What the Ever-Living Hell is Flirting? And How Do People Do It?
My asexuality became all too apparent when writing a short story
Paraphrasing a conversation between my demisexual self and my allosexual partner during a rewatch of The X-Files:
Me: “I never thought there was chemistry between Mulder and Scully. Their relationship always seemed forced.”
Her: “They flirted, a lot. All the time.”
Me: “Really? Care to point some out?”
Readers, she pointed to many such examples of either one way or reciprocal flirting and I couldn’t understand any of it. I couldn’t see most of it. Sure, there were moments of jealousy when one or the other seemed to receive some romantic interest. But even then I couldn’t see what the other was getting jealous about- to me, it was merely the presence of an attractive potential suitor and nothing deeper than that.
Which brings me to my attempt at portraying flirting in my fiction.
Those of you who follow me over on social media will know I have a dark paranormal mystery novella coming out at the end of May. It is set in an existing universe I’ve been working in for some time. Last year I published the third in the series and one of the secondary characters is now going to appear in her own spinoff.
This spinoff is a darker affair and aside from the main murder mystery and dark fantasy elements, there is also a demisexual coming out story which closely parallels my own.
Last week I had an idea for a prequel short story to lead into this novella, set before sunset on the fateful evening when Nikki’s (the main character’s) life begins to unravel. The novella starts with Nikki getting dumped by the woman of her dreams and ending with a dead man following her begging to solve the mystery of his death.
It was during this short story that a familiar character (the daughter of the main series main character) flirts with this character completely off script. Her name is Claire, and her father (Karl) says of her in the main series that she’s a bit of a free spirit who seems unbothered by relationships. She’s been single for a few years and she’s the only one of Karl’s children who is single. Needless to say, she’s the only one who has given me ace vibes.
Anyway, in this short story, Nikki bumps into Claire and Karl who are off out to the theatre. Claire is immediately taken with Nikki, seems very fascinated with her, and invites her to have a drink with herself and her dad while Nikki awaits her date (she accidentally turned up an hour early).
Claire can’t help but flirt with Nikki and doesn’t know what to do with herself. Nikki doesn’t pick up on it.
And this is the bit I struggled with! Showing a secondary character flirting with a main character was difficult that I had to research it. I must have read about ten different articles on flirting covering both body language and reaction to flirting. And to be honest, I still don’t know if it came across in text that Claire was flirting with Nikki!
I came to realise that I just don’t understand flirting and can’t recognise it when it’s happening either to me, or between other people.
This is one reason I cannot write romance, either as a genre, or to portray a blossoming romance the conventional way. The only time I’ve done this was a developing relationship between two characters acting as each other’s foil, and whose relationship (if it worked out) would have been built on mutual piss taking (that means joking at each other’s expense).
All this got me wondering whether I should withdraw my previous long-standing belief that no woman has ever outright expressed an interest in me. I was in all likelihood mistaken.
There may, in fact, have been some who were interested and giving me the signs. However, my lack of ability to pick up on the subtleties of flirting because of my asexuality meant I did not recognise what was going on. Further, my lack of reaction to what they thought were obvious signs made them think I wasn’t interested.
This is another reason why it’s important to have these labels and for people to fully understand what it might mean for people who identify with them.
Want to read that short story? Click here
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