Flirting can look so effortless on TV. Someone smiles and says something clever, and the other person is immediately charmed.
At least for some of us, that’s really the case in real life. Flirting looks a little more like accidentally saying “you too” when someone says “happy birthday” and then standing there processing what just happened for the next few hours. If your attempts to be cute and coy tend to go sideways in ways you can’t fully explain, this is a safe space. Being bad at flirting is way more common than the confident people want you to believe. In fact, we think there’s something endearing about it. Below are the 10 signs you might be one of us.
You Laugh at Everything They Say, Even When It’s Not Funny
There’s a different between nervous laughter and going into the full-body cackle you emit when your crush says something completely neutral, like commenting on the weather or bad traffic. You know it wasn’t funny. They know it wasn’t funny. And yet the laugh just happened, loud and uncontrollable, and leaving you sitting awkwardly in the aftermath. Bad flirters default to laughter as a reflex because silence feels dangerous, which unfortunately means they end up looking like everything their crush says is the most hilarious thing they’ve ever heard, even when it is very much not.
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You Go Silent When You Should Be Talking
There are few things worse than having your crush right in front of you, talking to you and giving you the perfect opening to speak, before everything you wanted to say all along instantly leaves your brain, producing nothing. Instead of speaking, all you can give is a long pause and a slight nod that you hope reads as mysterious and not dull and frozen. Bad flirters often over-prepare what they’ll say and then blank on all of it the second it matters, leaving them in an awkward silence that feels like it lasts approximately a million years.
You Accidentally Bring Up an Ex Mid-Conversation
You never mean to bring up your ex when you’re telling a story, but sometimes your memories involve a certain person and then suddenly you’re mid-sentence about your ex with no graceful way out. Bad flirters tend to get so flustered that their brain-to-mouth filter goes completely offline, which means things come out that really should have stayed internal, like a reference to your last relationship when you were supposed to be charming someone new.
Also read about: 10 Struggles You’ll Relate to If You’re an Accidental Flirt
Your Compliments Come Out Completely Wrong
You wanted to say something nice. The intention was genuinely sweet. But somewhere between your brain and your mouth the compliment mutated into something confusing, backhanded, or just deeply strange. “You’re so much nicer than I expected you to be” is a real thing a bad flirter has said while trying to be kind. “Your laugh is so weird but I like it” is another. The meaning is good. The delivery is a mystery. Bad flirters have big hearts and occasionally terrible execution, and the compliments are where it shows most.
You Talk About Yourself Too Much When You’re Nervous
Many of us start rambling when we get nervous. We start talking about our day, our weekend, our opinions on a movie we saw, our childhood pet, the weird dream we had last Tuesday. We’re full of nervous energy that needs to go somewhere, and talking feels safer than sitting in silence, but unfortunately, we come off sounding totally self-absorbed. Bad flirters can be anxious monologuers, and by the time they come up for air they realize they’ve been talking forever and haven’t asked a single question or shown any curiosity about the other person.
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You Accidentally Like Social Media Posts From 3 Years Ago
You never mean to commit this classic social media faux pas. It’s just that you were doing a completely normal amount of research, casually scrolling through their grid, and your thumb slipped on something from 2021 before you knew what was happening. Even if you unlike it in less than a second, the damage is already done. As a bad flirter, you probably understand this type of panic intimately.
You Break Accidental Eye Contact Like You Were Caught Red-Handed
Sometimes, it can feel like there are a hundred unwritten rules about eye contact no one ever bothered to share with you. You know it’s supposed to be flirtatious, and try to hold it just long enough for it to be meaningful. Instead, the second your eyes meet theirs, you look away so fast it probably seemed like you saw something alarming just past their shoulder. Bad flirters want to make the moment happen but get startled by it the second it actually does. The resulting panic rarely comes off as alluring and intentional.
Also read about: These 3 Zodiac Signs Are the Biggest Flirts
Your Texts Are Either Way Too Much or Way Too Little
When you like someone, it seems impossible to send them a text of regular length. Either you send a three-paragraph message that took 45 minutes to compose and accidentally reveals more than you meant to, or you overthink it so hard that you send “haha yeah” and then stare at your phone for an hour wondering if that was enough. Bad flirters struggle to find the casual, low-stakes middle ground because nothing about texting your crush feels casual or low-stakes. Every message is a whole ordeal to overanalyze, leaving you exhausted in the process.
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You Reveal Something Embarrassing Way Too Early
It can be hard to keep your cool around your crush, and so very early on in the talking phase, the story about the time you tripped in front of your entire school or the weird phase you went through in seventh grade has somehow already come out. Bad flirters tend to overshare early because they’re nervous, and being incredibly uncool feels easier than trying to impress them. We think the impulse is actually kind of sweet, but it can also scare people off before a relationship gets any chance to blossom.
You Ask Your Friends to Find Out if They Like You Back
Because you’ve never had a sixth sense for this kind of thing, you tend to recruit others to help you gather intelligence on your behalf. At some point in your flirting journey, the indirect approach feels completely reasonable. It’s not like you’d ever dare to ask the person how they feel about you. The stakes can feel enormous, and you really don’t want to mess things up. Sending a friend in first is a kind of risk management, and even if it’s a slightly juvenile approach, it works.
If the opposite is true and you’re a natural flirt, click HERE to learn how to avoid giving someone the wrong idea.
