My Mouth, It Hasn’t Shut Up Since You Kissed It

Have we declared flirting to be dead? This is a notion that I think every 20-something-year-old has thought about. Maybe “dead” is the wrong word to use, but flirting has certainly evolved to be something different than conceived expectations. Is it casual, or not casual at all? It’s neither, really. It exists in a beautiful in-between.

Alex Turner wrote a love letter to Alexa Chung, scribbling in messy writing, “My mouth hasn’t shut up about you since you kissed it. The idea that you may kiss it again is stuck in my brain, which hasn’t stopped thinking about you since, well, before any kiss,” and to think that someone could write those sentiments about you, it really makes you wonder, did we stray away from proclamations of love all together? Even reading the letter makes you feel excited that these words can be strung together and it can be for you. The letter is flirting encompassed on one page.

Is flirting an Instagram story like? A grid-post? A public declaration? Or, is it the whisperings of sweet, honeyed words into your ear?

The idea of flirting is nuanced, obviously. There is casual flirting with a stranger that you just met at the bar, there is flirting with that one specific friend where you are platonic but still, there is something lingering there, there is flirting with an ex, a rekindling of the past that makes your head feel fuzzy and your heart race, there is flirting with someone you have obvious chemistry with you met last night and you can’t stop thinking about, there is flirting with someone that you know it won’t lead to anywhere, but hey, it was worth a try, and then there is flirting with someone you’re already dating, something you both do that keeps the spark ignited.

In its purest form, flirting makes you feel light. It is a two-way game in which there will never be a winner, but you feel a winner regardless. It is healthy — a necessity even, especially in a time where more and more people fear connection, fear attachment, fear commitment. Maybe some people have forgotten what it feels like to flirt, what it feels like to be wanted, what it feels like to make someone feel wanted.

Flirting may be the last thing we have that does not come from a place of fear. It is low-committal in its own right, and the fact that it can lead to something more or lead to nothing at all may be the most exciting part. Though many people feel weathered down by the prospects of dating because of a variety of reasons that are too convoluted to bring up right now, flirting still exists, in many different forms. Flirting online — posting a story or a song that you want one specific person to see. Telling someone their lips have left a permanent imprint on theirs, so what is there is left to do but kiss, forever?

Do you think flirting is dead? Let @VALLEYMag on Instagram know.

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