Flirting (Or Sleeping) Your Way to Friendship

My poor deluded hubby doesn't think I'm awkward.
Bless his heart.

A while ago, I read a couple articles on flirting and posed a few questions about flirting and relationships.  One of these questions was: For what purpose is flirting acceptable?  Unacceptable?

I have had friends accused of being flirts, accused friends of being flirts, and (consciously and unconciously) flirted with guys in whom I had no romantic interest.  My flirty side tends to come out when I am meeting new people and when I am mingling in a large group.


I believe this happens because flirting is a gendered script for acquaintance.  It provides norms and expectations for interactions that can set both parties at ease as long as they are operating within the generally same conception.  Because of this script, I often have an easier time talking with new male acquaintances that female ones.  And I got to know/be friends with many of my close male friends (a circle of intimacy just outside my close female friends) by flirting -- in some cases uneventfully, in some with emotional fall-out on one side or the other.

And now I am trying to figure out how to backpedal from a discussion of How Beth Flirts to the point of today’s blog post, which is this piece written by my fave, Leah Libresco.  She writes about a friend who finds sleeping with a guy to be a functional script for making a friend.  Essentially, she argues that there is a social script to backpedal from hook-up to friend, but not from acquaintance to friend.  And this is a problem.

Since my social circles tend, as a whole, to participate less in the type of hook-ups that Libresco describes, I can’t evaluate the veracity of her claims about moving from fling to friend.  However, I do experience the main problem discussed: that there is no social script to move from acquaintance to friend.  I often walk away from social interactions with people who border between “good acquaintance” and “casual friend” saying to the Captain, “I want to be her friend for real!”

But we don’t have a common script.  Or, am I just so socially awkward that I am completely blind to rules of interaction that my peers are using?