Words: Esme Lloyd (she/her)
Maybe you’re somebody who has decided they simply cannot flirt, to which I would say, how about you buy me a drink and find out (joking)
The setting can vary. Between the aisles of a supermarket, perhaps, or the bookshelves of the library. Or maybe it’s at the club, four Red Stripes deep, sticky trainers against PVC flooring. Still, the giveaways are often the same: eye contact that catches across the room, a smile closer to a smirk, even, godforbid, a one liner.
I’m talking, of course, about one of life’s great joys: flirting. An emphatically human phenomenon, you would assume people have been flirting for millennia, but the OED marks the first use of the actual verb ‘to flirt’ in 1532, when it meant ‘to be tilted, or curved up’. It was used in 1532 in reference to headdresses, but these origins feel appropriate, considering that so much of flirting is about looking at things at a slant. Flirting necessitates reading between the definitive lines of an interaction to discover its unstable meaning; something tilting, shifting, and always transient.
I find flirting’s delight to be twofold; first, there’s the artistry and craft of a good flirtation, and then there’s the sweet grey area it occupies. Flirting is undoubtedly an art, a careful dance between two people. Make one wrong move and the game is up, both of you sent plunging back down to reality. Earnestness that leans cheesy? Not good. Overfamiliarity? Even less so. It’s a difficult game to play, especially considering the goalposts of what passes as attractive or funny shift with each person. But the joy of flirting is in this subjectivity, and the thrill of getting it right – two people, maybe strangers, somehow finding themselves on the same page of a book with no words.
And then there’s the hazy noncommitment that flirting celebrates. Flirting is a language of implication, and delicately evades fixed, singular meaning. This is what gives it its edge of mystery, the blade of excitement in what might otherwise be a tedious conversation in the library canteen. By noncommitment, I don’t mean in a romantic sense, necessarily – I actually think flirting can be pointedly unromantic – but a general refusal to commit to intent. A single look or comment can invoke myriad possibilities, though none are fulfilled or confirmed. Flirting lets you indulge in uncertainty, finding pleasure and excitement in the potentiality of those murky grey areas.
This is also why flirting takes place in spaces you pass through, like train stations, coffee shops, and parties: these places don’t require you to commit to a location, or anything else. Flirting embodies this transience – comments pass before they can be resolved, any potential implication slowly dissipating into thin air like it might just have never happened. It’s the clanging bell of ‘did she really just say that?’, and the vanishing of that thought in light of a quick reply. Consider it table tennis (but actually fun): you never have a moment to drop the ball or think about their serve, you’re just batting it back.
As a historically feminine pastime, it’s unsurprising that flirting is associated with silliness and vacuity. Freud (who, let’s be real, was probably no good at it) labelled it a ‘shallow and empty’ activity, identifying yet misunderstanding its gleefully noncommittal nature. My own therapeutic guru, Dolly Parton, had a better idea of it: ‘Yeah, I flirt. I have eyes and I’m not dead!’. What Freud misses is the pleasure to be found in its shallowness. It’s certainly not love (no depth of feeling), nor is it seduction (not a road to a destination). It’s not even lust, which necessitates attraction. Instead, flirting is about celebrating the superficial, skittering across the surface of an interaction, suggesting, and rescinding. A good flirtation can even be transformative, a way of imagining a different self. Maybe you become the kind of person that says something out of pocket in the Tesco’s cereal aisle, or sings Prince’s Kiss with unbreaking eye contact at karaoke. It’s play in its purest form, wonderful because of its emptiness and superficiality, rather than in spite of it.
Maybe you’re somebody who has decided they simply cannot flirt, to which I would say, how about you buy me a drink and find out (joking). In this case, I would encourage you to consider flirting less as a means to an end – some faintly sinister weapon in the armoury of seduction – and more about getting comfortable with life’s uncertainties. Learning to flirt means learning to approach life with a touch more levity, appreciating the transience of interactions, people, and places. Whilst the thrill of the flirt might be in the will-they-won’t-they, there’s something to be said for embracing the philosophy of flirting more generally: accepting life’s grey areas for all their discomfort, and uncovering that sense of freedom and play they can offer you, if only in the spirit of cautious experimentation.
