How Can I Sense if a Girl Is Interested?

Obviously, some nonverbal signaling is at work in this situation. Your experience is not unusual, and some psychologists have set out to discover just what signals are sent out in this kind of interaction. Dr. Mark Cary of the University of Pennsylvania set up a simulated situation just like the one you describe. He prepared a room with a woman sitting in it and set up a hidden television camera
to observe what went on.

He asked fifteen male college students to enter the room, one at a time, and he recorded each meeting with videotape to see when and why conversation took place.

In almost all cases, he found that the girl and the student looked at each other once as the student entered the room, but no conversation took place until the woman looked a second time.

He could not determine why the woman had control but decided it was either her sex or the fact that she was there first and had established territorial rights.

He set up twenty situations in which a male student was in the room and a woman entered. The results were the same. It was the woman in all cases who dictated, with body language, whether or not conversation should take place. The reason? The very fact that she was a woman.

However, Cary added that the person in the room first has some control. If it’s a woman who’s there first, she has enormous control. If it’s a man, he has some control, but this is canceled out by the fact that the entering person is a woman. Either one can initiate conversation.

In bars, Cary found a similar signaling system, but often that first, sizing-up look is omitted. The woman will only give a glance at someone who appears interesting.

The glance is interpreted as permission to start a conversation.

What it boils down to is that the woman is in control of this type of pickup. If she doesn’t look at all, most men will not try to talk to her.

“Inexperienced men,” Cary suggests, “occasionally pick the prettiest girls to approach. More experienced men look for the girl who signals her interest in them. Because of this their score is much better.”