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

You totally can, just not if you're me

Hear me read this post on the Deep Sy podcast.

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.

I looked in a few rooms. A dangerous thing to do in itself at a high school party, but clearly that’s not where my head was. We found a room with a queen-sized bed. Two guys were sleeping in it, but there were pillows and blankets set up on the carpet.

“Perfect!” I thought.

We laid down next to the bed, and I said goodnight.

There were several seconds of silence, and then one of the guys in the bed whispered something to the other guy. The other quietly agreed, “Yeah.”

They got up, one announcing loudly, “We are going to go to a different room to sleep now because, uh… see you later.” They left quickly.

“Awesome!” I thought, “The bed is free!”

I had no idea why they left. but obviously two friendly pals like me and Claire weren’t going to sleep in the same bed. That would be so awkward! So I had to grab that bed for myself before she did.

“Dibs!” I shouted as I leapt into the bed.

Claire did not respond to this exclamation at all. This was strange. Most of the guys I hung out with would have been upset.

“Dude, no fair! You were closer,” they would say.

“Oh well,” I would respond smugly.

Silence from Claire though. Curious… Oh but of course! I forgot. She was so sleepy. She was probably drifting off, which would be great because she wouldn’t object to me taking the bed.

So there we were. Me on a bed, and my good, platonic buddy on the floor. Just two affable chums trying to get some rest.

But I soon realized I wasn’t actually tired. Not understanding my nervous system’s strategizing, I assumed I was rallying. And if one is capable of further partying, then one must party further. Any normal teenager knows that. And I was determined to act like a normal teenager in the hope that someday I might become one.

So I said, “I’m not falling asleep. I’m gonna go back out there,” and left the room. I still heard no response from the floor as I closed the door behind me, leaving Claire alone in the dark.

This accidental yet categorically brutal rejection is made worse by the fact that Claire was relatively shy and reserved. This took courage on her part, and I’m certain something in the vicinity of first base was all she had in mind. The same is true of the girl in what I unfortunately have to tell you is the story of another time I did the exact same thing.

About six months before the party, my grade went on a class trip, and everyone stayed in a motel together, taking up two of the building’s floors. The chaperones, rightly not trusting us to remain in our rooms after lights out, stationed a teacher on a chair in the hallway of both floors. It would have been effective… if the teacher in our hall had stayed awake. But even quietly cracking our door open an inch was enough to hear his deep, slow breathing and occasional snores.

My roommate, much more closely tuned to romantic signal frequencies, knew there was a girl a few rooms down who was interested in him (and whom he would later date). He texted her to come over with her roommate, who I’ll call Donna. They tip-toed and easily evaded detection.

Donna was a smoker, and at that time, I partook socially (I later partook privately, but then partook in a relationship with my wife who despises smoking, so that was that). We were standing next to each other, smoking out my room’s large window, when the conversation turned to relationships. Donna took it there. She mentioned she wasn’t having a lot of luck with boys since moving to Zurich. I said my experience with girls in Zurich was similar, judging it irrelevant to the conversation that my experience with girls was also similar at all times before Zurich.

“So,” she said, “I guess neither of us has had a lot of luck recently.”

“Why does she sound like she’s insinuating something?” I thought. “Wonder what that’s about.”

“Well, I think I’m going to head back to my room now,” she said slowly, still sounding like there was an implication of some sort.

“Oh okay, have a good night!” I said, thinking she was, as I’m sure you could now guess, sleepy.

She said goodbye, touching my arm.

I sat there, talking to my roommate and Donna’s roommate, both of them probably praying I’d spontaneously learn how to take a hint.

And then, ten minutes or so later, for some reason I couldn’t possibly discern, there was Donna again. She was back. She must have rallied. Later, defeated, both girls left to go to sleep. And thus the night ended, with, I’m now sure, three separate people very frustrated with me.

Discerning readers might be thinking, “Wait, what do these stories have to do with being blind? Couldn’t anyone, no matter how little they could see, understand with clarity what was going on in both of these cases?”

True, no vision was required to correctly interpret these situations. Some of the problem was my pure social clumsiness. But the day-to-day experience of blindness was at play as well. It took many years after these incidents to realize, subconsciously, I had absorbed the message that blind men are unattractive. This is not a difficult conclusion to reach. Most men I knew who women found attractive, or who were depicted as attractive in media, were distinctly non-disabled.

Think. What do the manliest men do? They engage in feats of traditional athletic prowess. They hunt. They fight. They protect their loved ones from armed assailants. They get jobs to provide for their families. Those jobs are things like fireman, police officer, soldier, or football coach. They are supposed to feel like superheroes to their children.

Blind men can’t do most of these things. We can sometimes get well-paying jobs, but often aren’t allowed to. The rest of the list is basically off-limits. and superheroes have superpowers, which are the polar opposite of disabilities.

Somewhere along the line, I decided a girl being romantically interested in me was not possible. The belief stood firm, even in the face of girls presenting seemingly insurmountable evidence to the contrary.

Years later, I managed to decipher that a girl was attracted to me and wanted to go on a date. I figured it out when she said something along the lines of, “I am attracted to you and want to go on a date.” It might have taken time, but I cracked the code.

A few years after that, I began dating my wife, who had to be similarly direct about her feelings. Once things got more serious, I started addressing the issue of my non-conformity with traditional masculinity. I made it clear to her that if anyone ever attacked us, I wished her luck. Only the most incompetent sighted attacker would fail to get the best of me. Maybe a mugger who spots a blind person and gets pumped about the chance to try a move they saw in an action movie, like a flipping kick, and lands on their head.

I also told her that I would take a bullet for her, which is true. It’s just I would have to know where the guy with the gun was first. Maybe she could sort of grab me and direct me between the two of them. I realize that wouldn’t look to witnesses like me protecting her so much as her using me as a human shield. But I thought she should know it’s an option. Otherwise, she might have to go find something else to hide behind, like a wall, or a tree, or another woman who is behind her husband.

Over time, my wife successfully assured me that she wasn’t very concerned with whether her partner was manly. This made me think there might be more women than I thought who were likewise so unconcerned with stereotypical manliness that they could be interested in disabled men. This, in turn, reframed the above stories, plus one or two others, leaving me feeling quite embarrassed.

Now, 20 years after high school, I understand that the potential for social awkwardness and embarrassment is the exact kind of thing that makes parties draining. I know myself better. So here I sit, working from home, writing stories on a laptop in a room by myself, happy as a little introverted clam. But now I need to go. All this thinking about times I had to interact with people… I’m sleepy.