Viral video mocks cringe flirting tactic men use on women

A painfully accurate impression of a certain type of male flirting has gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of people cringing as they watch.

Creator Auden Barnes posted the video to Instagram with the caption: “You’re one of those ones nahhh.”

The on-screen text sums up the type of man he is impersonating: “Guys whose only way of flirting is pretending to care loads about really boring stuff.”

In the clip, Barnes pretends to be on the other end of a conversation with a woman and somehow manages to turn every one of her everyday habits into something worth dramatically disagreeing over.

“Nah, you put the milk in before the cereal?” he says, immediately horrified by the answer.

“Nah, you’re wrong”.

When his fictional date apparently doubles down, things only get worse.

“Nah, nah, nah, nah, guys. She puts the milk,” he says, seemingly appealing to an invisible jury for backup.

“Milk in before the cereal? I can’t even with that. What the hell? I put cereal in, then milk.”

Then comes showering.

“Shower in the mornings? Nah, that’s wrong. That’s wrong. I shower in the evening.”

And olives.

“I’m a green olive guy. I’ve been a green olive guy. Don’t tell me you’re a purple olive girl.”

Even the poor woman’s favourite colour isn’t safe.

“Yellow is your favourite colour?” he asks incredulously. “What? It’s gotta be something else, like blue.”

It is flirting stripped back to its most excruciating form: find out something completely harmless about a woman, tell her she’s wrong about it, call her “one of those ones” and hope the relentless teasing somehow creates chemistry.

And judging by the reaction online, plenty of women and men have encountered their own version of him.

The video has racked up more than 737,000 views and 40,000 likes on Instagram, with hundreds piling into the comments to share their second-hand embarrassment.

“Mate I didn’t know how much this pissed me off till you made this vid,” one person wrote.

Another was ready for men still using the tactic to cut it out altogether.

“Mate when I see lads doing this it pisses me off. I think bro grow up, you’re begging it,” they wrote.

“I have met so many versions of this man I can’t believe they all spoke the same brand of jibberish,” one person said.

Another said the impression transported them straight back to teenage flirting.

“2014 Snapchat convos,” they wrote, recalling endless weekend chats before a boy would announce he had a “secret crush”, refuse to reveal who it was and eventually claim it was because “she’s too pretty”.

If your romantic tactic still consists of “nahhh you’re wrong” and disagreeing with a woman’s favourite colour, the internet has a message for you: grow up.