3 Indirect Ways Guys Tell You They’re Not Interested

1. Pat her.

Back pat: The back pat is best implemented when the two of you are greeting each other with a hug. If the hug lingers for longer than one second, pat her a few times on the back with one of your hands — it’s a way to say both “this hug is over” and “we’re buddies.”

Ideally, you want to move from the two-arm hug to the one-arm hug, then the fist bump, to the head-flick, to raised eyebrows until eventually you’re checking your cell phone to avoid eye contact and letting her sneeze in the same room as you without so much as a “bless you.”

The Head pat is also a good tactic, and best saved for when she’s trying to get you with some lingering eye contact that’s just a second or two too long to be casual. At this point, you just lightly tap the top of her head a few times. It’s like when you’re on your computer and you need to do something, but your dog keeps getting really close to your arm, which is so cute that you start feelingly almost inhumanly negligent, so every once in a while you pet it.

2. Don’t let her establish an inside joke.

Avoid inside jokes — that’s usually how it starts.

For instance: the last time you talked to her you told her something about hating country music. The next time you run into her at the bars, a country song comes on and she says, “Hey, it’s your favorite song!” with her mouth open ready for you to laugh.

Scrunch your eyebrows and smile, “What do you mean?”

“Ugh, last week at Jessica’s you said you hated country, remember?”

Slowly relax your smile back to a neutral, serious state and take out your phone, “I wasn’t at Jessica’s last week,” and show her a picture of a dead deer, “I’s in Arkansas for the Big Buck Classic, shot this one right through the heart from thirty yards out…” Keep flipping through pictures and adjust to a borderline hostile tone, “Wasn’t at no Jessica’s, tell you that much…Me’n my uncle stuff ‘em ourselves, when I’s six he showed me howda clean ‘em –.”

At this point she’ll feel like she’s losing her grip on reality and slipping into a David Lynch movie; just keep talking, showing her pictures of dead deer, and diving deeper into that backwoods accent until you’re just making vowel sounds.

3. Have her walk in on you.

Having her walk in on you is one of the most foolproof techniques; this is how you want to do it:

She walks in on you wearing a leather dominatrix outfit on all fours with a horse-bit in your mouth. On top of a glass ottoman there’s a three-layer fondue fountain blooming like a rose as it runs on six pints of your own blood. There’s two morbidly obese women with full body tattoos: one of them spanks you and counts in Latin, the other uses a stick to dip a burnt frog into the bloody fondue like she’s roasting a marshmallow. To the left of the door there’s a little person wearing a Saw mask sitting on an 8-foot stool, taking puffs from a 14-foot hookah hose that runs through the body of a Boa constrictor.

Her eyes fix on the fondue fountain, then you, then she apprehensively traces them up the ‘S’ shaped Boa-scaled hookah hose ending on the little person in the Saw mask who’s been pointing to the bloody fondue while small puffs of smoke escape his nose:

“You must drink,” he says in an impossibly low baritone.

You take the horse-bit out of your mouth and yell, “She doesn’t want to drink!” then you look at her, “Do you?”