Flirt blindness

[rhialto]

 BiCon is over, and I had 3 stickers on my name badge for flirt blindness. Just to make it clear.

Recently I read somewhere that if you're blind (in the conventional sense), that your brain makes up for the lack of incoming signals by just making up some random stuff. A similar thing is exploited by things like the "brain machine" - flashing lights in front of your eyes plus rhythmic sounds. It makes you see pretty moving patterns in various colours, which are certainly not real.

I connected this with flirt blindness. If you never see when somebody is flirting with you, apparently your brain tries to see flirting in "random other stuff". Hence, you may think that somebody is flirting with you, even when they aren't. Which is exactly my experience, but I just hadn't connected the different types of blindness yet.

Comments

[bitty.livejournal.com]

is that why there were none of those stickersn left for the rest of us?

[rhialto.livejournal.com]

Possibly. There were lots and lots of green stickers left, I noticed, so you could have re-purposed them for the meaning. Not that it would be confusing or anything[1].

[1] There were two slightly different greens already, and also there were two different stickers for flirt-blindness.

[plumsbitch.livejournal.com]

Hi there just friended you, entirely up to you if you friend me back, I'm C, Asian/British trans person, glasses and bleached blonde/purple hair. Enjoyed chatting to you on the grass on the last night.

[rhialto.livejournal.com]

Yay :-) And of course I've friended you back!

[ruth-sedina.livejournal.com]

You guys didn't know each other? You've both been going for ages, and are also both lovely :) Yay for lovely people making friends!

[rhialto.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose we knew each other to some extent but never got around to "formalize it" by friending ;-)

[plumsbitch.livejournal.com]

yy, I think of you as I person I expect to see about, but I think had first proper convesations and chilling. :)

[bondagewoodelf.livejournal.com]

Did I discuss "secondary flirt blindness" with you?

It's the inability to detect if your own flirting has been detected by the flirtee and to detect whether they are flirting back

[rhialto.livejournal.com]

You mentioned it in a hurry. Yes, I'm pretty sure I suffer from that too.

In another comment I realised there is also "doesn't signal to others that they'd like to be flirted with"; there must be more variations like that. I suffer from all of those, I'm sure, since I simply don't understand "body language" - usually I don't even *see* it, never mind try to extract a meaning. How expressive my own body language is, I have no idea, but I don't have high hopes.