God, that final bit. I was a resident assistant for my dorm in college for a year. Didn’t date anyone that year. Had plenty of crushes, including plenty from the dorm. At the end of the year, my coworkers (female RAs) were like, “yeah we were all so surprised you didn’t go out with anyone, like, half the girls here were in love with you.” And I just stared into the middle distance, “and you didn’t think to tell me???”
“We thought you knew!”
“I DID NOT”
How were you supposed to know? If half the girls acted the same then how could you know that anything was afoot?
Yeah. It all worked out. Married a nice person, have a kid, the whole deal. But god I could not read the room for YEARS.
It can get really confusing. I was one of the only out bisexual guys at my school in the 1990s. In my senior year there were two girls who individually always expressed a desire to hang out and talk but took none of the opportunities offered to do exactly this. I was confused because they were both stunning and always kind of weird around me so I couldn’t figure out what they wanted because it clearly wasn’t a relationship (Im not stunning). That was 30 years ago. Both are married to lovely women and have been out for decades now. What they wanted to talk about was how I knew I wasn’t straight. I wasn’t able to figure that out even though I knew they weren’t into me because reading the room has always been a challenge.