COMMUNICATION: How To Flirt, Start Conversations And Keep Them Going? In Depth Guide to Approaching, Flirting and Dating | Page 59

Turn-taking
Once you have initiated a conversation with your chosen target, your success in
making a favourable impression will depend as much on your social skills as on
what you say.
We have probably all met at least one person who is highly articulate, witty and
amusing, but who loses friends and alienates people by hogging the conversation,
not allowing others to get a word in. You may also have come across the equally
irritating strong, silent type who makes you do all the 'work' in the conversation –
who never asks a question, never expresses interest and makes no effort to keep the
conversation flowing.
What you have to say may be fascinating, and you may express it with great
eloquence, but if you have not grasped the basic social skills involved in
conversational turn-taking, you will be perceived as arrogant and unpleasant, and
neither your target nor anyone else will enjoy your company.
The basic rule on how much to talk is very simple: try to make your contribution to
the conversation roughly equal to that of your partner. The essence of a good
conversation, and a successful flirtation, is reciprocity: give-and-take, sharing,
exchange, with both parties contributing equally as talkers and as listeners.
Achieving this reciprocity requires an understanding of the etiquette of turn-taking, knowing when to take your turn,
as well as when and how to 'yield the floor' to your partner. So, how do you know when it is your turn to speak?
Pauses are not necessarily an infallible guide – one study found that the length of the average pause during speech was
0.807 seconds, while the average pause between speakers was shorter, only 0.764 seconds. In other words, people
clearly used signals other than pauses to indicate that they had finished speaking.
In previous sections of the Guide, we have described in detail the various non-verbal signals people use to show that
they have finished what they are saying, and that it is your turn to speak. These include eye-contact signals (remember
that people look away more when they are speaking, so when they look back at you, this often indicates that it is your
turn) and vocal signals such as rising or falling intonation, with a drop in volume. This may be accompanied by verbal
'turn-yielding' signals, such as the completion of a clause or 'tailing off' into meaningless expressions such as "you
know".
As a general rule, the more of these turn-yielding cues occur simultaneously, the more likely it is that your partner has
finished and expects you to speak. Watching and listening for these clues will help you to avoid interrupting, and also
to avoid awkward gaps and lengthy pauses in the conversation.

Talking
This Guide clearly cannot tell you exactly what to say, what words to use, in a flirtatious conversation, but it is
possible to provide some general guidelines on what you talk about, and how you
express yourself, particularly in terms of mistakes and pitfalls to avoid.
Negativity, for example, is real turn-off. If you talk too much about the bad side of
things, and constantly complain about the world or your own problems, your
partner will soon get bored and fed up. Other characteristics that research has
identified as particularly boring or off-putting include self-preoccupation (talking
too much about yourself and showing too little interest in oth