Flirting today

Flirting is hard these days. It's not that there aren't good people to meet. It's not just that flirting has always been hard. There are societal effects in place today that add difficulty that, to my knowledge, has never existed before. Please forgive me as I indulge in stereotypes – and don’t wear the shoe if it doesn’t fit.

Men have to deal with the possibility of being branded as "creepy." A man becomes creepy when he violates social protocol, as it is perceived by others. This is frequently unfair to the men in question: as much as we’d like to think that there are universal standards, or even societal standards, everyone is a little different and has different rules. We all communicate differently (in fact, I have an entire blog post about it), so a woman may reject a man in a way that is both clear and gentle to her, but that doesn’t communicate rejection to him at all. The fault here belongs to both parties, but calling him a "creeper" places all the blame on him. To further complicate matters, men are encouraged to break social protocol for the women they love – as long as he doesn’t go too far, a man can express sincerity by going beyond social norms. But it only works when she’s interested; if not, going beyond is unquestionably creepy.

Some women experience something remarkably similar;

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