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.

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.