While it is absolutely possible to learn the skills required to pick up on these things, my personal experience is that it’s a very slow, very painful process. I first realized that there was information most everyone around me were getting that I wasn’t (i.e. social cues) at around 8 years old. I didn’t come up with anything resembling a solution until I was 12, when I read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It took me the better part of three decades to devise and implement my workaround. The essentials are that most people appear to have an intuitive grasp of social cues, including but not limited to the ability to recognize, identify, and interpret emotions in other people. I do not have this intuitive grasp, but I am now able to glean a largely overlapping set of information by consciously reading body language, micro-expressions, voice intonation, common patterns of phrasing, etc., and also by creating a mental model of common patterns of thinking, which I call “mental archetypes”. Note that these archetypes are neither intended as nor appropriate for comprehending or predicting any specific individual, but rather illustrate general patterns into which many people frequently fall, to aid in navigating social situations. For me, it was a lengthy, tedious, painstaking process, but it was effective.

I know this one! You realize it many years later while quietly laying in bed. “OMG, she was hitting on me!”

There is also the “Their face is looking weird, this is one of those trauma stories I shouldn’t share with normal people.” And you’re just trying to tell what to you is a funny story.