#2 WHEN DO WE START TO FLIRT AND WHAT'S THE PURPOSE?

Primary school crushes, the Bible Belt, and mackerel fishing in Wales

My cousin's beautiful daughter, Eva, who is the tender age of five and just started reception (aka Kindergarten) for the first time loves to bat her lashes and smile at my husband, Michael.  A couple of weeks ago, Michael was showing her all about the power of magnets with one of our side tables, much to both of their delight and amusement.

Mama Mia, a media company that aims to make the world a better place for women and girls in this article claims that’s normal for this age range. Eva is so much more than her amusing flirting as she is one of the most delightful young children I’ve ever known. She’s clever and sassy, stubborn and loving – and best of all, she loves to make people laugh. So, I wonder when women (who are heterosexual cisgender) start to notice boys? Is flirting natural to us, even from a young age?

Another article notes via clinical psychologist Jennifer Powell-Lunder that young people don’t understand their behaviour is flirtatious or that’s what they are communicating because they’re starting to think abstractly, unaware of their impact on others. They’re simply imitating what they see on social media and television.  

Photo by Ryan Brooklyn on Unsplash

Who knows the origins or the whys, but I’d say that I was fairly asexual until late high school. Was that because I preferred friendships and reading? Did I simply love the fantasy or using my imagination more than the real thing? Or was it because, ultimately, after starting my childhood in the northwest of England (Lancashire to be precise), I grew up ultimately in the Bible Belt of South Georgia? 

Few people tell us early on how to have healthy relationships, whether family, friendship, or romantically. There’s no class on finances, boundaries, expectations, cultural backgrounds, or love. 

I suppose, like most, I learned my attitudes to sex by a combination of my parents and my ultra-religious deep South schools when I moved to Georgia at the age of eleven. Those views were opposing.

My father was born in 1953 and my mother in 1963. They had an open and free-love attitude to sex and I’m not sure they could count their sexual partners but nor did they judge each other for it. It was just what it was. They were also respectable members of society. So, I didn’t grow up (not immediately) with any stigma around sex or the idea you had to wait until marriage and I’m not sure either parent ever sort of gave me “the talk.”

Photo by Nils Leonhardt on Unsplash

In the Bible Belt, sex was something you waited for until marriage, especially if you were a woman. The general attitude to boys who had sex or masturbated was “boys will be boys.” But girls, especially, should be pure and virginal because no one wants damaged goods!

When I was in middle school, I remember a nurse with a deep Southern scratchy drawl (many ladies in the South have very charming lilting, drawn-out accents of old-monied harkening to the Gone with the Wind era and this wasn’t one of them) talking during sex ed when I was maybe twelve – and after the obligatory scoliosis test where you bend over and touch your toes and medical professionals examine your spine whilst you stand in pre-pubescent training bras and knickers (panties) – telling the class of girls that boys love three things: pizza, football, and then you. And basically don’t have sex because you won’t be their priority. Not that at the tender age of twelve, I was thinking anything of the sort. I wouldn’t actually kiss a boy for another three years.

Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

A similar instance occurred later in my education when I was, perhaps, in tenth or eleventh grade at a school assembly (so I was fifteen or sixteen). In England, teens have sex legally at sixteen although maybe girls often have sex at fifteen. In the Bible Belt, the stigma of having sex in high school and, perhaps, my semi-asexual nature at the time didn’t make me eager to try it per se. 

But in that assembly which was held in the basketball gym bleachers – it must have been around Christmas – the men giving the talk demonstrated emphatically how if you get a present all wrapped up pretty and then if you just tear the corner of the paper a little or undo the bow or pass it around (all demonstrated), then when you go to give that “gift” to someone (i.e. your future husband and yes, the present equalled sex), then it’s just not as good – it’s damaged and it’s such a shame. 

I didn’t get the sense they meant this to apply to the boys in the audience. I mean we did have some pregnant teens in the assembly bleachers too because, well, abstinence-only education doesn’t work. The only thing you were taught was sex was bad and evil. You could catch STDs that looked vile and could end your life (figuratively if not literally). And you just have to say no because that’s the only safe, secure option.

Sadly, it seems many Christian attitudes to sex haven’t altered much if social media is anything to go by. I can’t tell you how many posts I read from former high school classmates who rally against the “liberal media” and agenda of (gasp!) having teen programmes or children’s programmes that depict same-sex couples. I mean what could be worse than showing the world as it is? No, it’s an “abomination” and therefore to protect their delicate Christian sensibilities, the children of these parents shouldn’t be “exposed” to the fact that people choose who to love, whether same-sex or not. And, more importantly, why should they care who someone loves or sleeps with? Many of those in the South think children should be brainwashed into thinking sex outside marriage is wrong and especially sex with people of your own gender – because neither of those positions will ever require therapy later in life. This side note will come into play when I speak about one of my high school boyfriends later.

Photo by Nat Callaghan on Unsplash

But I digress. When I was growing up in the former industrial hub of the cotton industry in Oldham, Lancashire, I remember attending Clarksfield Junior School and wanting to be faster than the boys when running in races. I also had a crush on a boy named Jordan Green. I think we “went out” for a week before he dumped me for the cooler Bethany Fern. Later, I had a crush on a boy named Adam Howels and I think I enjoyed the fantasy of scribbling in my notebook about him but what would I have done if we had actually gone out? Probably nothing. 

My Mum had said when I was younger that an Indian boy named Jitten and I had “gone out” because Mum was friends with his mother Kay, but this was primary school so I only had a vague recollection of this beautiful little boy. 

When I was a little older, maybe eight or nine, I had a crush on my Uncle’s girlfriend’s (at the time) nephew, we will call him Jed. I thought he was handsome and cool but was a few years older than me, and, thus, had zero interest. He had a younger (later also very handsome) brother, we will call him Mark, who was maybe around my age and the three of us would play together in Wales at their caravan when my Uncle took me along. I recall loading up into their classic Land Rover, sitting on those bench seats in the back with the boys, and then being out on their boat, catching mackerel, and eating grilled mackerel for breakfast. 

Photo by TK on Unsplash

Those boys were kind. They came from a loving family. Jed taught me to ride a bike for the first time as I lived on a massive hill and had always been too frightened to use my bike. The bike was too tall for me, even though I was tall for my age, but we got there eventually. We would visit the joke shop on the caravan site and play tricks on the grown-ups with whoopee cushions and invisible ink – and the grown-ups would pretend they fell for our antics.

And, even though I had a crush on Jed or Jordan or Adam or whoever at school, I didn’t feel the blow if my crush didn’t reciprocate or if they liked someone else. Sure, I felt a little bummed if my crush didn’t like me back but there were always plenty more fish in the sea, so to speak. I’d either continue to like that crush or move on to the next one.

Photo by Nat Callaghan on Unsplash

I didn’t feel the pain of heartbreak until the age of fifteen, which Cosmo says actually hurts more than later in life (thank you, underdeveloped brain).

So, flirting may be natural to us. It may be a way to make sense of the world, how we develop relationships, and how we think adults relate to each other. It may also be damaging societal conditioning to keep the beauty business in business and women in competition, but more on that later.

Don’t forget to check out my first post on why I’m writing this newsletter/blog in the first place.