#Disclaimer: This contains potentially irritating advice for OP. Please for love of god leave your pitchforks at the door oh god help

[hauntu4ever]

I think about this a lot, because it's also something I struggle with. Recently I had some experiences that are now coming to me as a breakthrough, so I'm going to share them here.

What I'm thinking is that in order to understand flirting you have to have past experience, so here's a first question to anybody reading this:

Have you ever known a person who you couldn't live without? Someone who you want to know as friends more than anyone else in your life, that you want to try and do everything with? I'm not talking about family either, or like a cool coworker. I'm talking about someone for whom you have absolutely no rational reason to want to talk to as much as you do. So maybe not the cool coworker but rather the one you keep wanting to share things with, or some similar.

(I haven't; see the bottom for another couple experiences that might help.)

I don't know if that's love, I'm no expert, but I know that having someone like that puts everything else into perspective. If you know what I'm talking about, then you know the difference between someone you want to spend time with and someone you don't. You know what it means to want to hang out with someone for more than just the game you play together. Fundamentally, you understand wanting to be around someone. And if you understand that, you can ask the next question:

How do you keep them?

You personally, I mean - everyone's different. But either way, remember the premise. We're talking about a person who has no obligation to you, and you none to them. You don't have to be together - it would be perfectly rational to ghost and never talk to them again. But you don't want to. So now you're playing a game with them. You need to determine whether they feel similarly to you, whether they also want to be around you for no good reason; and you need to do this whilst keeping it friendly and not pushing them away. You need to make it so they don't go "wow this person is crazy" and ghost you, because again, there's no reason for them not to. Except for who you are.

The way you go about this is called flirting.

That's it. It's acting in a way that both emphasizes yourself and who you are (especially the best sides of yourself!) to that single person, and also plays to your current relationship while simultaneously growing it, all via doing what others might call "acting normally" as far as your behavior goes.

So, OP got called out for flirting with a whole discord. I don't know who was right there, whether she was actually flirting or the call-outer(?) was just overreacting to something she said, but it does raise a question. If this is what flirting is, then why not do it with everyone? Or perhaps, what is different in this from your usual behavior?

To answer the latter question first, it's intent. Intent and effort. When you flirt, you're actively trying to keep that person around, engaged, and interested. With the average person, you are (or you SHOULD be) just riding the waves, keeping it casual and chill, etc. You could say flirting is "your usual l, but more intense". To put down an example, if you like to share tumblr posts with people, maybe your version of flirting includes every time you send a post to someone *also* sending it to the person you're flirting with, regardless of whether it caters to their interests, just because you want to share things with them no matter what they are. And that means the conversation might be harder somehow, but it might also be more rewarding, or also tell you something about whether they're a good fit for you. Another example might be that you go hang out in call with them even though you never do so with other people. Stuff like that.

To answer the former question, it's because it's fucking exhausting. Rewarding, but exhausting xD Like we're talking about effectively catering your behavior to getting to know a single person, but doing that individually for everyone you know. Even if those behaviors are not in direct conflict with each other, it's probably really hard to maintain them, and the resulting amalgamation of behaviors probably doesn't even look like you all that much anymore. Something people find it easier, of course, but like as not you just don't have the physical and emotional energy to flirt with everyone you know all the time. If you do so then you probably get *really* exhausted by conversation, more so than might come from just being an introvert (or maybe you're not an introvert and this is what's tricking you into thinking you are - I don't know!). Depending on who you are, it's also possible that flirting with everyone causes you not to be very self-aware when talking, or to cross social boundaries by acting in ways that you think of as being yourself when those behaviors are just not cool by group norms. It could lead to awkward situations, or perhaps even something like what OP ran into.

So in conclusion: Flirting is a matter of being yourself but more intentionally, of getting to know a single person while letting them know you, of turning a single mundane relationship into something you both believe to be special. It's where you apply all those flirting rules and "get to know someone" strategies. It is also *extremely* subjective and very much based on the relationship that already exists. To tell whether you're flirting you have to know yourself, what you want, and how you want to go about achieving that, all to a degree you don't usually need to for other relationships. And of course, the only ways to know those things are to talk about them and to practice them. So get to trying xD

And to OP: Again, I don't know what that situation looks like. If you read this whole thing and went "that's not what I was doing at all!", then maybe the person who called you out was overreacting to something you said. Again, I don't know what, but there's some pretty easy ways to get people to think you're flirting, especially in sexual topics (via the age-old confusion of love with lust, but on the flip side so to speak). If you read this whole thing and went "oh yeah, I *was* doing that", then maybe reconsider how you act in that group. Either way, remember there's always a chance you parse the situation wrong, and also remember that I'm just some lonely schmuck on the internet no pitchforks pls ;-;

*Addendum: What if Forever Alone*

As I said above, you don't *need* to have experienced this intense of a desire to understand it. I certainly haven't. There are actually a few paths to understanding; knowing someone you want to be with is the *best* one because it teaches you how to flirt directly, but it's not the *only* one. For me, it wasn't love, it was hate. (I don't like people, ok xD) I got in a fight with a friend, and in looking back on our relationship I realized that I just could not stand the way he acted, and I had several grudges *years* old that I couldn't imagine ever finding a solution or closure to, because the way he acted didn't let me do so and the way I acted didn't let our relationship just sit there. I'm still in the process of ending that friendship, but more importantly to this discussion it taught me something vital. It showed me that there are at least two levels of "want to be around" that I experience with people. In this case "fine with" and "not wanting to" were the levels, but looking back on other friendships I also see some "wanting to"s and a couple "not fine with"s as well. It was the experience of knowing that that difference exists that allowed me to understand that there might be other levels at all.

Love, hate, dislike, like, like for certain things but not others, etc. It's the understanding that you feel differently about different people, the annihilation of the voice inside you that's telling you you're "just fine" with anything, that is the key. You can adapt to anything, sure, humans are very adaptable, but you will never *feel the same way* about everything, and recognizing that is how you come to understand flirting and, in the end, even yourself.

I ... okay I know we've been over this ... but ... what IS flirting. I got called out for apparently flirting with a whole fucking discord server of like 230 plus people. I ... wasn't trying to flirt. I ... I don't think I understand what is or isn't flirting.

Can someone help?