Even worse idk much about codeswitching.
I can tell friends who are girls “I love you” and they take it as friendly. But guys can’t hear this without thinking he’s laid claim to a romantic and/or sexual feelings?
If I reject a girl asking me out with the attitude of a bubbly girl talking to another bubbly girl at a party, and say “I have a bf. But you’re a babe!, You can get another babe!” She’d totally be friendly back about it… But once I said this to a guy who asked me out, and he proceeded to ask me for my number 4 times in less than 10 seconds.
Shit like this puts me in fight or flight mode. I have very little awareness of how or why I have to codeswitch between men and women. My skin is crawling nearly everytime a friend points out to me in retrospect that a guy was actually flirting with me after my only intention was being friends or a friendly neighbor. Yikes. I want to go back in time and yell “Fuck you stop being a creep!” (Ofc, they’d be too creepy to understand why I would say that.)
That said, I love my bf because his fem side makes him chill and understanding if a girl talks to him like he’s another girl. I’m pretty quiet and mostly talk to him, and I have no guy friends. So I’m not learning codeswitching skills by watching him. How do you codeswitch and why do you codeswitch in the exact way(s) you do? I barely go outside, and I’m angry at guys everyday over this over past events I’m creeped out by.
right i understand those dynamics but OP is talking about (attempted) flirting so subtle or incompetent as to go unnoticed in the moment and then the other part.
i don’t want to hurt anyone, nor to get hurt, so i don’t know what to do with this information besides never talk to anyone (which is very easy when nobody else wears a mask)
OP is one person venting, I would not recommend setting entire behaviour patterns based on such posts.
It is good to be sensitive, but part of socialising involves making mistakes or even not making mistakes but still sometimes bothering people due to incompatibility or differing expectations. Generally if you are polite and respectful things will go ok. For example if you are complimenting someone and they seem to be getting very excited and showing interest in you and complimenting or teasing you back and you ask if they’d like to meet up/for their number/whatever and they say no or suddenly seem uncomfortable a quick apology and an opportunity for them to excuse themselves like “well it was lovely to meet you and I hope you have a great day” is not likely to bother someone.
but it’s rude to be bad at socializing and there’s nowhere safe to practice or catch up if you didn’t learn by cultural osmosis as child.
movies and tv shows don’t exactly teach men good behavior… even in romcoms…
I frequently don’t catch flirting due to obliviousness around social norms. I have an especially huge blindspot to flirting. I’m multiple decades old amd I’ve rarely flirted my entire life. I’m not asexual, but other than with my current boyfriend, I’ve barely experienced flirting at possibly nearly asexual levels. There’s a lot of dynamics and vibes I don’t pick up on.
In case you’re wondering, I’m not autistic. I’m just a very quiet, neurospicy person who needs to understand styles of conversation more. As you can imagine, having to codeswitch on top of that throws a wrench in the very little conversational knowledge I have.
relatable, i haven’t had anyone show any interest in over a decade and i wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between genuine friendliness and interest because all i’ve ever experienced is the fake ass neurotypical minnesota nice that comes from a shared understanding that we need to be polite enough to each other that we’ll help random strangers avoid freezing to death in the winter since that comes up from time to time.
what i don’t understand is how some guy was such a huge creep if he’s leaving you alone after an interaction you needed to be told was attempted flirting. to me that sounds like taking no response as disinterest, but maybe you have something specific in mind where there was other behavior left out?
I’m Asian and there was this guy who was obsessed with the videogame Resident Evil. He frequently quoted the character Leon, and would ocassionally call me Ada when I wore the color red. (Ada is a character in a traditional floor-length red dress, with a leg slit all the way up to her hip, catering to people with an Asian fetish.) I was passive to it because I thought he was just pretending to be action figure and trying to involve me in that. “W/e,” I thought, even if it made me unconformable in a way I couldn’t place.
One day I identify that I feel uncomfortable because Ada is an Chinese fetish character in a basterdized version of a traditional dress. All for people in the West to drool over. So I tell my bf that that guy made me uncomfortable because of this racist aspect of that Asian fetish character. My bf said this weirdo might of been of been flirting. The weirdo had ask me out me years before that so this makes sense.