Top tips to flirt by
The course is called Flirting 101 and I’m sitting on the floor in a circle, staring at the reinforced toes of my Wigwam socks. I paid money for this. I am anxious to learn. Please don’t tell my friends.
The instructor’s name is Coco La Crème, an exuberant young woman with a curvy body and a staccato laugh. Coco is a burlesque dancer, performance artist and designer of stripper wear and lingerie. Tonight, she is my flirting instructor, dispensing knowledge I do not have — or claim not to have — about something I’m told even insects understand: negotiating access to the opposite sex with a complicated set of primordial signs and signals. Unlike an insect, I take lots of notes.
Getting our flirt on
While Coco explains the art of flirting — the idea that we are like fairies, going from flower to flower, touching down lightly, making ourselves and others feel interesting and interested — we, her students, clamour for clarification. One woman repeatedly asks how she can possibly execute Coco’s flirting moves if she can’t bring herself to actually talk to someone. One man concludes the evening by handing out business cards for his eyeglass store — the closest any of us get to flirting that night. I keep thinking, We need videos here. Some kind of demonstration would help.
How did I arrive at this place in my middle years, here on the second floor of a sex shop, wondering if I’d missed something, somehow in high school? In those days, I thought flirts were the bad girls who tried to take away your boyfriend. Later, when I married, it was the flirty ladies who regularly hip-checked me at parties as they worked to get closer to my husband. I did not appreciate their sport. I was not, I told myself smugly, one of them. But every woman crosses that line at some point — the day you walk by a construction site and the men keep working. When you’re riding the up escalator and all the guys on the down escalator stare straight ahead. When hockey players, police officers, firemen look younger and younger, and you wonder how that happened. When you start to realize that your flirt circuits have been on “Receive” mode all your life and it may be time to throw the switch to “Transmit.” But how?
Coco gave me her top five tips
- Slow down! Remember to breathe! Make eye contact!
- Flirt often. You need to practice “taking it to the next level” until it becomes natural and easy.
- Don’t let fear of rejection stop you from trying to connect with people.
- Think of flirting as something you do to make others feel good about themselves.
- Smile at people as you walk down the street. Say hello. It’s good practice.
It’s time to put theory into practice.
