DUMMY NY/La Ball

• • Cause and Effect 247

Toward Key Insights

4111 Which of the causes of marital breakdown do you consider most important? Why? What are the most essential things that couples can do to help lower the divorce rate? •

Suggestion for Writing

• Write an essay explaining why certain individuals do well (or poorly) at forming friendships. Develop your causes with relevant specific details. •

• BELINDA LUSCOMBE AND KATE STINCHFIELD

• Why We Flirt • Often writers work together to create an article, especially in journalism but also in

1111 academic settings. Belinda Luscombe has been a Senior Editor for Time magazine since April 1999. She started in journalism at The Daily Telegraph in Sidney, Australia. She • joined Time in 1995. Her work also appears in Sports Illustrated, Fortune,

Mademoiselle, Vogue, the New York Times and many other publications.

• Kate Stinchfield is a productive freelance writer who often writes for Time. Other arti-

cles by her include "Early Bird or Night Owl? Brain Scans Show the Difference." and "The

• Science of Risk Taking."

This article was published in Time in January 2008.

• 1 That smile! That glance! That rapt attention! We flirt even when we don't

• need to. And that can be good. 2 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

ID them, sleep with them or scratch that difficult-to-reach part of the back. But mar- ried people, they're a tougher puzzle. They've found themselves a suitable—

maybe III 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 genera-

• tion. They've done their duty, evolutionarily speaking. Their genome will sur- vive. Yay them. So for Pete's sake, why do they persist with the game?

• 3

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

411) 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,

• 4 arms positioned to draw the eye to your impressive lower abdomen?

Scientists call all these little acts "contact-readiness" cues, because they indi- • cate, nonverbally, that you're prepared for physical engagement. (More general

body language is known as "nonverbal leakage." Deep in their souls, all scientists • •

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248 CHAPTER 12 The Essay Examination

are poets.) These cues are a crucial part of what's known in human-ethology cir- cles 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 pro- ceed to that awkward talking phase. They're the opening line, so to speak, for the opening line.

5 One of the reasons we flirt in this way is that we can't help it. We're pro- grammed 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.")

6 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.

7 Simpson is currently studying the roles that attraction and flirting play dur- ing 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 8 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 fifty something 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.

9 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 inde- pendent 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

• Cause and Effect 249 •

• 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

• 10 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 fall-

• back 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. 11 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.

• 12

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.

13 Flirting is also emotional capital to be expended in return for something

III 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 bet- ter 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 unto-

III ward advance. 11,

It's Dangerous Out There

14 But outside the hairdresser's chair, things are not so simple. Flirt the

IIIII 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

III 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 • 15

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 mes- sages, nuance is almost impossible. And since text and e-mail flirting can be • •

S 250 CHAPTER 12 The Essay Examination

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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 4111 the Internet, so the process may escalate more quickly." 16 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 41111 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 III 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 III like a profitable place for people like the guy behind me on the pre-Christmas flight to hang out. 11111

17 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 cock- tail

41111 is in some cases much headier. It is most commonly the case with affairs, ther-

apists 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 fol- • lows, then, that there's little that feels less affirming than being cheated on.)

flirting is a decal affair, a way of feeling more alive, more vital, more desirable 11111 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.

• A Field Guide to Flirting

Humans observed in a natural mating habitat—here, the Cock and Bull Pub in Los • Angeles and Helm's Bakery in neighboring Culver City—exhibit nearly all the major flirting behaviors, whether or not they're flirting at all. •

1. Open Body Position This come-and-get-me stance suggests the man is neither about to flee nor fight. •

2. Raised Eyebrows Upon first seeing a potential mate, both men and women often • briefly raise their eyebrows.

3. Head Cant Women frequently tilt their head to one side, exposing their neck, • and sometimes flick their hair at the same time.

4. Sustained Eye Contact Men and women both hold the gaze of someone they're 1111) interested in for longer than feels quite comfortable. 5. Leaning Forward Both genders tend to lean in toward people they're attracted to. 1111 Sometimes they'll unconsciously point to them too, even if they're across the room. 6. Leading Questions A man will often ask a woman questions that allow her to

• show off her most attractive features. 7. Sideways Glances Often followed by a glance away or down and a shy smile, these

• coy looks are a classic flirting behavior for both sexes.

•