-complicate things and make life difficult for yourselves.

        How to flirt as an autistic person: make a friend over shared interests, spend time together sharing that interest, realize they’re enjoyable to be around, communicate clearly “I enjoy spending time with you, let’s do it more often”, slowly morph into a relationship out of convenience. Done.

        I cannot understand NT mind-games and obsessive preening. Don’t you get frustrated with it? And to think - someone who puts that much effort into judging you upfront is likely to keep judging things about you all your life, with no end to playing games… Stressful, no thank you.

        • cole@lemdro.id
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          9 months ago

          neurotypical people do this too lol. everyone is a bit different. although I’m not neurotypical so I guess take that with a grain of salt

          • mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            If humanity can make it another 100k years I think the spectrum and NT people will diverge to the point of being separate species, and if anything about hominid history tells me, one branch will club the other to death at some point.

            I was thinking what a functioning society of people all possessing Down’s Syndrome would look like if human history had taken a strange turn at the bottleneck, or the same circumstance for conditions like Tourette’s.

            Personally I think that neurodivergent people may be evolutionary solutions to very specific survival hurdles, and that we have not been facing these hurdles long enough for natural selection to smooth out the side effects. It’s all very confusing at the individual level in a species specialization event as none of us will live long enough to see even the glimmerings of whatever shift in human existence that our daily struggles will initiate.

            • cole@lemdro.id
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              9 months ago

              I think nothing has ever been enough of a hindrance to be selected out evolutionarily which is why non-neurotypical people exist. Just my head theory though

        • mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I know, I’m on the spectrum too. This data is really the results of years of studying and a minor in psych to fit in.

          And it isn’t NTs making things difficult, it’s our biological drives. We have them too, just we find fitness tests exhausting and unnecessary and are far more motivated by good conversation than full lips or wide limbal rings.

          It’s a sad truth that most people don’t follow the ‘getting slowly to know each other’, and it is true that this kind of method works well with some, not just autists, but the majority of people are swimming in a sea of ten thousand little unnoticed fitness checks. Again this usually isn’t conscious, it’s not like NTs have a list of things they consciously tick off.

          It’s more of an aggregate result, and is of course intensely subjective.

          Yes it is exhausting to keep up with it, but once you understand the biological foundation, you start to feel a bit more sympathetic to NTs that they are a lot more beholden to these biological drives than we are.

          Let me use the butterfly metaphor:

          So butterflies have a very limited time to reproduce, and since they only get one stab at it, it is very much in the best interest to quickly find the best possible mate.

          This is where mating dances come in. Both butterflies want the best possible mate, and for those species that usually means someone who is a really good flyer. Flying takes a lot of energy and is a great indicator of general health. I’m sure coloration comes in as well but that’s not so much the focus here.

          They keep chasing and fleeing each other to see how good and fast a flyer the other is. In my mind they are getting more and more turned on by how good their partner can dodge and chase until if both butterflies are satisfied then they share genes and go off to lay eggs before they die. It may seem exhausting but it serves a very important purpose of making sure your kids have the best chance at life. It’s also likely not conscious, just a triggered series of behaviors.

          My hypothesis for spectrum existers is that biologically we ‘know’ that the best possible survival tactic is being smart, and that this rates higher than any amount of full hips, large lips, limbal rings and physique. So in-depth conversation on complicated topics are major turn ons for us.

    • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      It’s generally when someone is hinting at personal interest beyond the immediate conversation, or otherwise an overt complement where they might not normally show up. Complements are not flirting in their own right, but they can show up readily if someone is either genuinely interested or romantically interested. Hopefully, it won’t be hard to parse between actual direct interest in a topic and, “hey I just want more attention from you and this topic is my in.”.

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    9 months ago

    those three dots aren’t me trying to think of what to write those three dots are me starting to reply and then having a panic attack cause girl pretty

  • GluWu@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Ascii hex is hot but if you can flirt in binary that’s pretty attractive too.

    49 20 6E 65 65 64 20 74 6F 20 63 75 6D

      • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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        9 months ago

        Not to worry I will teach you!

        Hexadecimal is a method of representing numbers much like the decimal you’re probably used to, only it’s base 16 instead of base 10. It’s used a lot in computer science since one digit of hexadecimal exactly corresponds to four digits of binary and that makes it really easy to write long sequences of binary without wearing out your hand.

        In order to explain base 16, I need to tell you how base 10 works first so you have a point of comparison. This’ll be a bunch of stuff you already know but bear with me. With base 10, you add a new digit every time you count past 9, and each digit in a number is worth 10 times the one to the right of it. Starting at the right you have the ones place, then the tens place, then the hundreds place (10 times 10), then the thousands place (10 times 10 times 10), and so on. The number 349, for example, can be written as 3 hundreds, 4 tens, and 9 ones (3*100 + 4*10 + 5). The thing is, there’s nothing magical about the number 10. You can pick any number you like and have each digit worth that many times the previous, and add a new digit each time you count past one less than that number. In base 16, you add a new digit each time you count past 15, and you have the ones place, to the right of that is the sixteens place, then the 256s place (16 times 16), then the 4096s place (16 times 16 times 16), and so on. The number three hundred and forty nine from earlier can be written as one 256, five sixteens, and 13 ones (1*256 + 5*16 + 13). But wait – 13 ones? How do we write that in a single digit? This is where computer scientists had to get inventive. For the digits 0 through 9, we just use the regular digits, but for 10 through 15 we use A through F. So the number 349 (base 10) is written as 15D in hexadecimal (again, that’s one 256, five 16s, and D ones (A=10, B=11, C=12, D=13)). It’s also common practice to write 0x before a hexadecimal number so it’s clear it’s not a decimal one in case the number doesn’t happen to have any letters in it, so it would more properly be 0x15D.

        Got all that? Good, let’s press on.

        Now we need to talk about representing letters using hexadecimal. Long story short, the only thing computers know how to deal with is numbers. Any other kind of data you want them to interact with (text, images, audio, etc.) has to be converted into a sequence of numbers first. The most obvious way to do this for text is to just say 1=A, 2=B etc. but then you kind of run into a wall when you want to add lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation etc. Some very smart computer scientists in the 1960s came up with a standard way of mapping basically every key on your keyboard to a number between 0 and 127. (That may seem oddly specific, but it’s a perfectly round number in binary.) They called it the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII, and it’s still in use today (albeit in an expanded form called Unicode that allows non-English letters, emoji etc., that maps each character to a number between 0 and 2147483647).

        It just so happens that a number between 0 and 255, such as a single letter in ASCII, can be represented using two hex digits. For this reason, any hex string that encodes ASCII will be divided into pairs of digits. The OP might have been kind enough to put spaces between the pairs like you see here, they might not. If they don’t, you’ll have to do it in your head; i.e. 4A5C204E becomes 4A 5C 20 4E. (If there are an odd number of digits total, it’s not valid ASCII.) A good way to make sure you’re counting right is that with the exception of 20 (ASCII space) the first digit of every pair will be either 4, 5, 6, or 7.

        While ASCII can encode any letter, number, or punctuation on your keyboard, most hex you encounter on the internet will only be letters and spaces. For this there are three things you need to know:

        Space = 0x20
        Capital A = 0x41
        Lowercase A = 0x61

        Every letter after that, you’ll just count in hexadecimal till you reach it; e.g. 42 = capital B, 43 = capital C, …, 49 = I, 4A = J, …, 4F = O, 50 = P, …, 5A = Z. Same thing for the lowercase letters only start at 0x61. Space is always 0x20. The letters that start with 4 or 6 and the second digit is between 0 and 9 are easy since it’s just that letter of the alphabet, i.e. the fifth letter of the alphabet is E so 45 = E and 65 = e.

        Got all that? Congrats! Now you can read hex without using a converter!

        Here’s OP’s original message:
        49 20 6E 65 65 64 20 74 6F 20 63 75 6D

        49 = capital I
        20 = space
        6E = lowercase N
        65 = lowercase E
        etc. etc.
        The first three words are “I need to”. I’ll leave decoding the last three pairs up to you.

        (Sorry if this explanation was a bit rambly – it’s late in the day and I’m on mobile)

  • Miss Brainfarts@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    9 months ago

    Just be adorable and continue to not know what to say, that works too, kitten. You won’t be able to talk much once I put everything on you, anyway.