How to Tell when Someone Is Flirting and You’re Blind

You totally can, just not if you're me

The podcast episode for this post will come tomorrow. Sorry for the delay! I had some things come up, and I’m a one-man production team.

Toward the end of one year in high school, a friend threw a party at his big apartment. My family lived in Zurich, Switzerland at the time, and I went to a relatively small international school. My whole grade had about 60 kids. Most of us had to show up in one place for a party for it to be at all significant, and we couldn’t remotely compete with the parties of my friends back home in New Jersey public schools. But this was one of the few times we had something that felt like a legitimate high school house party.

One of the kids there was a girl I’ll call Claire. We got along well. We had a similar sense of humor and had done some nerdy theater things together. I always had a good time when we talked. But we didn’t have mutual friends and never hung out outside of school. She was, in other words, the exact kind of person I want at a party: someone I like who I don’t see often. And she was, quite noticeably, happy to see me too.

The party went into the early morning. I was tired most of the party, and most of all parties, because I’m an introvert. But at that age, I had only heard the word introvert and didn’t know what it meant. I was thus incapable of having the insight required to think, “There are almost no people on planet Earth I want to be around for more than 90 consecutive minutes, so I should probably go home.”

My nervous system knew what was up though. Doing the best it could given my limited self-awareness, it sent a message to my brain.

“You need to go be alone now because you’re… sleepy? Yeah, it’s, uh, bedtime. That’s why you need to be alone. Will that work?”

It did work. I told the people I was talking to I was going to look for a place to crash. Almost immediately, Claire said “Oh me too. Let’s go,” and proceeded with me down the hall where the bedrooms were.

Most teenage boys might at this point have smiled, or raised an eyebrow, or thought, “Oh, really…”

I thought, “Guess she’s sleepy too!” with a foreshadowingly catastrophic amount of innocence.