What could be more terrifying than talking to someone you're attracted to?
Luckily, social science has figured out what makes flirting work — or not.
Couples need to flirt, too.
Like Tinder, cats, and dying alone, flirting is usually associated with single people.
But couples need to know how to flirt, too.
After studying 164 married people for a 2012 study, University of Kentucky researcher Brandi Frisby noted that most of them flirted as a means of maintaining and emphasizing intimacy. Oftentimes, she wrote in her paper, married couples flirted to "create a private world with the spouse."
People flirt for six different reasons.
In a 2004 review of the literature on flirting, Northern Illinois University professor David Dryden Henningsen identified six different motivations for the behavior:
• Sex: trying to get in bed
• Fun: treating it like a sport
• Exploring: trying to see what it would be like to be in a relationship
• Relational: trying to increase the intimacy of a relationship
• Esteem: increasing one's own self esteem
• Instrumental: trying to get something from the other person
In that study, Henningsen asked 101 female and 99 male students to write out a hypothetical flirty conversation between a man and a woman, then identify the motivations for the things they said.
The behaviors broke down along gender norms: men were significantly more likely to have a sexual motivation, while women tended to have a relational one.
Some conversation starters are better than others.
For a study in the journal Sex Roles, University of Alaska psychologist Chris L. Kleinke asked 600 respondents to rate the effectiveness of three varieties of opening lines in a flirtatious situation:
• "Pick-up" lines like "You must be a librarian, because I saw you checking me out"
• Open-ended, innocuous questions like "What do you think of this band?" or "What team are you rooting for?"
• Direct approaches like "You're cute — can I buy you a drink?"
The responses were pretty evenly split along gender lines: While the men in the study tended to prefer the more direct approach, the women tended to prefer the open-ended, innocuous questions. Not surprisingly, very few people said they preferred the pick-up lines.
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