River: Flirting

[mdlbear]

I believe I've mentioned that I don't do subtle. Whether sending or receiving -- I'm no good at recognizing hints, and even worse at hinting. In an IM conversation last night I had the vague feeling that the other person wanted to flirt with me, but I had no idea how to confirm it. No idea what I could possibly say in response that would indicate a willingness on my part to continue.

Instead, my mind veered off in largely irrelevant and in some cases potentially dangerous directions; it was an hour before I decided it was worth asking for calibration. Which prompted a more serious discussion, at the end of which I realized that, even on those rare occasions when I can recognize that I'm being flirted with, I don't know what to do about it.

Sometimes, to be sure, someone feeds me a straight line with an obvious response, and in that case I can usually be counted on to make it. But I still don't know where to go from there. As is usual in dealing with humans, flirtation seems to be a foreign language that I have little talent for and would be too embarrassed to practice in public.

I don't mind the fact that my response to some flirtatious remark is likely to send things off into a deeper conversation -- I like deep conversations, and know how to handle myself in them. To strain a metaphor, I don't mind diving into deep water; it's hitting the rocks on a too-shallow bottom that I worry about. How does one keep the conversation shallow and playful?

I don't mind things getting silly, either, though I tend to be overly serious, and my brand of humor tends toward dry, wry, and often self-deprecating. I might be able to be silly. The thing I worry about is going in the other other direction -- saying something unintentionally offensive or hurtful or inappropriate, or simply stupid.

(Hmm. This is a tricky one to phrase. I've mentioned before that I have very few limits on how deep a conversation or a relationship can go. Even when I know that someone is not available and/or not interested, how do I avoid damaging a valuable friendship by exposing the fact that I might be happy to fall madly in bed with them if they were? That's a topic that probably needs a separate discussion; I've been close to stepping over that line, or maybe stepped well over it without even noticing, a couple of times in other situations.)

The whole thing seems to rely on being able to walk along some invisible line that only humans can see.

Still, it sounds like fun. I'd be open to giving it a try, provided I could be reasonably certain that the other party wouldn't mind the occasional digression into linguistic, psychological or interpersonal meta-analysis. That's probably asking too much on either side.