Why We Misread Attraction (According to Psychology)

Why We Misread Attraction (According to Psychology)

You’ve probably had this happen. You meet someone you like and then you get home and you start replaying every detail of the interaction, their eye contact, their posture, the way they smiled at you, trying to figure out whether they were into you or not. But the more time you end up spending analyzing the signals, the more stressed out and confused you feel. It is exhausting and it rarely gets you any closer to the truth. So, in this video, I’ll share what I did to get out of that loop, along with some of the research that I found helpful, and I’ll show you a much clearer way to tell when someone is genuinely interested in you. So, you can stop ruminating, can enjoy dating, and finally, notice the people who actually want to get closer to you, even if they’re not super obvious about it. When I was young, I used to really get caught in this trap of trying to figure out if somebody liked me. Nowadays, I’m a clinical psychologist. I help people work on their confidence and social connections. I even wrote a book about it. But in my youth, I was really putting a lot of pressure on myself to try to solve this. And it was leading to these kind of emotional highs and emotional lows. It meant that how I was feeling about myself was starting to become dependent on an outcome very much outside of my control. It was becoming dependent on what somebody else thought about me. I did not like how that felt. In fact, it’s possible to manufacture being obsessed with someone just by dedicating a lot of time and energy to thinking and thinking and thinking and trying to figure out whether they like you or not. I had a German roommate when I was in college and at one point he got so caught up in trying to figure out whether this one girl liked him that it became all he could talk about. He’d have those conversations with me all the time like, “Hey, she did this today and she did that. does that mean she’s into me? But yesterday she did this thing and he’d go through all the evidence with me. And after a while, I realized he was actually having that same conversation with everybody else. There’s a real cost to this hyperfocusing and analyzing of signs. But luckily, I found a different way of doing it, which I’ll get into. It’s tempting to think that you are going to get confirmation about whether someone likes you if you can just learn the body language science, right? So, for example, there was a meta analysis from a few years ago, which sounds really promising. They looked at people who reported feeling romantic attraction and then they did a complicated analysis to show what behaviors did those people reliably do. meaning we could see those behaviors, we’ll know someone’s attracted. Very promising. Those behaviors, by the way, were things like talking more, saying more words, making more eye contact, more frequency of eye contact, moving physically closer, like standing closer, mimicking the um the posture or body language of somebody else. Even things like laughing more, smiling more. Okay, problem solved, right? We got the information. Well, no. When I try to actually apply these kind of insights, it wasn’t very useful in the real world. Some signs pointed one way, other signs pointed the other way. Someone seemed into me one day, not into me the next day. I’ll be like, “Wait, did did she like me yesterday and then I like screwed something up and now she doesn’t like me today?” So, you’ve probably come across some of this behavioral information to look for, too. And I’m imagining probably like me, when you try to put it into action, it’s not actually super helpful, it doesn’t really differentiate who’s into you from who’s not into you. So, after struggling with this for a while, I went to more research and this is when it all started to make sense for me. We can’t tell from just observing who is into us and who isn’t. There’s a study from a few years ago that I thought was really helpful with this. When people were in a conversation and somebody was flirting with them and that person said, “Yeah, I was flirting with them.” And they asked the person, “Do you think they were flirting with you?” They were correct 28% of the time. Guys will uh often complain that it’s hard to tell when women are flirting cuz they’re so wishy-washy about it. But in fact, the women had an even harder time telling when guys were flirting. Take a second and imagine that in your life you have missed 72% of the people who were flirting with you. You didn’t even notice. Who do you think was flirting with you and you missed it? You’ve missed the majority of it apparently. That is just bonkers. So why are we spending all this time analyzing body language? We can’t effectively tell if somebody’s flirting with us from looking. So let’s talk about why we have trouble picking up and identifying these cues. First and most important one, that study from before where they looked at people who were romantically attracted and they looked at what behaviors they did. Well, one twist is they also looked at people who were feeling just platonic attraction to somebody. And what behaviors did they do? And it turns out it’s the same exact behaviors. They could not distinguish between romantic and non-romantic attraction. They did the same stuff. This is really the biggest maybe issue with this. The same signals mean I like you and I like you and I’m attracted to you. Maybe like I like you and I like like you. It’s the same thing. And it’s because those behaviors, the eye contact, the moving closer, the mimicry, the smiles, the laughter, those are signals of warmth. They’re signals of trust. They’re signals of liking. This is how humans show that we like people. And yeah, you need that in order to have romantic attraction, but that also is every other kind of connection, family connection, friend connection. And so, because these body language signals are not specific to romantic attraction, people who are warm and friendly can often times get misinterpreted as being attracted when they’re just being warm, when they’re just friendly. I had a friend in college who um would run into this all the time. So, she was very warm person. She also was um quite anxious and so she had that mix of warmth and nervousness that surrounds a lot of kind of classic flirtation signals. every guy she’d interact with would just you could see them like starting to like perk up because they kept thinking that she was flirting with them and she wasn’t. That was just her in her natural state interacting. And so she just had this like trail of guys that were like following her around who she wasn’t interested in. So I’ve had that in the past too where people have misinterpreted me as flirting when I’m just being animated and friendly. Even if you do figure out that, oh, I really do think this person is flirting with me. The problem with that still is a couple of things. One, people flirt for all kinds of reasons. We don’t just have this straight line through somebody who is flirting is trying to date me. Now, people flirt because it’s fun. People flirt because they’re bored. But I think even more important is the core of flirtation as a model is you are suggesting interest without confirming it. So flirtation is inherently ambiguous. The idea of flirting is I’m going to hint at interest. I’m going to see what comes back. So we can’t rely upon that very well. I made a whole video getting into the science of flirtation um which you can watch if you’re interested. Maybe you’re thinking, “Yeah, yeah, okay.” But like I have met people and it I could tell they were into me and then like we talked and they were into me. Yeah. So like does that disprove this? No. No. If you dig around in the research, what you also find is that people are different. And there are some people where everyone observing can tell that person is flirting, that person is attracted, everyone gets it right. Then there are other people where nobody gets it right. You just can’t look at that person and tell that they’re attracted because they hide it so well. Some people are open books. The emotions just all come out. Some people are much more closed off. They’re protecting and hiding, right? And I know this because like that is how I’d always been. No one knew when I was into somebody. In fact, if I was into somebody, I would clamp down on it so hard that they would think that I disliked them. Generally, the more anxious we are, the more fearful of rejection we are, the more likely we are to try to hide those signals of interest because we don’t want someone to find it and then reject us. So, we tend to be a lot more careful about it. as well. If you are that kind of person, like like I’d always been, then you’re also likely to interpret the signals coming at you in a way that dismisses the idea that people are into you. There is a lot of room for interpretation in these signals. And I’m sure you know some people, I certainly do, who think everyone likes them, who thinks that everyone is attracted to them and trying to date them. you know, they’ll be like in a relationship and they’re like, “Oh, everyone’s hitting on me.” Some people will interpret ambiguous things very positively. A lot of us will not. A lot of us will almost go out of our way to dismiss very positive signals that people like us. So, we can’t even trust our own interpretations. The most classic one is, “Oh, they sending me all these signals. They’re smiling at me, doing the things. They’re just being nice. They’re just being friendly. I was talking to a young woman just yesterday who said that she was having a first date and she was getting a lot of signals of um warmth and connection from the guy. But she didn’t think he was into her. She was telling herself, “Oh, he’s just being nice.” She was wrong about that. And I know she was wrong because I was that guy and now we’re married. So I think that’s pretty conclusive evidence, not just being nice. So that is why we cannot rely upon just looking at these cues. We don’t really know what they mean and a lot of us are going to misinterpret them anyway. So if the signals lie so much, what can we actually trust? So, what finally helped me was discovering a model that just cut through all the noise. When I was trying to solve this problem of why attraction signals were so unreliable, I started thinking about this idea that came out of evolutionary psychology that’s called costly signaling theory. So, basically, it says that the signals that you can trust are the ones that actually cost something. They cost time or energy or effort or having to give up other opportunities. And this made complete sense to me. Most of the signs that we’re obsessing over in analyzing dating, they are cheap. So like smiling, it’s great. Please do it all the time. But it’s cheap to produce. You just do it. Same with eye contact. Same with laughing. Being warm, being polite, it doesn’t cost very much, right? But when somebody is giving things up in order to spend time with you, like if they’re choosing you over all the other options in their life, if they’re investing emotional energy, if they’re planning, they’re following through on things, then that’s more expensive, right? And therefore, it’s harder to fake. And that makes it a much more honest indicator that they actually like you. What I came up with was a mutual investment model. The basis of this is, you know this from looking at general economic things. If people are willing to pay more for something, it indicates they value it more. The way that I applied this was I stopped focusing on all the signals. I had fun. I focused on engaging and connecting and then I asked for and I looked for some kind of investment. On the other side, if people send you all the right signals, but then they’re not willing to give anything up or put anything into trying to get closer to you, then they’re not interested. This plays out in a range of different ways. Are they talking to you when they could be talking to a bunch of other people in a social environment? Are they agreeing to spend time with you one-on-one? Are they doing engaged listening like from the art of conversation video? So, one of my mantras to remember this is if you’re not sure, just ask for more. You can’t be asking for a ton of investment when you’re very early on to meeting somebody. So, you got to match it to where you are so it’s appropriate. And you might notice it’s called the mutual investment model. That’s because ideally we want it to be pretty equitable. What I find is a lot of people things tend to be a little mismatched. They are investing a lot of energy. the other person is not and they start to get a little resentful understandably. So, I’m planning to do an online workshop related to these topics, but I really want to tailor it to what would be most helpful to you. So, if you’d like to date and connect more confidently, then click in the link below. It’ll take you to a form where you can give me your input and help shape the direction of the workshop. So, after I adopted this mutual investment model, dating became just a lot easier. I didn’t have to have all this attention during the interaction trying to observe all these signals and remember the checklist in my head of what mattered. I didn’t have to go home and like ruminate about it and try to figure out whether they liked me to know what to do next. Instead, I would focus on just having fun and then seeing if they wanted to invest. That made honestly things so much simpler for me. And this is where it got kind of interesting because I would spend time around these people who were sending the signals and I figured they were into me somewhere. It was like, “Oh, this is so obvious.” And then when I would ask for investment, no, like they were just friendly or they just liked me as a person or they had kind of a flirty personality. And then more importantly, I met people who did not give body language signals of being interested, but who when I asked for investment, it turned out that they did like me. In my 20s, like I had a great relationship with somebody who was pretty shy. Had I relied upon the signals that I was getting, the body language, I would never have asked her out. And because I had this new model where I just assumed people may not be showing how interested they are and I just asked for investment, we ended up dating for quite a long time. We had a great relationship. And if you want to work on the skills that build genuine connection, like the kind where people open up and they invest into getting closer to you, the next video shows you how to engage and listen in a way that invites

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If you ever struggle to figure out whether someone ACTUALLY likes you, this video can help.

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DISCLAIMER
This information is for educational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for clinical care. Please consult a health care provider for guidance specific to your case.