Why We Flirt (The Answers May Not Actually Surprise You at All!)
2 Comments Published by Joel January 19th, 2008 in Romance, Sex. Share ThisIt’s hard not to dismiss this piece in TIME by Belinda Luscombe, titled “Why We Flirt,” with the pat answer: because we want to fuck. But it’s the stuff in the margins, when we flirt despite no real intention to follow through, that is much more interesting. Still, I can’t help but read blips like this and think that even benign flirting is, at its core, our brains and bodies going through the motions just in case.
[Expressing intimate information happens often] on sites like Yahoo!’s Married and Flirting e-mail group, as well as on Marriedbutplaying.com and Married-but-flirting.com. “Flirting” in this sense appears to be a euphemism for talking dirty. A University of Florida study of 86 participants in a chat room published in Psychology Today in 2003 found that while nearly all those surveyed felt they were initially simply flirting with a computer, not a real person, almost a third of them eventually had a face-to-face meeting with someone they chatted with. And all but two of the couples who met went on to have an affair. Whether the people who eventually cheated went to the site with the intention of doing so or got drawn in by the fantasy of it all is unclear. Whichever, the sites sure seem like a profitable place for people like the guy behind me on the pre-Christmas flight to hang out.
It’s why your wife or girlfriend gets pissed when you flirt. I mean, it’s so obvious it’s obfuscated. You get jealous of a flirting partner because there’s a chance, however small, they might stray.
I found the linked TIME article on Digg. Delving into the comments I found a few telling replies, like this one from “Senator PJT.”
I always get pissed off when I read articles that assume everyone is socially adjusted. I don’t flirt. I was only able to get a girlfriend because I knew her on the internet first, and we’ve been together for five years so I know it isn’t just because I’m ugly or generally an asshole.It at least proves to me that it’s specifically because I just can’t navigate that first five minutes of meeting someone, which makes it even more frustrating than if I really were just an asshole.
Dude, I know the feeling. And while I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using the internet as a proxy to mask your social awkwardness—better that than not having a girlfriend at all!—it reaffirms one of my realizations about all the pick-up artistry resurgence in the last few years. Normal guys aren’t going out to these conferences and reading books about meeting women because they want to turn into super-charged Lothsarios with a shiny vagina on every finger; most of these guys are reaching out to learn skills that will bring them up to what is a basic, healthy skill level of human social interaction. And it’s not just for meeting women, either, but for meeting anyone in real life.
Why We Flirt [Time.com]
IMO, a far more in-depth look at the topic comes courtesy of Psychology Today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19990101-000033.html
I recognized so many of my own habits that I wasn’t even aware were considered flirtatious.
Gotta love the Richard Burton quote:
“She was,” he proclaimed, “so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud. She… [was] famine, fire, destruction and plague… the only true begetter. Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires before they withered… her body was a miracle of construction… She was unquestionably gorgeous. She was lavish. She was a dark, unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much… Those huge violet blue eyes… had an odd glint… Aeons passed, civilizations came and went while these cosmic headlights examined my flawed personality. Every pockmark on my face became a crater of the moon.”
So Richard Burton described his first sight of a 19-year-old Elizabeth Taylor.
Even a hundred years ago, most of the planet’s population never traveled more than a few miles from their birthplace, and never interacted with more than a few dozen people in their lifetimes.
Modern life provides us with the means and venues to interact with billions of people. Yet most of us are still the same awkward parochial folk at heart, requiring plenty of familiarity before we are comfortable with someone.
Face it, most people don’t do well in bars and other such social settings with total strangers because even today our tis structured around enclosed social groups: family, schoolmates.