Flirting with futility
Why it’s not always easy to read romantic signals
I’ve just come back to work after paternity leave. Great stuff, paternity leave. You get some time off and then, when you come back, other men in the office clap you on the back and shake your hand. No one does that after a holiday. “Well done. Fantastic news!” Female colleagues, meanwhile, go even further. Some even pretend not to want to throw themselves out of the nearest window as I pull out my phone and show them a photo or 26 of the wrinkled baby. Instead, they beam and coo and tilt their heads to one side and do something with their eyes, which I take to mean that they think my new son is the greatest human being ever conceived, barring his elder brother, with whom — obviously — he shares the title.
But, frankly, this is a total guess. Because reading signals and expressions from women has never been my strong suit. It’s entirely possible that what my female colleagues are really communicating as they smile and wind strands of hair around their fingers is: “How on earth did this creep manage to procreate?”
And then they return to their keyboards and computer screens, leaving me to wander off and wonder if I have correctly interpreted each highly freighted tilt of an eyebrow. And, as usual, I conclude that I have absolutely no idea what they are really thinking.
In fact, it’s a miracle that I managed to get married at all. Because of all the signals from the opposite sex that I am bad at interpreting, flirting is No. 1. And it turns out I am not the only one. According to new research from the University of Kansas, only a third of men are able to tell when they are being flirted with.
Flirting. Just the mention of the word sends shivers down my spine — terrible memories flash up of parties and dinners from my days (now all very happily behind me, darling) as a single man.
There I would be, happily milling about, glugging down the booze and chatting inanely to some vague friend when he would say, “Oh, have you met Madeleine? She’s a pal of my sister,” and I would say, “Oh, hullo hullo,” like some nincompoop. And then the stream of nonsense chat would continue pouring out of my mouth.
The only way in which a woman could have unambiguously flirted with me would have been to wear a sandwich board emblazoned with: “I AM FLIRTING WITH YOU, YOU TOTAL IDIOT.”
Even then, I would have dismissed it as a message for someone else. So she would have had to wear the sandwich board in a room with no one else in it but me. And possibly jump upanddown.
But get this: when it comes to diagnosing flirtatious behaviour, men are astonishingly accurate — compared, that is, to women. According to the Kansas study, only 18 per cent of women are able to get the message when we men are beaming out the lurr-vve waves.
It’s amazing that the human race continues at all, frankly, what with us gooseberries nervously shuffling around, assuming that no one fancies us. It’s just as well for my new baby boy, bless him, that my wife had that sandwich board to hand. And that no one else was in the room at the time. And that she was on a pogo stick.