What Is Your Flirting Style?
Five ways of signalling interest, and why some go unnoticed
Flirting is usually treated as a skill you either have or do not. The research says something more useful: there are five distinct ways of communicating romantic interest, and most people have one dominant style. That matters because the styles are not equally visible. Two of them are so subtle that the other person frequently does not register that anything happened at all.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you behave when you are genuinely interested in someone, not about how you behave when you are being friendly.
What it measures
Five styles. Physical is expressing interest through body language. Playful treats flirting as a game worth playing for its own sake. Sincere aims at a genuine emotional connection. Polite keeps everything within proper boundaries. Traditional holds that men should make the first move and women should not. Most people score on several, with one clearly leading.
Based on: Flirting Styles Inventory (Hall, Carter, Cody & Albright, 2010)
Possible results
Physical
Signalling interest with your body rather than your words.
Playful
Flirting as a game, enjoyable whether or not it leads anywhere.
Sincere
Building a real connection rather than performing interest.
Polite
Keeping everything within proper limits.
Traditional
Holding that there is a proper order to who approaches whom.
Common questions
Which style works best?
In Hall's data, physical, playful and sincere flirts reported more dating success than polite and traditional flirts did. But the mechanism is not charm - it is visibility. The two styles that do worse are the two that are hardest for the other person to detect, which means the problem they have is not being unattractive, it is being unread.
Can I change my style?
You do not need to change it so much as make it legible. If you are a polite or sincere flirt, the fix is not to become someone else - it is to add one unambiguous signal to what you already do. Saying plainly that you enjoyed the evening and would like to do it again is a small act that converts a whole category of missed chances, and it is entirely compatible with being a careful person.
Why do people miss it when I am flirting?
Because detecting flirting is genuinely difficult, and the studies on it find accuracy rates that would embarrass most people. Interest is communicated through small signals that also occur in ordinary friendliness, so the receiver has to decide between two readings with almost no evidence. The safest assumption is that your signal was weaker than it felt from the inside - it almost always is.
Sources
- Hall, J. A., Carter, S., Cody, M. J., & Albright, J. M. (2010). Individual differences in the communication of romantic interest: Development of the Flirting Styles Inventory. Communication Quarterly.
- Hall, J. A., & Xing, C. (2015). The verbal and nonverbal correlates of the five flirting styles. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. doi:10.1007/s10919-014-0199-8
- Hall, J. A., Xing, C., & Brooks, S. (2015). Accurately detecting flirting. Communication Research. doi:10.1177/0093650214534972
An honest note The five styles are well established and come from large samples - the inventory was developed on thousands of respondents and has been replicated since. Two limits are worth stating. First, this measures how you say you flirt, and the research on accuracy is not flattering to anybody: people are poor at detecting flirting directed at them, and both sexes make errors, in opposite directions. Second, the traditional style scale is about beliefs regarding gender roles, so it is describing a set of attitudes rather than a behaviour, and it will read differently depending on where you live.