Women often communicate how they feel in very small actions, tone shifts, and behaviors that men completely overlook during the moment they occur.
Proximity shifts
Women will try to subtly move closer to a man they’re interested in, but this intentional movement typically goes unnoticed. She’ll purposely sit right next to you instead of across from you at a table or angle her whole body toward you if you’re in a crowded space.
Women do these things because they want to decrease the distance between you and them without explicitly saying it.
Shared mannerisms
If a woman likes you on a subconscious level, she will begin mimicking your physical movements, verbal rhythms, and body language. So if you shift your legs and cross your ankles, she’ll likely do the same thing a few seconds later. She may also mirror the slang you use or your speech patterns.
Mirroring is an instinctive thing we all do when we want to build rapport with someone, but men tend to think it’s just a coincidence when it happens to them.
Micro-compliments
Rather than give big, obvious compliments, women will throw out insanely specific ones that you don’t even catch. She’ll tell you how deep your voice sounds when you’re mad, how she liked it when you put your hair up a certain way, or how she liked your outfit yesterday.
When women say these things, they mean you’re being analyzed. They watch you like hawks and pick up on details others won’t notice.
Targeted venting
If she starts telling you about small problems in her life, she’s silently assessing if you are a safe person for her to be vulnerable around. When guys hear women complain, they usually try to fix the problem or just listen half-heartedly.
What she’s actually doing is giving you small snippets of info about herself to see how you’ll react, hoping you’ll fill in the gaps by reassuring her you care.
Eye contact
She locks eyes with you for a few seconds longer than social norms approve of, then quickly looks away. Oftentimes, she’ll smile or glance down at your lips when she does this.
Girls love to flirt with eye contact, but men never realize what’s happening. To most men, it probably just seems like a friendly stare.
Intentional touch
Lightly brushing up against you when you’re walking down the street or resting her hand on your arm a fraction too long after laughing at one of your jokes are women’s favorite ways to break the touch barrier with you without it being too forward.
It’s innocent and seemingly mundane, but completely calculated. She wants to see how you react to being touched by her, so she starts with small doses of physical contact to see if you reciprocate.
Remembering minutiae
When she remembers something small you said a month ago and brings it up in conversation, that’s a big green flag. She’s paying attention. Women store little facts and details like this away when they like you, so they can mention them months later and prove to you they listen when you talk.
Men often don’t even catch these and completely overlook the fact that she took a mental note to save that information.
Curated styling
She may make minor alterations to her appearance when she knows she will be around you. Maybe she puts on a certain perfume that you complimented before, wears an article of clothing in your favorite color or changes up her hair if she knows you will see her.
This small effort to make herself look nicer for you often goes completely unrewarded when you don’t notice it.
Delayed responses
In the early stages of a connection, she may delay responding to your text messages for a calculated amount of time. Or she may respond back to you right when you stop texting her, exactly when you would expect her to.
Creating distance by playing with texting gaps is an indirect way of controlling her perceived value and shielding herself from getting hurt.
Most men will interpret long gaps in texting as them being busy or not interested. What they fail to realize is that she’s emotionlessly testing the waters.
Strategic absences
She might become somewhat unavailable for a day or say no to a simple hangout just to see if you’ll bother to fill that small amount of distance she created.
She’s waiting for you to notice the gap she created, pursue her, or say you miss her. Men who experience this tend to take the hint and continue on with their day, not realizing what they should have done.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.