“When Both People Are Interested, How Often Is Flirtatious Escalation Mutual?” by johnswentworth

Here are two models of “the norm” when it comes to flirtatious escalation, assuming both people are in fact interested:

• “Mutual Escalation”: both people go back-and-forth making gradually more escalative moves. One might tend to escalate first, but the other will at least match escalation level.
• “Active/Passive”: one person makes roughly all of the escalative moves. The other person passively approves/disapproves, and the active participant tracks their approval when deciding to dial up/down.

Multiple people (including agree-votes and offline) have told me that the first is most common. Multiple people (including agree-votes and offline) have told me that the second is most common.

What I really want to know is:

• Conditional on mutual interest, what are the relative frequencies of these two kinds of flirtatious escalation?
• Are there particular settings/cultures/etc in which those frequencies are very different?

These are both fairly difficult questions to answer, because of [...]

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Outline:

(01:54) Some Priors

(02:47) Some Data

(04:22) Some Better Answers?

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First published:
September 2nd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dpfYKEC2NijExZQQ6/when-both-people-are-interested-how-often-is-flirtatious

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.