47. If I email my friend’s brother without mentioning it to my friend?
From the mailbag.
Beanie asks:
Am I flirting if I email my friend’s brother without mentioning it to my friend? Does this mean that I must be flirting because if I wasn’t I would have told my friend? Or can it be innocent? I mean, I AM trying to flirt but maybe I am picking up the wrong signals; so if it’s not necessarily flirting I can pretend it was never a flirtation in the first place!
Without knowing what’s in those emails, AIF? faces a classic Schrödinger’s Cat scenario. This, of course, is the famous paradox which begins with a cat trapped in a box with an atom that could decay, setting off a deadly chain reaction. Until we can open the box and settle the question by direct observation, the cat’s life-or-death situation is blurred, and we can say that it’s both alive and dead.
What we have here, then, is Schrödinger’s Flirt. Unless we were to open the email in question, we’d have to assume that — given the potential for flirtation implied by writing to us at all — Beanie is simultaneously flirting and not-flirting. Although we appear to have arrived at a technically correct answer to this dilemma, we’ve also focused on the wrong question.
…
Come on, you don’t want to know whether you’re flirting! You’ve straight-up admitted that you want this dude to feel the gentle brain-caress of your coquettish ladywords. You want to know whether that’s ok, even though your friend might find your ambition to yummy down on his or her sibling kind of awkward. It might not hurt to drop a pretty obvious hint to your friend, leaving the email out of it, just to see where things stand.
Considering that you’ve already hit send, we can’t help you with the whole “going back in time to gather more information (and maybe ride hoverboards)” thing, but it’s not too late to figure things out before you take it any further. A few (mostly) innocent emails shouldn’t bust up any friendship worth having.
Would you like Am I Flirting? to lead your dating life frightfully astray? Email amiflirting@tumblr.com (we won’t tell anyone’s brother) or go to amiflirting.com/submit.
