why do we flirt?

Answers to why do we flirt

Flirting is a form of human interaction between two people, expressing a sexual and/or romantic interest. It can consist of conversation, body language, or brief physical contact. It may be one-sided or reciprocated.

The origin of the word flirt is obscure. The Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) associates it with such onomatopoeic words as flit and flick, emphasizing a lack of seriousness; on the other hand, it has been attributed to the old French conter fleurette, which means "to (try to) seduce" by the dropping of flower leaves, that is, "to speak sweet nothings". This expression is no longer used in French, but the English gallicism to flirt has made its way and has now become an anglicism.

Flirting is often used as a means of expressing interest and gauging the other person's interest in courtship, which can continue into long-term relationships. Alternatively, it may simply be a prelude to casual sex with no continuing relationship.

In other situations, it may be done simply for immediate entertainment, with no intention of developing any further relationship. This type of flirting sometimes faces disapproval from others, either because it can be misinterpreted as more serious, or it may be viewed as "cheating" if the person is already in a romantic relationship with someone else.

People who flirt may speak and act in a way that suggests greater intimacy than is generally considered appropriate to the relationship (or to the amount of time the two people have known each other), without actually saying or doing anything that breaches any serious social norms. One way they accomplish this is to communicate a sense of playfulness or irony. Double entendres, with one meaning more formally appropriate and another more suggestive, may be used.

Flirting may consist of stylized gestures, language, body language, postures, and physiologic signs. Among these, at least in Western society, are:
   * Eye contact, batting eyelashes, etc.
   * "Protean" signals, such as touching one's hair
   * Casual touches; such as a woman gently touching a man's arm during conversation
   * Smiling suggestively
   * Winking
   * Sending notes, poems, or small gifts
   * Flattery
   * Online chat is a common modern tactic, as well as other one-on-one and direct messaging services
   * Footsie, the "feet under the table" practice
   * Teasing
   * Chance meeting
   * Coyness, affectedly shy or modest, marked by cute, coquettish, or artful playfulness

While some of the subconscious signs are universal across cultures, flirting etiquette varies significantly across cultures which can lead to misunderstandings. There are differences in how closely people should stand (proxemics), how long to hold eye contact, and so forth.

During World War II, anthropologist Margaret Mead was working in Britain for the British Ministry of Information and later for the U.S. Office of War Information,[2][3] delivering speeches and writing articles to help the American soldiers better understand the British civilians, and vice versa.[5]

She observed in the flirtations between the American soldiers and British women a pattern of misunderstandings regarding who is supposed to take which initiative. She wrote of the Americans, "The boy learns to make advances and rely upon the girl to repulse them whenever they are inappropriate to the state of feeling between the pair.", as contrasted to the British, where "the girl is reared to depend upon a slight barrier of chilliness... which the boys learn to respect, and for the rest to rely upon the men to approach or advance, as warranted by the situation." This resulted, for example, in British women interpreting an American soldier's gregariousness as something more intimate or serious than he had intended.

Communications theorist Paul Watzlawick used this situation, where "both American soldiers and British girls accused one another of being sexually brash", as an example of differences in "punctuation" in interpersonal communications. He wrote that courtship in both cultures used approximately 30 steps from "first eye contact to the ultimate consummation", but that the sequence of the steps was different. For example, kissing might be an early step in the American pattern but a relatively intimate act in the English pattern.

TIME Magazine Explains Why We Flirt
Contrary to widespread belief, only two very specific types of people flirt: those who are single and those who are married. Single people flirt because, well, they're single and therefore nobody is really contractually obliged to talk to them, sleep with them or scratch that difficult-to-reach part of the back. But married people, they're a tougher puzzle. They've found themselves a suitable--maybe even superior--mate, had a bit of productive fun with the old gametes and ensured that at least some of their genes are carried into the next generation. They've done their duty, evolutionarily speaking. Their genome will survive. Yay them. So for Pete's sake, why do they persist with the game?

And before you claim, whether single or married, that you never flirt, bear in mind that it's not just talk we're dealing with here. It's gestures, stance, eye movement. Notice how you lean forward to the person you're talking to and tip up your heels? Notice the quick little eyebrow raise you make, the sidelong glance coupled with the weak smile you give, the slightly sustained gaze you offer? If you're a woman, do you feel your head tilting to the side a bit, exposing either your soft, sensuous neck or, looking at it another way, your jugular? If you're a guy, are you keeping your body in an open, come-on-attack-me position, arms positioned to draw the eye to your impressive lower abdomen?

Scientists call all these little acts "contact-readiness" cues, because they indicate, nonverbally, that you're prepared for physical engagement. (More general body language is known as "nonverbal leakage." Deep in their souls, all scientists are poets.) These cues are a crucial part of what's known in human-ethology circles as the "heterosexual relationship initiation process" and elsewhere, often on the selfsame college campuses, as "coming on to someone." In primal terms, they're physical signals that you don't intend to dominate, nor do you intend to flee--both useful messages potential mates need to send before they can proceed to that awkward talking phase. They're the opening line, so to speak, for the opening line.

One of the reasons we flirt in this way is that we can't help it. We're programmed to do it, whether by biology or culture. The biology part has been investigated by any number of researchers. Ethologist Irenaus Eibl Eibesfeldt, then of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, filmed African tribes in the 1960s and found that the women there did the exact same prolonged stare followed by a head tilt away with a little smile that he saw in America. (The technical name for the head movement is a "cant." Except in this case it's more like "can.")

Evolutionary biologists would suggest that those individuals who executed flirting maneuvers most adeptly were more successful in swiftly finding a mate and reproducing and that the behavior therefore became widespread in all humans. "A lot of people feel flirting is part of the universal language of how we communicate, especially nonverbally," says Jeffry Simpson, director of the social psychology program at the University of Minnesota.

Simpson is currently studying the roles that attraction and flirting play during different times of a woman's ovulation cycle. His research suggests that women who are ovulating are more attracted to flirty men. "The guys they find appealing tend to have characteristics that are attractive in the short term, which include some flirtatious behaviors," he says. He's not sure why women behave this way, but it follows that men who bed ovulating women have a greater chance of procreating and passing on those flirty genes, which means those babies will have more babies, and so on. Of course, none of this is a conscious choice, just as flirting is not always intentional. "With a lot of it, especially the nonverbal stuff, people may not be fully aware that they're doing it," says Simpson. "You don't see what you look like. People may emit flirtatious cues and not be fully aware of how powerful they are."

Flirting with Intent
Well, some people anyway. But then there are the rest of you. You know who you are. You're the gentleman who delivered my groceries the other day and said we had a problem because I had to be 21 to receive alcohol. You're me when I told that same man that I liked a guy who knew his way around a dolly. (Lame, I know. I was caught off guard.) You're the fiftysomething guy behind me on the plane before Christmas telling his fortysomething seatmate how sensual her eyes were--actually, I hope you're not, because if so, you're really skeevy. My point is, once you move into the verbal phase of flirtation, it's pretty much all intentional.

And there are some schools of thought that teach there's nothing wrong with that. Flirtation is a game we play, a dance for which everyone knows the moves. "People can flirt outrageously without intending anything," says independent sex researcher Timothy Perper, who has been researching flirting for 30 years. "Flirting captures the interest of the other person and says 'Would you like to play?'" And one of the most exhilarating things about the game is that the normal rules of social interaction are rubberized. Clarity is not the point. "Flirting opens a window of potential. Not yes, not no," says Perper. "So we engage ourselves in this complex game of maybe." The game is not new. The first published guide for how to flirt was written about 2,000 years ago, Perper points out, by a bloke named Ovid. As dating books go, The Art of Love leaves more recent publications like The Layguide: How to Seduce Women More Beautiful Than You Ever Dreamed Possible No Matter What You Look Like or How Much You Make in its dust. And yes, that's a real book.

Once we've learned the game of maybe, it becomes second nature to us. Long after we need to play it, we're still in there swinging (so to speak) because we're better at it than at other games. Flirting sometimes becomes a social fallback position. "We all learn rules for how to behave in certain situations, and this makes it easier for people to know how to act, even when nervous," says Antonia Abbey, a psychology professor at Wayne State University. Just as we learn a kind of script for how to behave in a restaurant or at a business meeting, she suggests, we learn a script for talking to the opposite sex. "We often enact these scripts without even thinking," she says. "For some women and men, the script may be so well learned that flirting is a comfortable strategy for interacting with others." In other words, when in doubt, we flirt.

The thing that propels many already committed people to ply the art of woo, however, is often not doubt. It's curiosity. Flirting "is a way of testing one's mate-value and the possibility of alternatives--actually trying to see if someone might be available as an alternative," says Arthur Aron, professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. To evolutionary biologists, the advantages of this are clear: mates die, offspring die. Flirting is a little like taking out mating insurance.

If worst comes to worst and you don't still have it (and yes, I'm sure you do), the very act of flirting with someone else may bring about renewed attention from your mate, which has advantages all its own. So it's a win-win.

Flirting is also emotional capital to be expended in return for something else. Not usually for money, but for the intangibles--a better table, a juicier cut of meat, the ability to return an unwanted purchase without too many questions. It's a handy social lubricant, reducing the friction of everyday transactions, and closer to a strategically timed tip than a romantic overture. Have you ever met a male hairdresser who wasn't a flirt? Women go to him to look better. So the better they feel when they walk out of his salon, the happier they'll be to go back for a frequent blowout. Flirting's almost mandatory. And if the hairdresser is gay, so much the better, since the attention is much less likely to be taken as an untoward advance.

It's Dangerous Out There
But outside the hairdresser's chair, things are not so simple. Flirt the wrong way with the wrong person, and you run the risk of everything from a slap to a sexual-harassment lawsuit. And of course, the American virtue of plainspokenness is not an asset in an activity that is ambiguous by design. Wayne State's Abbey, whose research has focused on the dark side of flirting--when it transmogrifies into harassment, stalking or acquaintance rape--warns that flirting can be treacherous. "Most of the time flirtation desists when one partner doesn't respond positively," she says. "But some people just don't get the message that is being sent, and some ignore it because it isn't what they want to hear."

One of the most fascinating flirting laboratories is the digital world. Here's a venue that is all words and no body language; whether online or in text messages, nuance is almost impossible. And since text and e-mail flirting can be done without having to look people in the eye, and is often done with speed, it is bolder, racier and unimpeded by moments of reflection on whether the message could be misconstrued or is wise to send at all. "Flirt texting is a topic everyone finds fascinating, although not much research is out there yet," says Abbey. But one thing is clear: "People are often more willing to disclose intimate details via the Internet, so the process may escalate more quickly."

That's certainly the case 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.

Most people who flirt--off-line at least--are not looking for an affair. But one of the things that sets married flirting apart from single flirting is that it has a much greater degree of danger and fantasy to it. The stakes are higher and the risk is greater, even if the likelihood of anything happening is slim. But the cocktail is in some cases much headier. It is most commonly the case with affairs, therapists say, that people who cheat are not so much dissatisfied with their spouse as with themselves and the way their lives have turned out. There is little that feels more affirming and revitalizing than having someone fall in love with you. (It follows, then, that there's little that feels less affirming than being cheated on.) Flirting is a decaf affair, a way of feeling more alive, more vital, more desirable without actually endangering the happiness of anyone you love--or the balance of your bank account. So go ahead and flirt, if you can do it responsibly. You might even try it with your spouse.

Another Man's View
It’s so natural, we barely even notice we do it. Tilting a head to expose the neck, smiling or laughing at something that really wasn’t funny, moving closer to the person making unfunny jokes, mimicking their actions. Our body language is perhaps the most subtle expression of what we’re really thinking and feeling, and is a crucial component of the courting dance known as flirting.

Though cheesy pick-up lines abound, a lot is conveyed even before words are uttered. A prolonged gaze or arched eyebrow gives clues to the person across the bar that you’re interested without having to explicitly ask about his/her sign. Though the statistics differ, some attribute almost 80 percent of our first impressions to our stance and swagger. And because flirting helps both animals and humans find mates faster and easier, it is an evolutionary trait hard-wired in our brains. Mice twitch their noses at potential mates, colorful peacocks strut around for admiring peahens, and pigeons puff their chests to look buff. As much as we have moved on from mice and feathers, we do much of the same, for the exact same reasons.

Genetic Peacockery
Because flirting is an easy way for us to display our genes, mating potential, and interest, nature put a lot toward its success. This is one of the reasons why some males birds have exotic plumes, why elk carry hefty antlers (a sign of a healthy immune system), and why male fiddler crabs have such large claws. He waves his in the air, alerting females to his whereabouts, and signaling them to come closer for a better look at his burrow, colorful shell, and flashy claw.

Much in the same way, we’re physically programmed to indicate interest almost before we mentally have a say in it. Slight actions reveal a lot. Stance, eye movement, and gestures like leaning forward to talk to the person, or quick eyebrow raises are what scientists call contact engagement, signaling to the other mammal that you’re prepared for things to potentially get physical. Perhaps most importantly, these signals show that you’re not intending to dominate or flee. Or not just yet, anyhow.

Moves Have Messages
By studying humans in their natural courting habitat (usually bars), scientists have been able to document the movements we make when we’re interested in someone else. As it turns out, we’re all quite predictable. A woman smiles, raises her eyebrows, opens her eyes wide, holds a gaze, fidgets with her hair, lowers and tilts her head, and laughs. A man might jut out his chin, try to make his chest appear as large as possible, unconsciously flex an arm, laugh aloud, and smile. But what do all these ridiculous gestures mean?

By comparing our actions with those of animals, it becomes clear that moves have messages. A woman tilts her head and shows off her neck as a sign of vulnerability and submission. I see my friend’s dog, a female boxer named Mable Mae, do this all the time. When a male dog is approaching, she turns her head and flattens her ears as if to say, “I’m a lover, not a fighter. Don’t bite.” The male dog naturally assumes the taller, dominant stance. Mable also steals sideways glances, just as we do when flirting, to show she’s demure and hard to get, yet interested.

Read My Lips
Like a lioness presenting herself to a mate, women will arch their backs and show off their hips to indicate fertility. Though I hate the stereotype of a giggly, doe-eyed blonde, women laugh and open their eyes wide not because they’re ditzy, but because it conveys an image of surrender and youth. (No wonder Dolly Parton was so jovial and popular.) While both men and women will make prolonged eye contact with people they’re interested in, a woman might also lick her lips, helping to bring visual attention to the mouth. If someone is staring at your lips he may be thinking of how to kiss them; scientists also think that our facial lips mimic our vaginal ones, and licking them shows sexual intent. (I swear, sometimes scientists have the dirtiest minds.)

Though a man might not pound his chest like Tarzan while in a crowd, it’s only because of social constraints. He’s still trying to put forth his strong jaw, an indicator of high testosterone levels, and spread his arms and chest to look muscular and strong. Yet he doesn’t want to look too strong or threatening, so he laughs and smiles frequently. Confident and powerful enough to protect his brood; nice enough not to harm the doe.

Monkey See, Monkey Do
Together, both sexes take part in mirroring, tending to sit or stand in similar positions, or pick up a drink at the same time. When one person leans in, another will do the same if she likes what she’s seeing. The theory behind this is that people are drawn to others who are like them. (Dating note: if he picks his nose, put the mirror down.)

We also tend to point or gesture toward our object of desire. This means feet, hands, or the entire body will subconsciously be pointed toward him or her, opening up a line of physical—and hopefully verbal—communication.

Yet through all our coquettish gestures, anyone who’s raised her eyebrows at a cop knows that flirting is not always intended to seal the deal. Flirting can be a default mechanism when we want to get something for nothing (a better table at a restaurant, another free cocktail on the airplane, a shortcut in line) or a comfortable and fun way to interact with new people. And it’s certainly not reserved just for people we want to mate with; married people flirt with no adulterous intentions and platonic flirting happens all the time. Flirting opens windows of potential and can peak curiosity about what might happen, but it also leaves us with the ability to walk away, no harm done.

Disclaimer - Answers to the questions are researched using various sources and are meant to increase the knowledge of our visitors. We cannot gurantee the accuracy of answers to questions.

Questions & Answers Page 2
Questions & Answers Page 1
Get Savio DSilva's Books for Free