16 Things Only People Who Are Super Awkward When Getting Hit On Understand

1. It never occurs to you that someone actually wants to buy you a drink. You’ll assume they want to talk to the person next to you before realizing you’re the ~target of their affection~.

2. On the flip side, you’ll think you’re picking up good vibes from someone when they’re really trying to talk to someone over your head, or 3 feet to the left of you. That doesn’t just happen in movies, and you will stand there smiling at NO ONE for 45 seconds too long.

3. Your biggest fear is that one of your friends will appear beside you, insist it’s time for a group picture at the exact moment you start to loosen up, and then you’ll have to admit that you’re one of those people who takes staged pictures with a blinding flash at local bars.

4. When you realize someone’s interested you go from perfectly pleasant to overly dry, sarcastic and lowkey judgemental. It’s a very “I throw rocks at the people I think are cute” mentality you were planning on outgrowing 20 years ago.

5. You’ll occasionally misread someone’s signal and assume they’re approaching you to make friends, as opposed to making a move. So you’ll introduce them around to all your friends, expectantly waiting for them to mingle with the others, and legitimately confused when they continue to talk to you.

6. Even if you’re the most social person, when someone cute starts talking to you, you become interested in every detail behind the bar, over their shoulder or on your fingernails.

7. You have an incessant need to ask a lot of questions because that somehow seems more natural than a flowing conversation. You end up receiving the synthesized version of their dating profile.

8. You’ll give an opinion, or adamantly oppose something (say, Tinder) and then worry that they really like whatever you just tore to shreds and feel retroactively terrible for shitting on them prematurely.

9. You’re careful not to lie (again, re: Tinder profile) because you know you’re not smooth enough to get away with it. You’d be the person to say you don’t have Tinder and then they’d find it the next day. That WOULD happen to you.

10. You’re too literal and when you don’t laugh at their joke – because you honestly didn’t get it – and there’s just a long silence when they pause for effect after the punch line. You then over compensate by hysterically laughing at their next sentence, which isn’t at all funny.

11. If it’s after midnight, you admit how hungry you are and try to steer the conversation toward getting pizza. But in, like, a sexy way.

12. You freeze up and answer all their lovely, open-ended questions with yes or no answers. Three hours later you realize what the perfect comeback would’ve been. You consider texting them – a cute, whimsical, after the fact response – but you can’t. You never got their number because you don’t know how to close.

13. You want to order something fancy and expensive because they’re buying but end up misreading the beer menu, panicking when they ask what brand of gin, or ordering something that’s extremely intricate, and is really just a fancy way to ask for alcoholic fruit punch. Ordering a Stoli blueberry with soda, cranberry and a splash of lime is a solid way to baffle the bartender, confuse your date and out yourself as a southern sorority girl.

14. If they offer you some of their drink, you go in for a dainty sip and come up spluttering and asking if scotch is supposed to taste like gasoline, before you can think better of it. During your recovery from the stinging alcohol, you make a mental note that you need a filter.

15. You feel guilty about any quality they might’ve been drawn to that was actually fabricated. Like, if they liked that you were 5’8” but you’re actually 5’5” in 3” heels, does that make you a liar?

16. You flinch when they touch you, even if you’ve been leaning in all night hoping they would. Being “approachable” is a thing you’re working on.