Flirting.

What actually occurs when two people flirt with each other?

I ask not because it happens very often - or, indeed, at all - but because I wonder whether or not it is one of a class of behaviours which are similar to each other, even if their intended outcomes differ vastly.

When we flirt, the most important thing is the suspension of disbelief (those words again) with a view to breaking down a fictitious barrier. That is: I must convince somebody who is already aware of their attractiveness (to me) that I am attracted to them - while the attractive other similarly waits to be convinced of what they already know. Flirting is no more than going around in circles, testing boundaries, and withdrawing in shyness (or not) when the offer of a concrete sexual encounter is made.

Should the sexual encounter ever take place, then the two people concerned can never again flirt with the same level of intensity and pressure, for the encounter served to prick that particular bubble. Flirtation is, as observed by Kundera, the promise of a sexual encounter without the guarantee that the promise will ever be fulfilled - it is an anti-promise, but no less sincere than that.

Flirtation, then, requires us to dig for things that are already obvious; to exert ourselves by running on the spot forever in order to preserve the thing we cannot vocalise, but which has already been released with smiles, with the subtle brushing of fingertips against fingertips, in a hundred other similar ways.

What other behaviours are there that require us to hold back from expressing the (obvious) truth? There must be hundreds, but the one most obvious as I write is anti-flirting: if the goal of flirting is to fuse two people together, then its opposite is when a couple have sprung apart, and are at pains to keep the extent of their antipathy under wraps.

I see it with my father (the leaver) and my mother (left behind) and how the latter exhausts herself to keep him in 'ignorance' of her loathing whenever he pays her a visit. As soon as the door slams shut when he leaves for work, she'll hiss: thank God for that! I couldn't wait for him to piss off!

If flirting is a tentative light shone into the future, then anti-flirting is more than an assessment of the past - it is its repudiation and negation. It is a long sigh of deep regret; the dismantling of history; the enduring expression of disgust, disappoinment and betrayal.