The Few Minutes Before Yes

Dating apps made attraction efficient. They also deleted the few minutes before you know whether somebody likes you back

A Thursday night, a half-full bar. A man at the counter has looked at a woman by the window three times. She has looked back twice. He knows nothing about her: not her job, not her age, not whether the person she came with is a friend or a boyfriend. No profile has confirmed that she is available. No match has granted permission. By modern standards this is an almost heroic lack of information.

He checks his phone. She checks hers. His friend starts talking about football. Forty minutes later both go home, each privately certain the other was not interested.

This used to be called meeting someone. These days it feels like being handed a microphone at a stranger's wedding.

The numbers explain the nerves. A 2023 Pew Research Center report found that 30 percent of American adults have used a dating site or app, rising to 53 percent among those aged 18 to 29. For a younger generation, online dating is simply part of dating.

Apps also take care of the scariest part. By the time you meet someone through an app, each of you has looked at a photograph, read a few lines and decided to leave the door open. A match is permission to proceed. Real life gives you no such thing. A glance might be an invitation or just a glance. A smile might be interest or good manners. Someone has to move first without knowing the answer. That is the part apps have made easier to avoid.

What changed for men

Men have good reasons to think harder about approaching women than their fathers did. A lot of what used to be called persistence was unwanted attention with better PR. That correction was overdue.

The trouble is that no replacement script arrived with it. The old arrangement was limited but legible: he approached, she responded. As roles loosened, that structure lost its authority. Women initiate more, men worry more about overstepping, and we talk about boundaries with a fluency our grandparents would have found alarming. Attraction, meanwhile, did not reorganize itself so tidily.

In my experience, plenty of women who expect equality in every other part of life still like being approached, provided it is the right person and a decent approach. Plenty of men with impeccably modern views still feel the first move is theirs to make. Both sides are waiting for the other to make the situation clear.

For the record, women are not blameless here. Plenty of us would rather study the bottom of a glass than say hello.

This is where the old advice about male confidence looks dated. Confidence still helps, but the skill that matters now is attention. A man who can read a room is far more appealing than one who has trained himself to cross it.

Here is what it looks like from my side of the bar. A woman who is interested turns toward you, asks you something back and finds a reason to stay when her friends drift off. A woman who is being polite answers in full sentences and asks nothing. The rarest thing of all is the man who asks one real question and then actually waits for the answer. He is harder to find than a free table on a Friday. Too many are either performing or already apologizing.

If the energy does not come back, you say something pleasant and leave. Nobody dies. Knowing when to go is half the skill, and it is the half the opening-lines listicle skips.

The part an app cannot do

Apps have made attraction purposeful. Match, message, meet, assess. Even a casual encounter starts from the understanding that both people want something, however vaguely defined.

Offline flirting used to be allowed to go nowhere. At a gallery opening, two strangers spend twenty minutes pretending to take the same mediocre painting seriously. He says something about the brushwork. She says she has no opinion on brushwork. They both laugh. Whether phone numbers are exchanged hardly matters. Someone has made a stranger feel attractive on an otherwise forgettable Tuesday, and that is the whole point of it.

We have lost patience for that kind of thing because so much of life is now organized around conversion. Recommendations become purchases, photos become posts, acquaintances become contacts. Flirting was one of the last places where a certain amount of pleasurable inefficiency was tolerated. It gave strangers a brief intimacy that no algorithm had approved, and there was no need to decide whether someone was relationship material before enjoying five minutes of their attention.

It also asks for something we are increasingly bad at: tolerating incomplete information. You do not know if she is single, if you are her type or if your opening line will land. You cannot discover in advance that you both spent last summer in Sicily. You have to pay attention to what is happening in front of you and accept that you may have misread it.

That sounds almost primitive next to how much research we do before buying a toaster. It is also where the charge comes from.

Men still know how to flirt. What they are out of practice at is the few minutes before mutual interest is confirmed, because technology got so good at deleting them. What matters is being willing to start without knowing the outcome, and paying enough attention to notice whether the other person wants to keep going. A better opening line will not do it.

Dating apps gave us certainty earlier.

Flirting begins before certainty arrives.