F.L.A.M.E.S. — The Litmus Test of Speculative Relationships
This is what decided all the gossip in a classroom
If today I take FLAMES seriously, I’ll be referred to a psychiatrist. But when a 10-year-old kid uses it to decide his relationship with a person he is attracted to, people find it cute. It is cute to see kids trying to figure out what a relationship means, with zero experience and understanding of its complexities and possible complications. If only life was as simple as a small exercise of FLAMES.
FLAMES — Friends, Lovers, Affair, Marriage, Enemies, Sexual Partner.
In case you are completely oblivious to the rules of this activity, you can check out this link.
I remember we first played this game by using only the first names of both the persons (since we knew the last name of the girl gets changed after marriage). In case we didn’t get favorable results then we brought in the last name also. Even then if the results were not favorable, we considered it the final verdict and accepted it as something not meant to be.
In my pre-teen years, I didn’t know about the ‘S’ part. We only used the five letters F L A M E. Suddenly when I was 14 or 15 years old that one day, some guy in my class wrote my name with a girl’s name on a sheet of paper. Other guys huddled around him. I also curiously joined in. I was a new student there so maybe they wanted to check my score also with some girls in the class. Then he wrote FLAMES on top.
“What does that ‘S’ mean?”
“I’ll tell, first let me get the result.”
Other guys and I also counted along with him, as he struck off each letter at a time in our names and then hovered his pen over the letters: F, L, A, M, E, S.
When I got a match of ‘S’ with that girl, other guys began to giggle and bow to me. I was puzzled by this stupid reaction. They told me that nobody got ‘S’ with that girl, and I was the chosen one. They laughed more at my clueless expression. Then a guy standing beside me whispered in my ear, “S means Sexual partner”. A few guys tried to explain what that meant but I couldn’t understand it properly because I felt uncomfortable about it.
I was too shy and embarrassed to talk about anything sexual with anyone so I never considered the ‘S’ in my FLAMES calculation until I joined college. By then we were old enough for such childish games. Some of us had actual relationship experiences or heartbreaks and were not as enthusiastic or hopeful as we were in childhood. I never had any experience so I carried on playing it alone during my college days. During those days I heard many stories and witnessed some heartbreaks to understand that childhood games are meant for childhood only. Adult life needs more sophisticated methods such as psychometric tests like MBTI or the Big Five to test compatibility with the other person.
Does this mean that enthusiasm and hope, flirting and romance are useless? Of course not. One can spend time and have interesting conversations with people one likes or is attracted to. But to decide where to eventually fit that person in one’s life — which letter in the FLAMES is that person most suitable for — a simple name matching is not enough.
It was after my marriage that one day I tried the FLAMES on our names (should I have done it before marriage?). The result was Friends. Then I brought in our last names also (sort of like involving the two families). That’s when I got Lovers and I heaved a sigh of relief.
