Months of lockdown have left us flirting with disaster...
ACCORDING to a new study, humans are losing the knack of flirting with each other. An inability to use chat-up lines, humour and eye contact are contributing to the rise in the number of single people, with more and more of us simply incapable of deploying the tactics required to signal attraction.
I must confess I’m a terrible flirt. That is to say, I’m terrible at it. I’ve always found the potential for embarrassment or rejection too off-putting.
Successful flirting requires a degree of physical self-confidence and I’ve never really had that, not even when I was younger and theoretically less unattractive.
Setting aside my own neuroses, however, I do think there’s more to this than simple insecurity or emotional paralysis. Communication between the sexes has never been more complex, and there are a variety of factors at play.
In recent years, sex and sexual politics have become so inextricably intertwined that it’s hard to know how anyone goes about finding a mate.
In the age of #MeToo there are so many behaviours that, certainly in my day, would have been considered harmlessly flirtatious which are now not only unacceptable but very likely to land a person in serious hot water.
It’s particularly hard, I think, for men.
UNLESS you’re the sort of knucklehead who just doesn’t care, it must seem almost impossible to go about the business of signalling attraction without being fearful of overstepping the mark in some way, however inadvertent.
Who knows these days what might constitute a sexual microaggression. A wink, a smile? The offer of an umbrella on a rainy night? The touch on an elbow as you help someone to their cab?
God forbid someone should put their hand on someone else’s knee. You just never can tell where boundaries lie, not least because they always seem to be shifting.
But this is one of the problems with flirting: it is, by its nature, a subtle and ambiguous art. In fact, some might argue that the very uncertain, unclear nature of the interaction is part of the joy of it.
There is excitement, danger, in not quite knowing where you stand with the other person. Which, in a world where you practically have to fill in a consent form in triplicate before it’s safe to proceed to first base, makes things rather tricky.
More recently, though, another obstacle has presented itself: lockdown. If communicating the language of love was hard before, it’s nigh on impossible when half your face is hidden behind a mask (on the upside, though, you don’t have to worry about bad breath).
As for Zoom, no one wants to gaze up their beloved’s nostrils as they search for the mute button, especially not when they’re frozen in all their hirsute glory.
SOCIAL distancing lends itself more to semaphore than to the art of seduction, and at two metres they are more likely to assume you have something in your eye than catch that subtle wink.
Assuming you do manage to acquire your target, even now might not want to risk sharing a park bench or a hot drink in case the Covid Gestapo catch you (and they really don’t do flirting).
The truth is, the longer we remain physically locked up, the more people are becoming emotionally locked in, and forgetting how to flirt is just a part of it. Humans are social animals who thrive on contact with others. Deprived of that contact, we don’t quite know how to function.
And it’s surprising how quickly it all unravels.
When all this began, I spent my evenings in a flurry of text messages and FaceTime calls. Now, one year on, I find even having a phone conversation with a friend exhausting. It’s almost as if I’ve forgotten how to socialise.
It has been so long since I sat next to a stranger at a dinner party, or had any sort of conversation other than ‘what’s for supper’ or ‘damn, we’ve run out of wine again’, I’m honestly not sure I can remember how.
That’s why we have to lift this lockdown. It’s not just that we all need a haircut, or that the economy needs restarting. It’s that we all need to be able to feel human again. Now, before it’s too late.