What was your "oh, they wanted more than coffee!" moment?

Thirteen year old me, upon being told that the class hottie wanted to get to know me better, came up "why would she want that?" as the best possible answer.

Undaunted, her friend said "you know, becoming more friendly with you", but I doubled down with "well, we always hang out at [specific place in our school], just tell her to come by and I will be there with the boys".

I ended up never getting anywhere with her, surprisingly.

As someone who's on the asexual spectrum (and insecure even when I am attracted to someone) I feel like I have a whole collection of moments where I knew someone wanted more than what they were saying but I wasn't interested or comfortable with the situation. I really wish people would be more direct so I could have a conversation about it. Is it weird for me to be far more comfortable talking about sex, attraction, and how I feel than I am touching someone?

I suppose most people haven't spent as long trying to pick apart their relationship with sexual attraction and don't have many thoughts on the matter prepared.

Alright so this one is a bit different but similar enough I think:

So in high school, I liked this girl. One time when talking to her, I made an 'Istanbul, not Constantinople" joke, and she asked if I liked They Might Be Giants. Of course, wanting to impress her, I said yes (I'd barely heard of them at this point). And then, in one of the most inexplicable moments of my life, my brain decided that just saying the name of the band in a weird singsongy way was the best possible follow-up. To this day I have zero clue what possessed me to do this. She just giggled, and I interpreted this as laughing at me and filed it under "adolescent cringe" for the next 3 years.

That is, until, one crisp fall night in my backyard, I actually decided to listen to the band. And what do I hear right near the end of Flood?

That's right, John Linnell yelling the name of his own band. And it was in that instant that it hit me, and when I say hit me, I mean hit me, straight in the face, like a sack of wet mice: she thought I was making a reference. This is the silliest thing ever, but between the environment of a quiet suburbian backyard in the middle of a night like that and the mounting realization, it really was an experience. It was by far the most vindicated I've ever felt at 2AM. I rode that high for about a week until I realized it meant that she wasn't in fact laughing at me, she probably just thought it was cute, and that it maybe could've gone somewhere had i not misinterpreted that and acted awkward afterward.

Mine was a double whammy.

I worked at a computer help desk at a university (in the 90s) and spent about an hour helping an attractive woman with her computer problems. I did not really get any hints from our interaction at all, but there were apparently lots - when I sat back at the desk with my female coworker, she expressed some consternation and wondered why I missed all the signs that that girl was flirting with me. She told me it was very cute that I couldn't tell, and that there's just something "sexy about a man who knows how to fix all the problems". Several years later she explained to me that she had also been flirting with me that whole evening (and for many of our shifts together) and I remained "blissfully ignorant".

An ex-girlfriend ended our first date by asking if I had any other plans for the day. I said I needed to get home so I could be rested for work the next day. It was only after we'd parted ways that I realized it'd been an invitation. It didn't mess anything up in the longer term, we had other dates and a long-lived relationship, but I was chagrined.

I'm generally good at picking up signals if I'm already attracted and my radar's actually switched on. By and large though, I used to be so thoroughly disinterested in people that I know I've had my fair share of oblivious moments. I never dwell on interactions enough to realize things after the fact, so here's a funny one I realized in the moment instead.

In my first office internship, there were a few of us interns/trainees around the age of 19-21. This attractive, quiet girl came on a couple months after me. We were in different units so we didn't really talk much but I knew she was a couple years older than me and I'd definitely admired from afar. I'd been given some assignment that had me working alone a lot but the other units would need my data from time to time, so one day after about her first month she comes to my desk while I'm working and asks me how it's going, how much more do I think I'd have to work on it, etc. I think I answered while keeping an eye on my computer screen as I was in the middle of something in Excel, and after a slight pause, she asks me, "So, how's your mom doing?"

I'd never mentioned my mother to her before, nor anyone else working there, for that matter.

I look up at her in confusion and the gears slowly start whirring in my brain. Suddenly I realize, "Ohhhh, she's trying to flirt!" Thankfully I didn't burst out laughing but it was very funny in the moment.

I later found out that she wasn't just quiet, she was really shy and a couple of the other girls in the office had been trying to engineer us something between us since her second week! Nothing really came of it though as I ended up leaving soon after and she lived too far away for me at the time, but I still get a good chuckle out of the memory.

Friend invited me to prom, "as a friend." We were trying to figure out where I would sleep that night, after after-prom (which was at the boarding school said friend went to). Friend offered to have me sleep with him, but mentioned the complication of his roommate probably being there.

I decided that since said friend was trans and lived on the assigned female hall, it would be less trouble for people to get in if I slept over with an assigned male friend.

🤦

A few years ago I reconnected with an old friend. We spent the night drinking, going out for dinner, etc.

At the end of the night, after a lot of drinking, she's all 'hey, wanna come back to my place for a nightcap?' and me, in my 'this is my first time drinking in about a year or so and I am super drunk' mind, come to the conclusion that I have already had enough to drink and said just that.

About twenty minutes later I'm taking the train home and it clicks --- and I think back to this very episode of Seinfeld.

Over the years I've had three persons asking me to help them with homework, or explain something out of the blue, that seems to be a common tactic to spend time with me without being too direct. I did suspect it was a ruse but as a learned man I couldn't avoid giving them a stern lesson, which made sure the event didn't lead to anything.

Just a quick note: probably better to phrase this as “they” instead of “she” in the title. As it stands now, it’s basically a great example of implicit heteronormativity (which leaves out a significant portion of Tildes users!) and may also propagate existing stereotypes about the internet being a male-dominated culture (which unfortunately does not appear to leave out a significant portion of Tildes users).

^{I’m no fun police, nor do I get inciteful about minor genuine mistakes, but I’m all for changes which can make more users feel better!}