Hiralious

She is touching her hair as she talks to you. When she is similing, her eyes smile along with her.

You know a lot about how to interpret body language. You know she is very likely to be flirting with you.

I point this out to her, just the fact that she touches her hair too often. She becomes self conscious.

''Am i touching my hair too often? Lol, It's just a habit I guess. I need something to play with always. Until you mentioned it to me, I didn't even realize I do that. ''

I guess sometimes we can be reading too much into something. As for her, maybe I have created an unnecessary amount of strain around a casual habit, or maybe i was right and she is just bluffing now. How will i know!

Dee and Mee are playing poker at the table. Despite the mastered art of keeping a poker face, a sense of agitation emanates from Mee's tapping foot under the table.

Dee is quick to pick it up. He thinks that Mee is in trouble. He doesn't have a good set of cards on him anymore.

Feeling confident in his assumption, Dee makes his next move and to his great disappointment , it becomes clear to him that he was wrong in his assumption.

That or maybe Mee had reversed his natural body language to confuse him. How do you ever know!

The problems with trying to figure people out by what you know of human psychology is that when you try, there are three possibilities:

What you interpret is true.

What you interpret, lets say a habit or behavior which is known to mean something in Psychology, is just a casual or benign habit of an individual that may be nothing to them, may conceal no hidden trauma or inner motivations, and may just be a force of habit they picked up randomly.

What you interpret is wrong because people may reverse their natural reaction/body language to fool you. ( This in turn, can be done for both bad and harmless intentions. An example of latter is that women usually learn to communicate messages in implicit communication instead of explicit communication, which can be misleading to someone who puts emphasis only on overt communication. And many a times, in social situations, all of us are expected to display emotions contrary to what we may be feeling. E.g : masking a sense of unease about someone's victory when your own spirit is down in the dumps.)

The odds of being wrong in your interpretation are great anyway. As long as a living, breathing human being exists in the confines of his own body separte from you, you will not have access to all his feelings, thoughts, aspirations.

Your efforts in this regard will be exasperating, even if they do not lead you to the wrong conclusion which they often will.

There are harms to overdiagnosing things just as there are harms in underdiagnosing them. Just as there is harm in being manipulated and fooled for a long time, there is a significant degree of harm in reading too much into people's actions and speech. Just as you may sentence yourself to a life of unhappiness, by being around people who are secretly manipulating you , you may just deeply hurt and lose the people who never had the malignant intentions you attributed to them or sensed about them.

Then what do you do? Do you just give in to the grey area where you trust these living, breathing, bags of lies?

No, you understand that they cannot be trusted. But you keep an open mind. You don't try to figure them out that much. That's all.

To me this is the concept of vulnerability. By keeping your mind and heart open, you expose yourself to people who are there to get you , but it is only by keeping your heart open and the possibilities alive, that you also meet the people who give you the only true connection in your life.

The answer to these confusions, no one can approach with certainty. But accepting this uncertainty is better than attempting to approach certainty for the sake of it. Certainty is an experience we are not allowed.

There is no option except to let people be.