My Uncomfortable view on flirting
Flirting repulses me. It always has and it always will. I can’t flirt, I can’t tell when someone is flirting with me and I certainly can’t bear it when other people flirt in front of me, especially when they are good and equally smug about it. This abhorrence becomes greater as I get older, and it’s more by luck than skill, charm and judgement that I now have a girlfriend and no longer need to take part in such awfulness. It’s ok in your youth, I mean, in your late teens everyone is too busy getting fucked, fingered and fondled to give a shit about flirting. Once you get out of  your teens and into your twenties the majority of girls grow out of being a slut. Yes guys, this is a bitter pill to swallow, but these things happen. Girls especially become ‘harder to get’ and more sophisticated, which leaves us boys in a right pickle, as it’s a well known fact that boys don’t mature at the same rate as girls. Offering a girl a lift home from the pub on a Friday is no longer considered legal tender for a blow job in your twenties.
 
Instead you have to be a little more primitive in your ways and smarter with the flirting. You also need to know when the girl who was a slut last week and is now an executive recruitment consultant this week is flirting with you. She won’t use words. No, no, no, that would take her back to the teen days of being a cock hungry whore, instead, she will play with her hair, roll her tongue across her teeth, touch her ear or do something equally subtle, shit and incredibly difficult to understand.  Note to women at this point, WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
 
With regards to getting older and flirting I can’t really speak above this age as I’m only 26. What I do know, is that people older than thirty five flirting is extremely embarrassing. Watching two middle age people flirt is as uncomfortable to watch as Ken Bigley having his head cut off by terrorists or Georgian men hurtling into the sides of buildings at 80MPH. It’s fucking horrible. I work in an open plan office predominantly occupied by middle age men. I hate to sound stereotypical, but the only woman on my quite sizeable floor is a receptionist. Listening to her play out endless sexual innuendos to an eager audience of men, who I may add are probably involved in a sexless marriage is quite disgusting. It’s so unprofessional even me as an extremely unprofessional person is appalled.
 
Pre-girlfriend day’s I was fucking terrible at it. Well, I thought I was, but thinking about it now, I was probably just bad at reading the signs, or not confident enough to do it, or just too drunk to actually give a fuck. I hate to say it but I’m one of these people who was unknowingly flirting. I’d chat to someone in the street, or in a queue or in a bar. Walk away, only to realise that I should have probed the encounter further, and perhaps got a number, or even better a date. This went on for years as a single guy. It got out of hand at one point. Instead of concentrating on the conversation I was looking for name badges, or interrogating surnames, all the time plotting how I could get home and find them on Facebook, Myspace or some other social networking website. I don’t know why I’d do this, it’s not like I’d ever send a friend request to the woman who served me shit rolls and cigarettes in Tesco Express is it? I’m ashamed of this but it’s true, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s done this before.
 
The one time I did recognise someone was flirting with me is a story on it’s own. Two New Year’s eves ago, we were out getting pissed as pretty much everyone does. I had one of those realisation moments where I stopped and thought. Fuck. I’m the only single guy in here. All my mates are hooked up with girlfriends or fuck buddies and I’m talking to middle age men about the potential of spending the next day in the pub because I have no loved one or fuck buddy to spend the day doing something productive with. Anyway, when your uncomfortable in social situations, you retreat to the great outdoors and spend the majority of the evening chuffing on cigarettes and developing throat cancer. The evening in question, it would appear that I was being singled out by an extremely (bluntest terms possible) gay individual I know he’s gay, it’s well documented. He was flirting with me to the point where I was looking round thinking, ‘Fuck, how the fuck do I get out of this’ I was fucking mortified. I was thinking about bumming him just to get myself out of this highly uncomfortable social situation. I didn’t I might add, but I was drunk and may have considered it.
 
In summary, I think flirting is just one of those things that’s not going to go away, but hopefully it’s something I will no longer have to do.
 
(Sir_Digby_Chicken_Caeser [email protected], Fri 19 Feb 2010, 13:15, Reply)