# When Both People Are Interested, How Often Is Flirtatious Escalation Mutual?

Here are two models of “the norm” when it comes to flirtatious escalation, assuming both people are in fact interested:

*   “Mutual Escalation”: both people go back-and-forth making gradually more escalative moves. One might tend to escalate first, but the other will at least match escalation level.
*   “Active/Passive”: one person makes roughly all of the escalative moves. The other person passively approves/disapproves, and the active participant tracks their approval when deciding to dial up/down.

[Multiple people](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/puv8fRDCH9jx5yhbX/johnswentworth-s-shortform?commentId=CPaAHMDgJAJCeHbiL) (including agree-votes and offline) have told me that the first is most common. [Multiple people](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZHYenMdmXEKR9YLwY/dating-roundup-7-back-to-basics?commentId=kxgcArLtEKYG8ZaPk) (including agree-votes and offline) have told me that the second is most common.

What I really want to know is:

*   Conditional on mutual interest, what are the relative frequencies of these two kinds of flirtatious escalation?
*   Are there particular settings/cultures/etc in which those frequencies are very different?

These are both fairly difficult questions to answer, because of major confounders. First and most obviously, it’s hard to tell how often an “active/passive” flirtation is just one person not being very into the other. Second, communication is hard even when people are not making a point of obfuscating it, so we should expect both that people are too subtle in their hints (or sometimes accidentally hint when not intending to) and that people are too clueless to pick up on hints (or sometimes pick up hints which were not sent in the first place).

I’m interested both in whatever personal experience people have bearing on the question, and in data or unusual experiences which somehow sidestep the confounders.

Some Priors
-----------

On priors, I would expect that:

*   Flirting is a skill
*   The large majority of people are both bad at it and know they’re bad at it
*   People who are both bad at it and know they’re bad at it are usually very hesitant to send escalatory signals (if they even know how to, which they might not)

That’s why, on priors, I personally strongly expected the active/passive model to be most common. Specifically, I’d guess that the mutual escalation model mostly applies when two people who are both good at flirting run into each other. That’s probably most fun and a great thing to optimize for, but the large majority of a skilled flirter’s encounters will be with people who are not themselves skilled flirters, and will therefore be active/passive.

The main way I’d expect this prior model to be wrong is if typical flirting skill levels are much higher than I thought.

Some Data
---------

A quick google search turned up a tangentially-relevant [study](https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/d3668c15-bbff-4cc2-a338-be4ca86e8e6a/content) on an easier-to-measure question, with this table:

| Partner Gender | Partner Actually Flirted? | Accuracy At Guessing |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Female | Flirted | 18% |
| Female | Did not flirt | 83% |
| Male | Flirted | 36% |
| Male | Did not flirt | 84% |

This says that, for instance, in the cases where a female *was* flirting (according to her), the guy she was talking to usually did not think she was flirting; only 18% actually thought she was flirting in such cases. High level story which the data suggests: mostly, people have a prior that nobody’s flirting, and that’s usually correct, but when people do flirt the signals are usually not nearly strong enough to overcome that prior.

This is one of those typical social psych studies where n is unimpressive (<100 participants), and it’s a bunch of undergrads, and the operationalization is dubious in all sorts of ways for generalization purposes (they were paired up and talked for 10 minutes before separately answering a survey), etc. It should be taken with an awful lot of salt. That said, it is at least extremely clear in this case that the large majority of hints which people send out are not received.

That study doesn’t directly address my main question, but it is at least strong evidence that the large majority of undergrads are not very good at this whole flirting business; the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty abysmal. It’s at least evidence against flirting skill levels typically being high.

Some Better Answers?
--------------------

Mostly I want to hear what other people have to say on the question; I don’t expect my priors or my quick google search or my own experiences to provide particularly reliable answers here.