593 - The Lost Science of Flirting

Is flirting harder than it used to be?

This is a research-heavy topic, but we’ve narrowed it down to 12 studies to focus on for this episode on flirting. Based on this research, in-person meetings started to decline around 1995, when the internet started becoming more popular.

Shockingly, based on a 2015 study by Hall, Xing, and Brooks with 52 pairs of strangers involved, only 28% of the time was someone accurate when thinking the other person was flirting with them. Multiple studies back up this finding that we are generally poor at knowing when we are being flirted with. Research found that people tend to be vague when flirting to avoid pressuring the other person.

As for feeling as though they can say no, people generally feel they can, but the cost of saying no varies. Additionally, telling the other person “but you’re free to say no” did not actually help. It did not make someone more comfortable refusing, despite that being the intent.

What does a no look like?

While a real acceptance is quick, a refusal is built from four things:

• A delay, or taking a moment to produce the answer.

• A hedge, such as “well...”, “um…”, “let me think…”

• A softener, such as a compliment or apology.

• A reason, typically scheduling.

Scheduling costs nothing, which is why it’s so often used as a reason. Instead of telling someone to their face you’re not attracted to them, a scheduling conflict is available to everyone.

Some tools for effective flirting:

1. Make your flirting clearer. Be direct about your interest, like saying “I really liked talking with you, I’d like to do this again on purpose sometime.” This shows clarity about your interest without pressure for an immediate answer.

2. Make no response a complete answer. For example, “I’d really like to see you again. I’m going to this thing on Thursday and the invite’s open if you want it.”

3. Hand them an exit line in advance. If they’ve mentioned being busy, offer it back. “I’d love to hang out, unless you’re too busy; I know you’ve got a lot going on.”

4. Don’t set a deadline.

5. Don’t withdraw warmth. If they don’t take you up on it, keep being warm, friendly, and polite. Pull back the flirting if it’s unwelcome, but not the warmth. You’re building a reputation as someone who is safe to say no to, which is what makes future yeses possible.

What actually does work when flirting?

Unfortunately, mirroring doesn’t work. A 1998 study on mirroring body language ended up being unable to “demonstrate a relationship between synchronization defined in terms of movement echo or position mirroring and subjective experience of pleasure and interest.” Mirroring did happen in some of the pairs observed, but it didn’t track attraction or enjoyment.

However, based on a different study, disclosing a stigmatized fact about yourself sooner rather than later produced more liking. This is relevant in particular for non-monogamous folks, who may feel unsure of when to disclose their non-monogamy. Late disclosure creates room for the other person to feel deceived, even when nothing was owed to them.

As for the best opening line, a 2010 study found that being introduced by a third party was most effective when meeting someone, but if a third party isn’t applicable, just saying your name worked extremely well.

A compliment, attempted joke, and cheesy pickup line rated the lowest of all. Joking during an interaction does signal people getting along and enjoying themselves, but as an opener, it’s not that effective.

Transcript

If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: The one other key here is if you do get the silence or that hesitation of a no, is to make sure that you don't withdraw your warmth from them if you want to build up that reputation of being someone with no consequences.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: Your warmth is not conditional. Maybe if you've been flirting really hard, back that off a little bit because maybe they don't want you to, but not the warmth. Don't stop being nice or smiling or being polite or things like that, because that's just reinforcing the idea that there are consequences. You told me there weren't, but I see that there are. Welcome to the Multiamory Podcast. I'm Jase.

Emily: I'm Emily.

Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker Winston.

Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.

Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here for you.

Jase: Forms I know I did, forcing me to form myself to fit.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about the lost art of flirting. Why does flirting feel harder now than it used to? Is it harder now? Are we doing it more? Are we doing it less? In this episode, I found way more research than I could possibly fit into this. I had to trim this down to just 12 studies we're going to talk about today.

Dedeker: Just a meager 12 studies for you podcast listeners.

Emily: Is that the most we've ever done on a single episode?

Dedeker: It might be.

Jase: It's close.

Dedeker: We can get into the weeds about if we do meta-analyses that look at hundreds of studies at once, but I don't know if that counts.

Jase: So I'm going to say though, we're not going to get really dry just talking about lots of technical details. It's more that as I was looking into this, I was finding so many different interesting angles that have been studied when it comes to flirting and rejection and propositioning and everything that goes into that. So it's been fascinating. Basically, from the research, there's three things that can come from studies in general. And I would say one is they can give you a new idea, a new way of thinking about something. Two is that they can help you let go of a fear, and we'll see some of that. And then the other is knocking down an assumption that you might have been basing decisions around that's not actually true. And in this episode, we've got all three of those back to back. It's going to be a blast.

Dedeker: I'm excited. I don't think we've talked much about flirting on this show with a specific focus. You would think that poly people would be really good at flirting, but I don't know if we are compared to the general population.

Jase: And these are all good questions. So this is one that I wanted to do because I had that question of, I don't know how to flirt anymore, or do I, or do I not? I don't know. And I was really scared of looking into it too because it's also an area where there's a lot of dubious advice out there. And what's the difference between flirting and being a salesperson, or flirting and being a pickup artist, or what differentiates this? Because there's a lot of overlap there, right? You're hoping someone wants something that you're offering. There's a lot of similarity there.

Dedeker: I run into that in Japanese, trying to even talk about flirting as a topic in Japanese, because the word that is always taught to me when I ask, how do you say flirting in Japanese is nanpa. But as I've come to learn, nanpa is more pickup.

Emily: Like pickup dudes.

Dedeker: And I'm like, well, sure, I guess that's part of it, but that's not really what I'm going for. So that is interesting.

Jase: I also learned that they don't really have a word for cuddling in Japanese. In Japanese, yeah, that it's often translated as incha incha, but that means more like getting all makey outy, and it's not the same as cuddling, which can be platonic, right? So it's just some fun nuance. Anyway, this is not about—

Dedeker: We'll do a whole bonus episode about Japanese flirting words some other time.

Jase: But so to set the stage for some of the first part of this is for you two, what was the last time that you were certain that someone flirted with you, and how did you know?

Emily: Well, I've been more active on the apps recently, and actually about dates and stuff. I've been much more active in an environment where it is expected that flirting will happen. So it's a little bit less of, oh, I'm just out at a bar and someone starts talking to me, and is it flirting? I don't know. So I've been more in a very distinct environment where, yes, we're vibing, we're riffing, we're bantering, it's flirting.

Jase: Okay, while we go to Emily, Dedeker, can you think about when was the last time that wasn't already a date, okay, where you knew for certain someone was flirting with you?

Dedeker: I'll think about it.

Jase: Okay, Emily, to you.

Emily: Okay, the answer to that question is probably at Skirt Club, and that's not a date, but it is an environment where a lot of people are getting together to engage in flirtatious behavior, etc. and beyond.

Jase: Yeah.

Emily: But I will say there are so many people there that you get yourself in a situation where you start maybe talking to several people and then breaking off and talking to someone, and then from there seeing, do we vibe with one another?

Dedeker: Mm-hmm.

Emily: Are we interested in engaging further physically in that regard? But I think that a lot of flirting at times, it can, not always, but flirting does sort of involve sensual feeling, not just intellectual, but I feel like it crosses over more into flirting when maybe a brush of an arm occurs.

Jase: A touch.

Dedeker: Okay.

Emily: Like, a physical aspect. Yeah, a slight physical aspect to it that kind of pushes it into the realm of we are not just speaking about something hypothetically, but really starting to go there in actuality. So that's a long answer for, like, last year.

Jase: Okay.

Dedeker: Okay, for me last time, all the memories that are coming up are moments where it was like, oh, I know this other person is flirting with me because I flirted first and they responded well. So now I know. It was a little bit of a Schrödinger's flirt of, cannot tell if interested, so I'm going to open the box and oh, they reciprocated. Great. Now I know.

Jase: Fascinating. Okay. This is great. This is great data. I love this. For myself, it was an experience maybe less than a year ago where I did not know at the time that the person was flirting with me until later when they asked me out. And then looking back, I was like, oh, I had kind of wondered, but I had thought, no, that can't be flirting. And it wasn't until later that it was like, okay, that was flirting. But I wasn't sure beforehand. So this is a great segue to get into here. And the part I want to start with is the whole thing of are we flirting less than we used to just in general as a society? And at least in terms of the in-person flirting that we've been talking about, the answer is, yeah, we're flirting less. And the way to think about it is that it's just that we're not in places to flirt anymore. We're meeting people in other ways. And what's interesting about this, because I expected this to be tied to something like online dating or tied to MeToo making people more scared to flirt at workplaces or other social situations like that. And the study shows— nope, this had happened way before either of those.

Emily: Really?

Jase: Yes.

Dedeker: Was it connected to the internet?

Jase: So yeah, kind of. So here's the crazy thing. So meeting online— and this is from a study by Rosenfeld, Thomas, and Hausen from 2019— that's two waves of a nationally representative US survey covering over 5,000 heterosexual couples. And then asking them about how they met. So it's retroactively constructing historical data from present-day couples. And so the meeting times of these go from the 1940s up through 2017.

Dedeker: Okay, that's a big data set.

Jase: Yeah, well, it's over 5,000 heterosexual couples, so that's over 10,000 people. So that's just the number of couples. And looking back, and so just to give you some starting data here, is that meeting online kind of started in '95, and in '95 it was about 2% of the couples that were currently together had met online back then. And then in 2017, it was 39%. So the meeting online surpassed the number who met through friends, which was the leading one beforehand, around 2013. So like, well before what I would see is the full heyday of everyone's on apps, which I would put a little bit more recent than 2013. But that's where it surpassed that. More people were meeting online than through their friends.

Dedeker: Hmm.

Jase: And during that time, every in-person channel for meeting and flirting, which is like friends, coworkers, church, all of those fell by anywhere from a third to a half. And what's interesting is that in terms of when they asked them, where did you meet your partner, the one thing that looked like the exception was bars. Restaurants that actually went up. But then when they looked at the data more, those people had actually met online first. It was just their first date was their first—

Emily: They were meeting there.

Jase: And so that's also been declining of actually just meeting someone at a bar or a restaurant.

Dedeker: I can imagine there's also an arc of way early when we get into the '90s, the nascent age of online dating where it was still considered sketch and maybe a little bit shameful to have met online, dating online. And so I imagine there's also an arc of people who are not leading with the fact that they met online, and maybe they are obfuscating by saying, oh yeah, we met at this bar. Yes, not mentioning the fact that no, it was on Match or Plenty of Fish or whatever it was back in the day.

Jase: And so as far as those causes that I thought, which is like phones or MeToo, is that this decline started in '95, which is 22 years before MeToo and a decade before the iPhone came out.

Emily: Yeah, right.

Jase: And way before we all had some kind of smartphone. So yeah, apps, but not exactly apps. It was like web is sort of what started this trend even before it was all swiping on our phones.

Emily: Are less people also meeting at school and at work? Because I feel like those two places, at least in certain age demographics, those are two places where people meet their eventual spouse or person that they're dating for a period of time.

Jase: Yes, I don't have data about school. That is an interesting one. But coworkers did fall from 19% to 11% of the people met through coworkers.

Emily: And that was even back in the day too.

Jase: That's comparing '95 to 2017. That it fell from 19% meeting through coworkers or being a coworker down to 11%. So all of them fell except for web, which just grew.

Emily: Yeah, and that's fascinating to me as well because I could see meeting at work declining since the rise of stay-at-home, hybrid, work-from-home situation. But I don't think that was really happening even in 2017. So fascinating.

Dedeker: Yeah.

Jase: So then another piece of this, just as a side note, actually, this is a bonus study because this one got cut from my final report because I had too many studies in here. But just a quick mention is that there was one specifically about MeToo. And asking people how they felt in the workplace, if they felt like it was more complicated to flirt or know the rules of flirting or being interested in people in the workplace. And that the headline number was that 51% of men said it was more difficult. But when you broke that down, that was being biased by men over 65, 67% of those saying it's harder. But of men under 35, actually fewer said it was harder afterward than not, only 41%. So of the people actually in dating age didn't experience that to be this blocker or this sudden thing that complicated things. Now, whether that means they're still doing it or not, maybe it simplified it by just saying, now I just don't do it, that I don't know. Or maybe those are the demographics more likely to already be on the apps, and so they're less worried about it. I'm not sure, but I just thought that was interesting, that there was actually evidence that contradicted the idea that MeToo made things more complicated, which I did not expect. I did not expect that going in. Okay, so now this part goes to what we talked about a little bit, which is how do you know someone's flirting with you? The headline number here is that if someone is flirting with you, you're likely to correctly identify that they're flirting with you about 28% of the time.

Emily: That's it?

Dedeker: That's less than a coin toss.

Emily: Yes, way less.

Dedeker: I thought for sure a coin toss would be optimistic.

Jase: No.

Emily: Why are we so bad at that?

Jase: Why are we so bad at it? That's a good question. So for this study, this is from Hall, Xing, and Brooks in 2015, and they had 52 pairs of opposite-sex strangers. Again, most of this research, with only one exception, is all heterosexual people with no exceptions, right? So 52 pairs of opposite-sex strangers, 104 people total, were left in a room and told to talk for 10 to 12 minutes. And then afterward, they were privately asked, "Were you flirting with that person? And did you think they flirted with you?" Because both sides reported whether they were or not, they were able to use those to compare. And basically, the takeaway was if someone was flirting, their partner thought they were being flirted with only 28% of the time. If someone was not flirting with you, people did tend to correctly interpret they were not being flirted with, but that just makes sense with the reciprocal of the other.

Dedeker: Sure.

Jase: 84% of the time they correctly identified they were not being flirted with. But if you look at 28% and 84%, it's basically just the flip. It's like we randomly think someone's flirting with us a quarter of the time and we're wrong almost all the time. Wow. Which is wild.

Emily: You'd think that from an evolutionary standpoint we would be better at that.

Jase: You would think so.

Emily: Because flirting is sort of the precursor to everything.

Dedeker: But that's so, but it's also so socially influenced and culturally influenced, right? It's not universal to human beings anymore. What are the socially acceptable and socially clear signals of interest?

Jase: And that's an interesting piece here. So with this, of the 104 people in the study, only 25 of those actually tried to flirt at all. So there's another factor here, right?

Dedeker: That these—

Jase: This was not a go here to flirt. This was just, we're putting you with— they did identify people that were attractive according to I don't know what metric, but they tried to pair people up with other attractive people to encourage flirting. But they didn't preface that. They didn't tell them this was about flirting. It was just have a conversation, right?

Dedeker: Okay.

Jase: So there is a little bit of a small sample when it actually comes to the number of people flirting. So take that with a grain of salt. But there have been multiple other studies since then, such as this one by Samara and colleagues that filmed blind dates and then asked observers who in those wanted a second date.

Dedeker: Hmm.

Jase: And that observer was just random chance of which video they watched to identify whether they would have wanted a second date. Those people also were very bad at actually telling the flirting or the chemistry going on. That was from 2022. And then another one from 2018 by Boothby et al. They watched conversation tapes to try to predict how much people liked each other. And they did that all based off of frame by frame coding their body language and movements and stuff to determine whether they liked the other person, but then comparing that to the participants themselves identifying whether they thought the person liked them or not. They also were really bad at telling.

Emily: So we're not good at seeing if other people are flirting with you either, which is unfortunate.

Jase: We're bad at identifying flirting, period, I guess is the takeaway, whether it's to us or to someone else.

Emily: If a friend is coming along to a bar and is helping to wingman and then they say to you, oh, that guy was flirting with you, but they actually weren't. That's really unfortunate. Or vice versa.

Jase: Sure.

Emily: I don't know. Goodness.

Jase: And then I want to go to the evolution piece that you mentioned, shouldn't we have evolved to be better at this? So they weren't looking at that specifically, but there is this longstanding evo psych claim called error management theory, which I'm sure you've heard variations on this, but the theory goes that men supposedly should be biased to overestimate women's sexual interest in them because historically a missed opportunity to procreate would cost more than a false alarm in terms of your genes getting passed on, right?

Emily: Okay.

Jase: If true, men should be better at catching female flirting than women are at catching male flirting. But in studies from Hall and colleagues—

Dedeker: Sorry, just for the listeners, mine and Emily's faces are just so scrunched up at that.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: And so this study Hall and colleagues tested it directly, where they cut these 26 one-minute clips from conversations and then had strangers try to judge whether the people were flirting, specifically trying to identify this trait. And they found no connection at all, that men and women are not any better than each other at detecting flirting in heterosexual interactions. So we're equally bad at it.

Dedeker: Okay.

Jase: In theirs, they found they got it right 38% of the time and 33% of the time rather than 28. So a little bit better, but still not great.

Emily: Not a lot better.

Jase: So basically that one's totally debunked. That theory just does not hold up as a lot of evo psych that we've talked about on this show does not hold up.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: Well, so one more quick one before we move on to part 2, which is if this is true, why don't we just say what we want plainly?

Emily: Yeah, actually that's worked very well for me in the past.

Dedeker: I know.

Jase: Okay, that's interesting.

Dedeker: Has it worked well for me in the past? I think it's worked 50/50. But to circle back around to what I said at the top about poly people, I do think poly people are better at saying what they want plainly instead of dropping in the more indirect flirtatious indicators of interest, perhaps.

Jase: Okay, so we're going to dive into this one a little bit more in part 2 as well, but to tee us up for that, this study by Lee and Pinker in 2010 in Psychological Review they gave people scenarios and then asked them, what would you say in this scenario? And the scenarios were starting a relationship, propositioning someone for a relationship, escalating a relationship, or breaking up a relationship.

Dedeker: It was what, just open, just like essay question style? What would you say? Or was it multiple choice?

Jase: No, it was like write a script of what you would say.

Emily: Oh God.

Jase: To ask someone out at the end of a date. So it's not a cold walk-up, but at the end of a date, you want to take them home.

Dedeker: Just generically, in a vacuum, not tied to a specific person, just what do you think you'd say?

Jase: What do you think you'd say? And what was interesting was comparing those three scenarios. What was interesting about this is that the one where people wrote the most directly what they wanted was in the breakup ones. Of course, when breaking up, people tended to be more clear. And that when it came to the propositioning, the asking at the end of a date, do you want to go home with me, or something like that, they were much more circumspect, much more roundabout in the way they went about these. And so basically, the theory here, and we're gonna get into more evidence for this in part 2, is that there's a reason for that, that that's a feature, not a bug. And the question is, who's it for? Is it intentionally vague so that if they say no, you're not hurt as much? Or is it so it's easier for them to say no and makes less of an awkward situation.

Emily: Hmm.

Jase: So that's something that goes a little bit against the idea of direct is always better. We're going to get into this a bit more in part 2, but first we're going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors for this show. Thank you so much to them for letting us do this show every week for free for all of you. And of course, if you would rather not get ads and join our amazing community and support our show the best way you can, go to Multiamory Podcast.com/join. We would love to have you sign up there. We have a sliding scale, and for as little as $5 a month, you can get ad-free episodes and get access to our amazing communities. This episode is brought to you by Uber Lube. Look, no matter who you are, what your body is like, what you like to do for fun, lube is the key to maximizing pleasure, whether that's by yourself or it's with partners. And if you're gonna lubricate, you want to be sure it's the best, highest quality lube made from body-safe ingredients. And for that, nothing beats Uber Lube. I swear, it is our absolute favorite.

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Jase: So coming back, one thing that was interesting in that previous study was that they identified that actually making a proposition request, or we could call it a flirt, a little bit vague, not super clear, is to make the other person feel more comfortable, is to avoid creating an awkward situation with them.

Dedeker: Avoid them feeling pressured, or at least it sounds like the intention is to avoid laying on pressure.

Jase: Yeah. And so to go with that, there's this study that I want us to focus on a little bit more here, which is by Bohns and DeVincent from 2019. And I'm not going to tell you the title of it yet because it gives away the conclusion. They took graduate students in a STEM program, and they found 277 out of this larger sample of 942 who'd been in one of these situations. So 176 of those recalled being the target of an unwanted advance, and then 101 of them recalled having made an advance that was not accepted, that was turned down. So both sides told their story, and then they answered the same questions. So one was about their own experience of that interaction, and the other was their guess about how the other person felt in that situation. And then in a second study, 385 people were then randomly assigned to read the same stories about an unwanted advance at work, either as the target or the person who made it. So this is coming from all of that data together, from people's own accounts and how they felt, and people just reading stories and how they think the people in the stories would feel. The findings is, of this, of the people who said no, who were the target of an advance, 23% of them said that they felt obligated to accept the advance.

Dedeker: Hmm. Rough.

Emily: Yeah, that's tough.

Jase: The people who had made those advances had put that estimate at 5%. Around 5% thought the other person might have felt obligated.

Dedeker: Oh, okay. That's rough.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: Okay.

Dedeker: That's a rough—

Emily: this is really fascinating information. See how people tick in general.

Jase: So next one here. 52% of the targets said that they tried to avoid that person afterward.

Dedeker: Oh.

Jase: Of the people who had asked and been turned down, only 7% noticed that and thought that their target had avoided them afterward.

Emily: My gosh.

Jase: This one's interesting too. Of the people who were asked, 54% of those talked to somebody else about it. Like, to a friend or coworker or something. The ones who had asked guessed maybe 13% had talked to someone else about it. And that one's interesting because that fear that someone else is going to talk to someone else about your failed advance is in other studies named as a fear that people have.

Emily: Interesting.

Jase: So it's interesting that we also then underestimate that. I would have thought it'd be the opposite. We would, because we're afraid of it, we would overestimate that.

Dedeker: Well, that is scary that we underestimate these things, but it turns out that there is a pretty high social cost to propositioning someone who doesn't want it. Let's all stop flirting. Let's just be done with it. Let's never flirt again.

Jase: And so that's the interesting piece here though, is about the ability to say no and the cost of saying no, and that those are not the same thing. And I think that when we talk about very explicit communication, I think we're often underestimating one and overestimating the other.

Dedeker: Hmm.

Jase: So here's the thing that's interesting. So between the two sides of the askers and the askies, the targets and the askers, the smallest gap, where they most aligned with each other, was on the question, could you have said no? So could they have said no, or could I have said no? And both groups, one was 5.27 out of 7 and the other was 5.86 out of 7. Almost identical, very close to each other. And both high, both a high number of people felt like I could have said no. The biggest gap though— so that was the smallest gap— the biggest gap was how uncomfortable were you about it.

Dedeker: Oh man, about saying no or just uncomfortable about the whole interaction?

Jase: About saying no. All of these were about saying no. All of these scenarios involved someone saying no, right? Whether it was from the asker's point of view or the asky's point of view. So again, on the scale out of 7, 4.24 was the average for people being asked about how uncomfortable they were out of 7. And the askers guessed it was around 2.92.

Dedeker: Wow.

Jase: Which is a lot lower than 4.24. And then here's the piece that I think some of you out there might be questioning, and that is gender.

Dedeker: I can make some guesses about the direction I would think that this would follow along.

Jase: Well, here's the interesting piece here, is that because this was a random survey and then asking people, have you been in either of these situations, and then to write about them, they found that women were far more likely to have been the target than men. But when women were the ones asking, they underestimated discomfort just as much as men did. Fascinating that there's no gender difference in how we mis-evaluate that.

Dedeker: Yeah, well, I think— this just makes me think of— I don't know if there's any research to back this up, but what we've seen anecdotally in certain non-monogamous spaces and in play spaces as well of sometimes women assuming— because of the way that we're socialized around sexuality, women assuming that they can be as forthcoming and bold and flirtatious and maybe even just straight up touching men at play events like without consent, right? And just assuming, oh, men are always down, they always want the attention, so it's okay. And that sort of counteracting—

Jase: Or that they're somehow more able to say no or more comfortable with it, maybe.

Dedeker: I don't know. Yeah, counteracting maybe what would be the normal human sensitivity to somebody else's discomfort.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: And it's interesting too because it relates to that whole hyperagency that we tend to assign to men and hypoagency that we assign to women. It's all tied up in here.

Dedeker: Yeah.

Jase: But there's a couple interesting takeaways that we could take from this, and we'll look at some more studies to back this up in a second. But one of those is that reiterating that people generally feel like they can say no, but they disagree on what the cost is, the emotional cost of that. And so telling someone, when you're asking them out, you can totally say no, is addressing a problem that's not actually the problem they have. It's not whether they can say no, it's that it's uncomfortable to do it.

Emily: Yeah, sure.

Jase: As a quick side note on this one, and this was a big surprise to me, but there was this study from 2023 on the effectiveness of the quote, "but you are free" technique. This is from Fillon, Souchet, Pascual, and Girandola. And this was an analysis specifically looking at this technique that was created called the "but you are free," which is the ask for the thing you want and say, "But you're free to say no."

Dedeker: Okay.

Jase: The idea being that that makes it better. And I'm like, "Okay, that makes sense to me. I think I've probably said something along those lines before." And what's interesting is in this study looking at it, they found that it did not help at all.

Emily: Oh, geez.

Dedeker: Mm-hmm.

Jase: And that if anything, it was just an effective way of getting a yes to be more likely. Rather than actually making that person more comfortable or more able to say no. It actually kind of has the opposite effect of what it claims to be doing.

Dedeker: Interesting.

Jase: But for the most part, it was a negligible effect. But if anything, it's actually a worse effect in terms of comfort. And there have been studies about this, like 7 studies showing it being effective. A lot of these were actually sponsored and done by the guy who created this. A lot of them have been flagged as potentially having—

Dedeker: Wait, hold on, so I'm— hold way back way up. Hold on. The guy who created the phrase "feel free to say no"— I've already got some—

Jase: "But you are free" technique is this technique of asking something with this.

Dedeker: The guy who created the phrase "but you're free to say no," right?

Emily: Yes.

Jase: He co-invented the technique.

Dedeker: He needed help on that one.

Emily: It was very difficult, Dedeker.

Dedeker: Oh my God. Okay.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: But anyway, a lot of those studies were actually flagged at risk of fabricated data, and then he even did a re-examination himself and failed to prove his own effect. So I just want to throw that out there as a little mythbuster if anyone's heard of that one before. If you've co-invented it yourself too, as Dedeker pointed out, you could have done—

Dedeker: Well, also, okay, maybe you don't have the answers to my many questions, including some choice questions I have for this guy and his co-inventor. Um, okay, because this makes me think about the research that I think— I forget if it's original to the Gottman Institute or if it's just research that other people have done that they cite frequently when it comes to initiating sex within relationships.

Jase: So this different context, different context.

Dedeker: Yes. But they talk about how when you very explicitly make it clear that there are no consequences to saying no, if you are trying to initiate sex, they find that those couples tend to have more sex. Ironically, in an environment where it's safer to say no, that these couples tend to feel more connected and have an easier time having sex when they both are ready to initiate or things like that. And so I would think surface level, if you're really explicit about making sure someone feels comfortable to say no, that that's overall a good thing.

Jase: Yes. And here's the challenge though, and here's the big issue, and that's also something I was a little surprised to find here, is that again, because it's not about ability to say no, it's about the cost of it, the emotional cost or social cost or whatever you might be worried about. And essentially what the research that I could find, all of it points to telling someone that there's no consequence doesn't help at all because we don't trust it.

Emily: Exactly.

Dedeker: Sure.

Jase: Because we've had experiences to the contrary.

Emily: And that safety that one feels in a relationship that's established to be able to say no is something that is built up over time. And when you don't have that, which I certainly have in a relationship, saying no feels very scary and you feel conflicted. Should I say yes just to get through it and then hopefully everything will be better on the other side? Or it's worse to say no as opposed to saying yes for a 10-minute whatever and just dealing with it. So that makes a lot of sense to me.

Jase: Yeah. And so I think that's the key part there is that the Gottman statistic about there not being consequences for saying no, absolutely true as you get to know someone. And I think that can be built up within a social group or within a relationship. But this episode is about when you don't have that history yet, right? We're still in the flirting— maybe we know each other through friends, but we don't have that level of social proof and history with each other. So the other part of this is that because we underestimate how uncomfortable the other person would feel to say no, we're actually more likely to misattribute their reluctance to them being interested but just not sure. It's the, "Well, I don't know. I'm a little busy that day. I'm not sure," versus the, "Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to do that." That we interpret that hesitancy as, "Oh yeah, they might still be interested. They're just not quite sure," because we underestimate how uncomfortable they might feel about saying no.

Dedeker: Okay, Jase, I feel like you're making a really good argument to never flirt.

Jase: I know, right?

Emily: Or just be very—

Jase: coming back around.

Emily: Sure, but wait a minute, you can't—

Dedeker: It's for baby duck, right?

Jase: Okay, so that's actually a good segue into this next one, which is how can we actually use this knowledge to our advantage though? To make the flirting better for everyone involved.

Dedeker: Yeah, how, Jase? I'm not seeing it.

Jase: Okay, so this comes from Kitzinger and Frith. This is actually from 1999. This is a little bit of an older study here. This one is a fairly small group of 58 students, and this was only women were involved in this particular study here. But I do think that these results hold up for everyone, in my opinion, anecdotally. So what this is, is they were looking at situations where people have accepted an advance and where people have turned it down. And looking at the shapes of those two different things. And the key finding here was that a real acceptance happens fast and it's plain, often arriving before the question is even done being asked.

Emily: Wait, what is that? Can you give me an example?

Jase: It's like that, "Hey, I'm having a great time with you. Would you want to get together sometime later?" Oh, yes, yes, please.

Dedeker: Thank God. I never thought you would ask.

Jase: Exactly. That.

Dedeker: Got it.

Emily: Okay.

Jase: It's fast, it's plain, it doesn't have a lot of thinking built into it. And that refusals are built from 4 things they identified in this particular study. The first is a delay, so it takes a little time to come up with your answer. Second is a hedge, so that's like a, well, um, hmm, let me think. Third is a softener, so that could be a compliment. Oh, that's so sweet. That would be lovely, but Or it could be an apology of, "Oh, I'm so sorry, but—" And then the fourth thing is a reason. And that reason tended to be scheduling, was the go-to thing people reached for.

Emily: "I gotta wake up really early in the morning tomorrow." "Oh, I got work tomorrow."

Jase: "Oh, I've been so busy with my doctoral thesis lately." Whatever it is. And so the key finding here is just the asymmetry between those two things.

Emily: He's just not that into you, right?

Jase: And so even just that beat of silence could be enough to give you that clue of, okay, this one's a no for now. Or even just a bare compliment, like, oh wow, you're so nice, without a yes, I'd love to. Or even just a slow, flat yeah is also not a yes.

Dedeker: I'm already crawling under the table just thinking about that scenario.

Jase: So one of the key things they found here too is that scheduling being such a common one is this, oh, I've got an early start tomorrow, whatever, that that's the most common because— and it's bullshit. Well, but because there's no cost to anyone. Again, we're both doing this weird cost-lowering negotiation here where we can sometimes flirt in an indirect way to try to lower cost, and then we also decline in an indirect way. Whereas we tend to accept in a pretty direct way.

Dedeker: Well, but it makes sense because then to the person's face you can't be like, "I'm really not attracted to you." "I'm really not feeling it," or "Not in a million years." It is a lot easier to just be like, "Sorry, really busy right now."

Jase: And then they found that in recorded conversations, when someone is asking, if you want to go out or you want to hang out again, something like that, they hit that pause the immediate reaction was almost always to sweeten the offer, which is, oh, it's really interesting. Or there's plenty of room, or, oh, it's really cool. I've been to this place lots of times. This restaurant's great. You'll love it. And the takeaway there is if you catch yourself upgrading your pitch, you already know you have already lost.

Emily: No, you already know your answer. Damn, this is great information, actually. This is rough. No, I think it's knowledge is power, Dedeker Winston.

Jase: It is power.

Dedeker: Yeah, it is. It is. It is.

Jase: It is. Now, one important thing to note about this study, and I do think this is more relevant than this little footnote makes it sound, and that is that this study was specifically looking at what makes up a refusal. Yes, they compared it to acceptances from these people's stories to get that direct and immediate, but most of it was based on what a refusal looks like. And so that's the delaying, hedging, softening and then giving a reason. What they didn't look at is how often those softeners and things happen before a yes. And so I'm thinking about this situation, where maybe you're caught off guard by this, or maybe you legitimately do just have a crazy schedule right now, that there's that situation if someone asks you out, I'm having a thing at my place next weekend, be great if you came. You're like, I don't know. I think there's this interesting push-pull between, as the asker, I'm being like, don't upgrade, don't try to upgrade your offer, just be like, okay, that's cool. I'm not gonna force you to say no, right? And I think that's one of the issues we get into with favoring explicit communication all the time, is assuming that an explicit no is the goal when we've seen that's very uncomfortable to do. That's fair. And so stop escalating, leave it open. But I do think it's worth acknowledging that they might find you later at that event or something and be like, actually, that does sound great. I would like to do that. But it's let them come to that on their own and not with you putting this pressure on them or keeping them in that spotlight. So we can maybe get into that a little bit later. But I do think it's something worth taking into account. And then the other big caveat is that this only applies In spoken conversations, a slow reply over text doesn't mean anything. This is only if you're on a video call or in person or something with real-time interaction. Is that what you were worried about, Dedeker? Someone takes a while to get back to you on text?

Dedeker: Oh no, I think once we start talking about this via text, it's just a whole other ball of wax.

Jase: I see. If someone takes a while to get back to you on text, that's not the same. These rules don't apply. I mean, I guess if they are giving the, well, I don't know, schedule, that probably reads. But the delay part, forget about that part when you're on text. So then the question is, how do we combine all of this, right? The fact that we're really bad at telling when we're being flirted with, we're bad at identifying if someone likes us. There's a study I didn't even put in this episode that was just about people having a conversation and being asked later, how much did you like that person? Not in a platonic way. And then how much do you think they liked you? We underrate how much they liked us compared to how much they actually did on average. And that the more shy someone rated on a personality quiz, the more they underestimated how much the other person liked them. That shyness was the factor, that if you're more shy, you're more likely to think people don't like you. Again, even just in a platonic way. Makes sense. So we're starting to get into putting this all together. So what do we actually do? So the first is when we're flirting, when we're giving compliments or something like that, find a way to make it just a little bit clearer. So the idea here is instead of, oh, this was really fun, of, I really like talking with you. I'd like to do this again on purpose sometime. Just adding that little more clarity of what you're asking, but without putting that you have to say yes right now pressure on them or really, it's removing the pressure to have to say any kind of no. Like, I'd love to do this again sometime, but then the no is just a non-answer. You're not actually requiring a no in order for it to be a no. And so the key is making your intentions clear but making the exit as cheap as possible. So making no response a complete answer. So, I'd really like to see you again. I'm going to this thing Thursday, and the invite's open if you want it. So it makes it clear you're interested, but then the second means that silence is an answer in itself in a way. And your obligation as the asker is to then treat a silence as your answer or be comfortable with maybe they'll say yes to me later, but they don't have to right now. But most likely if they want to, they'll be like, oh my gosh, I'd love to. Maybe they'd say, oh, I'd love to. I can't do it that day though. And that's different from the, ah, I don't know, I'm really busy. There's that subtle difference between immediately yes followed by scheduling's hard versus a hesitation and a that's there. So some other tips based on this one before we get into part 3 where we're gonna bust a few more myths and really get into some tools here. And that's, so letting the no be a complete answer, you're not requiring an answer at all. Another option is to hand them an exit line in advance, which is maybe if something came up about them being busy. To even give them that for free, to say, I'd love to hang out, unless you're too busy. I get you've got a lot going on, you just told me about that. So they could go, yeah, it's too much right now. It gives them that really easy way, and no one lost face. They didn't have to go through the uncomfortableness of telling you no. And who knows, maybe later they will want to hang out with you, but still, we want to favor making that no really easy, because then it goes back to what Dedeker was talking about with the married couples. Is knowing that saying no doesn't have consequences makes you more likely to want to say yes, makes that more comfortable. But you're starting that history together with this person. Say eventually they do become part of your friend group and they get to know you more and they get to learn, oh yeah, this is a person that saying no is not costly to, I can feel more safe around this person. Whether that turns into something romantic or not, who knows, but you're still starting that history from the beginning here. Another one is to not set a deadline. I said, let the silence be enough. And if they want to come get you to say yes, that's on them. Don't sit there and force them with an artificial deadline there. So you kind of leave that later yes as an option, but you don't have to say that to them. You don't have to say, well, let me know if you change your mind or something to put extra pressure on there. It's just you could put that in from the beginning. Of like, hey, I'm doing this thing next Saturday, be awesome to see you there, let me know if you want to do that, that'd be cool, and then move on. And then the one other key here is that if you do get the silence or that hesitation of a no, make sure that you don't withdraw your warmth from them if you want to build up that reputation of being someone with no consequences. Your warmth is not conditional. Maybe if you've been flirting really hard, back that off a little bit because maybe they don't want you to, but not the warmth. Don't stop being nice or smiling or being polite or things like that because that's just reinforcing the idea that there are consequences. You told me there weren't, but I see that there are.

Dedeker: Sure.

Jase: And with that, we're going to get into busting more myths and finding some tools after this next break where we thank our sponsors. Please do give them a listen. Use the promo codes in our show notes. That really does help our show. And if you want to help us the most, join our community. Go to Multiamory Podcast.com/join. We have a sliding scale there. You get to be part of our community, you get ad-free episodes and help support our show. And we love that so much. Thank you. This episode is sponsored by Attuned. Most intimacy apps were not built for how many of you actually relate. They assume two people, one configuration, one default way of doing sex, but Attuned is different. Attuned is a couples intimacy app. Think truth or dare, but powered by your actual intimacy profile. Each person takes a 54-question survey based on real sexology research, and the app reveals where you align and then powers personalized activities from there, whether that's just a couple or 3 people or larger configurations up to 6 people, each with their own profiles. And it takes all of that data into account when putting together your sexy game.

Emily: And the science is real. It's built on the sexual excitation inhibition dual control model from the Kinsey Institute. Your intimacy profile maps arousal patterns, power dynamics, and preference domains. There are 3 intimacy levels: platonic, exploring, and intimate. So you can meet your group wherever you are that night. Skip buttons are always available. No one ever is pushed. Download Attuned free on iOS and use code MULTIAMORY for 20% off your first month of premium. That's A-T-T-U-N-E-D, getattuned.app, code MULTIAMORY.

Jase: For those of you out there who think you're pretty smooth at picking up on body language, you're good at flirting, I've got some hard news for you. So this first one—

Dedeker: Oh no, we're not as smooth as we thought?

Jase: Well, this first one is specifically about mirroring. Have you two heard of this thing, mirroring? Yes, of course.

Dedeker: I feel that's very 101 dating advice, of tracking, is someone mirroring your positioning if you're sitting across the table at each other? Or that you can be the one who's proactive about mirroring their body language to get you more in sync. That's pretty common advice I see floating around.

Jase: Absolutely. Yes, I've heard this in so many places for so long. So Grammer, Kruck, and Magnusson in 1998 in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior— right there in the right journal for exactly this study. They did a study where they videotaped opposite-sex strangers meeting, and then they coded their movements frame by frame to test whether synchronizing their movements tracked with reported interest from those people. So they went in specifically looking to prove that or to show evidence for that behavior. And they said, quote, we were unable to demonstrate a relation between synchronization defined in terms of movement echo or position mirroring and subjective experience of pleasure and interest. So basically they were looking specifically for this movement echo of doing the same kind of movements. One person crosses their arms, the other person does. One person leans, the other person does within a short window. And they found that while that happened in some and didn't in others, it did not correlate with attraction or how much the people were enjoying the conversation. What they did find, though, that they were not looking for, but then when they took this and ran all of their coded frames through algorithms trying to find what is there here, is they found that a sequence of actions kept recurring with roughly the same pacing between the two people. So it would be a certain movement followed by another movement. He touches his glass, she touches hers, or he adjusts his glasses and she adjusts her hair, or some kind of a rhythm or a pattern, but that it was unique to every single group, but just that some kind of pattern would form, that they unconsciously fell into this pattern with each other.

Dedeker: When people are into each other.

Jase: When they were into each other, yes. So that was interesting. So a couple interesting things is that one is that what those gestures were or what those movements were that fell into this rhythm didn't matter. Those could even switch within a conversation, but they would still find this rhythm with each other. And that it's pair-specific, so that the loop that one couple fell into was not the same as what another one fell into. So this is not a universal thing you can watch for of, "I'll adjust my glasses and see if she moves her hair," or whatever it is. So this was fascinating, just that they went out specifically trying to replicate the mirroring thing and couldn't find evidence for it, which is a bigger statement than a random exploratory thing seeing no evidence for something. It's like, well, maybe it's still there, but they specifically went out looking for it and didn't find it. So that's kind of number one of if you've been relying on that one, it might not hold as much weight as you think it does. Okay, my next one here is about gaydar. Oh boy.

Dedeker: Yeah, also relevant. For our poor struggling poly folks.

Jase: You see. So this was a really interesting study by Cox, Devine, Bischmann, and Hyde. They published in 2016 and 2017 in the Journal of Sex Research. Okay, here's the setup, and this is the one I have to give you the details of the setup. So participants were shown fictitious men. Each one was built by pairing a real photograph of a real man who was either gay or straight, and then one short sentence about that man that was either stereotypically gay, like, "He likes shopping," neutral, like, "He likes to read," or straight stereotype, "He likes football." And then the participants were presented with these images along with that statement about the person, and then would just hit G or S for gay or straight. To say what they thought, right? So the largest version—

Dedeker: no bisexual representation here. Apparently not.

Jase: This one did not. They had 251 participants in the largest version of this. They also repeated the same studies with photos of women, with lesbian and straight women, found similar results. But the key was that while the photos were actually tied to men that were straight or gay, the statements were shuffled up, that those were mismatched of whether that person's face got paired with a stereotypically gay, neutral, or straight statement. And first thing they learned is that that sentence dominated the results over the pictures.

Dedeker: So people thought they were reading faces, the social information, actually, what they think is the social information.

Jase: Yeah. So people thought they were reading the faces and using their gaydar to tell if that person was gay, but it actually turns out the thing that influenced them the most was just the sentence. Just saying he likes shopping was more likely to make you say that guy was gay. One fun caveat they made here is that in a separate little side study, they had 27 people come in who didn't see the statements, just the pictures themselves, and to rate them. And what they found is that the gay men's pictures were reliably better quality than straight men's.

Emily: That doesn't surprise me. It doesn't surprise me either.

Jase: But it's saying that even some of the accuracy that people did have with photos could actually just be biased on the quality of their photos because they were pulled from actual dating profile photos. I was gonna say, if anyone's seen most straight men's dating profile photos. And then another fascinating piece was that if leading up to the research, if the experimenter said aloud beforehand that people really do have gaydar, here we're doing a study, or saying people don't have gaydar, they just stereotype, or saying nothing, they found that the first group, the one that was told gaydar does exist, leaned more heavily on the stereotyped sentences and did worse on the actual test based on the pictures. Fascinating. So now, of course, the caveat here is this is just pictures. So this is really talking about the gaydar just by how your face looks, that that doesn't hold up to scrutiny in the way that people think it does. Of course, it's a little bit different when you're interacting with people and talking with them, and we might put in subtle cues and things like that. So this isn't to say gaydar doesn't exist at all, but maybe not in the way people think that it does. The other piece that is specifically worth calling out that this doesn't have is that the space is a neutral representative space where like 5 to 10% of the population would be gay or some kind of gayish, I guess. But if you're at a gay bar or a Pride event or something like that, the math totally changes. Of course. So there's all these other factors that we're taking into account in real life. So there's that. And the third one here is about disclosure of something that you worry is going to mess up the deal. So for those of us that are polyamorous, it's the fact that you're polyamorous might be the thing you're scared to bring up, especially when you're flirting, or on a dating app or whatever. Or if it's that you have some kind of disability or something that you're afraid of them knowing, or some other caveat, you have kids or something like that that you're afraid of disclosing. So this one comes from Dane, Masser, MacDonald, and Duck from 2015, and they did 4 experiments where all they manipulated between the different cases was the timing of a disclosure. So some participants learned a stigmatized fact about their conversation partner early, right up at the top, and others learned it some time later after building rapport and talking with this person. It's worth noting this is all just platonic conversation. This wasn't specifically in a romantic context, but basically the finding was early disclosure produced more liking, closer physical seating, more excitement about meeting them again, and twice the odds of choosing a one-on-one later rather than having a chaperoned interaction. To be with someone else in the room as well. They also found that when the participants were asked to retell a story that they'd been told about that person, in the early disclosure group—so the ones that already knew the stigmatized thing early on—they retold that story accurately and not more negatively than they'd heard it. If anything, a little more positive than they'd heard it, or neutral. Versus the group that found out later about that thing, 56% of them retold that other person's story in a slightly more negative way than it had been told before. Isn't that wild? Yikes.

Dedeker: That's really fascinating. I guess if we're going to extrapolate this to a dating context and probably oversimplify it, that it's the difference between if you meet someone at a bar and you lead right away with the fact like, I'm non-monogamous, or I have two partners, or whatever, so they have the option to filter out earlier rather than later versus when you wait a long time and then drop that on them, that it maybe if this may not be your intention, but I suppose it creates more context and possibility for the other person to turn it into a little bit more of a, this person maybe deceived me or omitted this for a long time and now I have more of a bad taste in my mouth about who they are.

Jase: That I think it maybe it somehow reads as a betrayal even though they didn't owe you anything. I think maybe we still can read it that way. So I did think that was an interesting one to just back up the idea of, bring that up sooner, right? If there's something specifically you're scared of like that, find a way to work it in sooner. So one last study that I wanted to get to here before we start to wrap up and look at our conclusions that we have is about how do you approach people? What is actually researched to be the best way to approach someone at a bar or a party or something like that. So for this one, this is a study by Weber, Goodboy, and Cayanus in 2010 called "Flirting Competence: An Experimental Study on Appropriate and Effective Opening Lines." A fun—

Emily: Nice. A fun study. So we're talking about lines here.

Jase: So for this, they rented out an actual bar, hired a bartender and actors, and they filmed 5 versions of the same approach. Identical for a full 2 minutes except for the opening line. So they kept the whole interaction the same, but the opening line was different. And then they had 642 students who each watched one of those 5 versions and then rated it on various 7-point scales.

Dedeker: Jase, you better be leading up to that this study identified the best opening line ever. Well, kind of.

Emily: At least the best amongst this study.

Dedeker: Amongst this selection of 5.

Jase: So would you have any guesses about the category of thing that would be the best? So it wasn't like best pickup line. They were variations of how the conversation started.

Dedeker: Sure. I think the best opener is leading with curiosity about the other person.

Jase: Genuine curiosity. Okay. That was not it. Emily. Dang it. Would you like survey says?

Emily: I was going to say commenting on someone's intellect.

Jase: So. No, that was in the bottom 3 was a compliment. Oh, okay. So number 1 is being introduced by somebody else. Being introduced—

Dedeker: That was the best?

Jase: —to a party was the best rating for the whole interaction was if it started by being introduced. How have you met Ted?

Dedeker: Exactly. So the wingman is real. Is not dead.

Emily: The wingman is not dead.

Jase: For all y'all out there. And all they need is the introduction. And then second best This one surprised me. Second best is just saying your name. Oh, just introducing yourself.

Dedeker: Not even hi, you're just like Dedeker. I mean, I'm sure it was like, hi, I'm Jase.

Jase: That— yeah, that landed better than a compliment, an attempted joke, a pickup line, which was the lowest rated of all of the options.

Dedeker: Wow. It's not like there's any advice there that is leading you to believe that you shouldn't just walk up to somebody and give them your name, that that's going to be bad. But I think we have a lot of device that suggests you need more lubrication, you need something smoother, you need something more attention-getting than that.

Jase: And I kind of love that. I think there's a little bit of relief that you don't have to be clever.

Emily: Hmm.

Jase: You don't have to overengineer it. You just introduce yourself. Now what's interesting is in other studies, they did find that having joking happen during an interaction was a sign that people were getting along better and they reported enjoying that interaction more. But it's not the start. The start is just a simple introduction or better yet, being introduced by somebody else. But then after that, your banter and everything is going to show up, right? This is that people rated that whole experience higher if they started with a simple introduction than if they tried a joke or a compliment or anything like that. But I think still the content of the conversation after that is what matters. So this isn't to say if you just do this one simple trick, everyone will be into you. It's not that. And then one quick caveat here, and I'm sure some people have thought this, which is what about autistic people? What about people that are less neurotypical, right? Because a lot of this is about reading body language, subtle cues, things like that. And the first is we have a nice rubric we can apply that we learned before, right? Which is that if there's a pause, if there's a hedge, if there's a compliment or some other softener, and then some kind of reason, that's a no. That's a clear formula for that's a no or it's probably a no. And so a no and probably no, you treat the same, which is as a no. You don't add more pressure, you don't take away warmth, any of that sort of thing. What was interesting specifically about this study looking at— again, this was a more platonic circumstance, but was that They found in a study of watching brief clips of an autistic or a non-autistic person with video and sound, with sound only, or a written transcript of the same words, and then asked how much they want to interact with that person. They found that for the video with sound and the audio only, that people were less likely to say they'd want to hang out with the autistic people than the non-autistic people, but that that completely vanished when it was text only. And so this is to say that while we've been talking a lot about in-person flirting on this, the truth is that today we don't do in-person flirting a lot of the time. And while these things are useful to know in that context, the fact that we can start with texts and the fact that we can interact through dating apps and things like that, and a lot of these principles still apply just without that nuance of the timing and the face-to-face interactions and the pressure and things like that. And then what was interesting too is that when they did the same thing but they disclosed beforehand that the people were autistic, that that bias vanished. That if you were just shown the people, you were more likely to say, 'I'd want to hang out with the non-autistic person.' But if you knew ahead of time, 'Oh, this person's autistic,' and then you watch the video, you were actually more likely to want to hang out with them from this study that they did. Fascinating. So definitely some interesting stuff here. And I again, I think it speaks really highly in favor of online dating and texting because that's probably going to come up as part of your conversation, and that's probably going to get involved in there. And that actually has been shown to be a positive outcome in that case rather than a negative one, kind of going back to the whole disclosure thing that we talked about before of disclosing that sooner, having that be part of the conversation in any kind, works out better. So I just thought that was a little interesting aside. There's not a lot of research specifically about autistic flirting. That was not something that I could find, but I do think we can piece together a few different findings and find some interesting stuff here. So what can we take away? Oh, okay, well, let's see.

Dedeker: My takeaways: disclose stuff early. If you're gonna flirt with someone or try to ask them out, frame it in such a way that no answer could be an acceptable answer, right? So don't let it hinge on a yes or no. Continue to be warm.

Jase: Continue to be warm. I love that. Say your name.

Dedeker: I'm gonna be like a little Pokémon around the bar.

Emily: There you go.

Jase: Dedeker. Dedeker. So the way that I thought about this was, if you think your flirting is clear, realize that it might not be. There's actually a pretty good chance that they're missing it. But at the same time, watching for a subtle no and treating that as a no to build up that sense of being safe and proving that there's no consequence rather than telling someone there's no consequence. Because from studies that did not make the cut into this, the percentage of people who have had a negative experience specifically in online dating of someone continuing to pursue them or harass them or say mean things to them after they've said no is very high, higher for women than for men. But it was something like 60-something percent of women had had that experience and like 28% of men, which is very different but still significant in both cases. So we all have evidence to the contrary that it is safe to say no. So we have to prove that. We can't just say it or just trust that, oh, people know that because that's who I am.

Emily: When I think about people in my life that have had a lot of good experiences going out and meeting people at bars or meeting people in social situations and then actually following through and having dates with those people or sexual situations with those people, I feel like the ones who get the dates are the people who give off an aura of safety. And make it known perhaps somehow that they're not going to do anything to make it awkward for you if you decide, no, actually I'm not interested in you. So that's something that I'm taking away here. And that regardless of who you are, you might not be making it necessarily comfortable for a person if you are super explicit in asking that, even if you're a woman asking a man, for example, in that heterosexual situation, the guy might not be okay with it and might not feel comfortable, even though you might think that he does, right?

Jase: We all share that. And I think that also helps us to understand how we can relate to other people. If we've had an experience of feeling uncomfortable in a situation like that, being asked when you weren't interested—

Emily: yeah—

Jase: to realize that's the experience, that is the real experience, and it's not unique to your gender. It's a more universal thing. Another thing I thought was fun that didn't make it into this was in other studies looking at ways people flirt and things like that with being gay versus straight versus bi, is that there seems to be evidence showing that actually the way we flirt and the way we perceive those things is not based on our sexuality, but more just based on how we present our gender. Of how feminine or masculine we are, regardless of our gender or sex or any of that. So I think a lot of this applies more across the board than we might think, even though a lot of these studies are focusing on heterosexual undergrads for the most part. Sure, right? They're the easy ones to study when it comes to flirting, I guess. Well, thank you for joining me for this little journey here. My hope is that in looking into this, It helps give us clarity. Emily said, knowledge is power. And this lets us realize how we can flirt in a way that we're not being creepy, we're not making other people uncomfortable, and that it can be fun too. That realizing that it's really just about having conversations and seeing who you click with, the fact that introducing by your name is what matters more than some clever pickup line or some amazing compliment or something like that. It's just, just be real, just be yourself. And look out for those nos and not stress about it because there's a lot of people out there and you don't got to worry about all of them. And if you have friends that can introduce you, even better. So all the more reason to go to meetups and not just try to date everybody, but also try to just make friends and be a good member of your community so they can help you date everyone. Be a wingman.

Emily: That's what I'm taking away.

Jase: Be a wingperson and wing it forward. There you go, put that on a t-shirt.

Dedeker: Done and done and done. Great. Cut it, print it, that's the end of the episode.

Jase: Great. We would love to hear from all of you. What is the clearest, most unmistakable thing someone has ever done to let you know that they were interested? One that you couldn't have missed. Curious to hear from you. And if you want, for extra credit, you can tell us how you felt about that. Was that good or bad? I'm excited to discuss this with all of you as well. You can share in the episode discussion channel in our Discord server or in our private Facebook group. You can get access to both of those by going to multiamory.com/join, or you can share publicly on Instagram @multiamory_podcast where we will be posting that question for all of you. Multiamory is created and produced by Dedeker Winston, Emily Matlack, and me, Jase Lindgren. Our production assistant is Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page at multiamory.com.