How to Improve at Flirting When You Don’t Like Flirting

have fun git gud

Welcome to algebra class. Today we will prove the central theorem of flirting.

Lemma 1 — To enjoy flirting, you must be good at it. Nothing feels as good as successful seduction, or as bad as rejection. It’s hard to enjoy the process when so much is at stake with the outcome.

Lemma 2 — To get good at flirting, you must practice. No one was born smooth and confident. Flirting is an anti-inductive game with an ever-evolving meta, you need to constantly improve just to keep up.

Lemma 3 — To practice flirting, you must enjoy it. It’s attractive to be confident, relaxed, and optimistic. If you’re forcing yourself to flirt through gritted teeth, people can tell. And why would you even force yourself to do something you hate?

Conclusion: if you’re not already good, practiced, and having fun flirting, you never will be since either one requires the others. You’re in a catch-22 with no chicken and no egg. 1+2+3 = QED.

Fix Mindset

Just kidding, friends, just kidding. But before we attack the conclusion, let me actually offer some support for the lemmas.

The counterargument — there’s no such thing as “getting good through practice”. Your success in flirting is determined before you even start, through some combination of innate traits (looks, charisma), persistent attributes (fitness, career success), or sheer luck (meeting your soulmate). “Practice” sounds like some pick-up artist bullshit to trick girls, but you can’t fool anyone for long anyway. If it’s meant to be it’s meant to be. And if it isn’t, you can’t help it.

There’s a lot of truth to this. Looks matter, stable traits matter, a relationship won’t hold for long on the strength of practiced flirting alone. But this argument is missing two important things.

First: the fixed mindset implicitly assumes that we each have our “dateability ELO”, our ranking on the ladder of all other daters. Since that ranking is mostly set by universally-desired traits (looks, youth, success), flirting practice won’t move you up the ranks. I call this the “Sexual Marketplace Value fallacy”.

We’re all looking for a combination of universal desiderata and our own special compatibilities. If you’re a homebody, you might want a partner who isn’t very outgoing so you can enjoy cozy time together. But perhaps you want someone who is adventurous to help you out of your shell. A wild spirit may be looking for someone to match their vibe or for a grounding presence. “Adventurousness” isn’t universally high-SMV or low-SMV, it depends on context and on the person looking.

The point of flirting is everything aside from SMV. People can judge your looks, age, and social class the moment you walk in the room. But they don’t know if you prefer mountaineering or quilting, if you’re a quiet listener or a gregarious storyteller, if you care about sports or literature. Flirting is how you show what’s unique about you, not what’s universally appealing. And it’s how you discover what’s unique about the person you’re flirting with.

Second: if it’s meant to be it still probably won’t, because the default outcome is nothing. Unless you’re literally being sold into marriage for a dowry of camels, there’s no one who is so “meant for you” that you can end up together without flirting. (You may be longtime friends and not even realize that you’ve been flirting for a year, but that too is a skill!) You get a lot of information “at first sight”, but love requires talking to the other person.

Many people are tired of apps and mixers and dream about meeting the love of their life as their hands serendipitously brush while reaching for the last sleeve of Mentos at the grocery checkout line. I’m not saying it won’t happen to you. But at that moment, wouldn’t you wish that you had practiced the art of striking a flirty conversation about Mentos?

There’s a lot more to flirting than pick-up lines and coy smiles. From spotting the right person to making a graceful exit. From maintaining good eye contact to maintaining plausible deniability. From following up on successes to recovering from rejections. You don’t improve these skills just by SMV-maxxing on your own.

But this is also what can make it feel overwhelming. There are so many aspects of flirting to potentially suck and fail at, and success is often out of your control. “Growth mindset” is often contorted into “everyone can be a champion” which is A: plainly false, and B: pointlessly recasts a collaborative endeavor as a competition. You’re not going to beat everybody at flirting. But if your goal is just to meet somebody, practice helps.

Started from the Bottom now I’m Top 20%

This post doesn’t really fit in the current chapter, but I was inspired to write it by SCPantera’s essay The Skill Issue Issue. Here’s a snippet:

I can’t recall where I first encountered the “passion” component but I think it was in relation to fighting games. The idea here being that a top player will have spent hundreds or maybe thousands of hours in a game’s practice mode perfecting combos and pouring over frame data, optimizing offensive and defensive strategies, testing what works in a punish counter situation, practicing hit confirms and reactions, etc etc. If you have ever tried to do this yourself, you might know that this is skull-crushingly dull and frankly pretty unbearable to do for even just a few minutes, especially compared to the tense, exciting action of simply playing the game normally.

The most unpleasant truth is that getting really good at something requires both some amount of innate baseline talent and an unusual passion for the thing that makes the overwhelmingly boring process of improvement at the thing unintuitively fun and rewarding.

This was part of an amusing exchange between Axel and SCPantera in the comments on my last post. Axel sees dating as a matter of setting standards and evaluating criteria, a frame that can’t really make sense of polyamory. SCPantera replied: it’s not about my standards, it’s about my love of the game.

Here’s an incredible comment I got on a an old dating post I wrote:

It prompted me to share some of my experiences with girls in my younger years. These experiences included: getting slapped, getting body-shamed, getting stood up, getting cheated at tennis, having my birthday cake eaten. Combined, they did absolutely nothing to diminish my love of the game. I kept thinking about girls, flirting with girls, and enjoying their company when I could. I’m fairly certain this is the main reason for what dating success I’ve had in my 30s, not my ethnicity or military experience.

The main goal of Second Person is to infect you with my love of the game of dating. To help you see through the confusion, ignore the negativity, follow a positive vision, and actually go out there and try stuff. I can’t convince you into an attitude change with arguments, but I hope a little of it rubs off on you with every essay you spend in my company.

What if you hate every single thing about dating? You should start here. Come back to flirting when you’ve transmuted at least some of your resentment into curiosity.

What if you hate almost every single thing about it? Then it means there’s something you don’t hate. You can start from this kernel of enjoyment and practice some flirt-relevant competency, slowly expanding your practice and your enjoyment to adjacent skills.

That’s the good thing about chicken and egg problems: you only need one thing to get the whole cycle going.

10 Ways to Git Gud at Flirting by Doing Things You May Already Enjoy Doing

(Are we seriously doing a numbered advice listicle? LOL yeah I know. But I assure you: none of these are science-based, generalizable, or come with any guarantees regarding your Hinge reply rate.)

Here are ten things I really love doing. If you enjoy any of them, you’ve got a place to start getting good at flirting.