19. If I Train Him To Email Me on Schedule?
“am i flirting if… in the course of four months i have successfully trained him to exchange emails every two days when he said he hated email and only wanted to correspond by post? i mean i think it’s clear but he insists it’s platonic. then i feel bad for maybe flirting. maybe i am wondering if he’s flirting.”
Am I Flirting took this mailbag question to the sharp, the sensitive, and don’t you call her a Tumblrette, meaghano:
The E-mail Flirt is tricky territory, as it is much like Real Flirting, but with backspace. And a paper trail. Strike up a conversation on the train, and it’s over before you can say “Gabriel Garcia Marquez”. Send a flirtatious message via email, and there exists a potential back and forth expressible only by modern day romantic comedies starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.
If you find yourself in an outpouring of the soul, constant-refreshing of the inbox situation, it is best to take your hands out of your pants and consider the following. To interpret flirtation in real life we look at tone, facial expressions, and body language, whereas on the Internet we have other, more blatant, markers. Ask yourself, “What is the approximate incidence of ;) ?” or “How deftly does my correspondent convey a degree of frustration with the limitations of technology to properly express how much he wants to bone me?”
Always remember that when it comes to e-mail flirtation, a refined boldness is the name of the game. Seasoned veterans get things done with an equal ratio of clever wordplay : shameless declarations. So if a man is in two months deep and still hasn’t begged you for a nudie pic, my advice would be to open a Twitter account, grab a book, and go to a coffee shop (in that order), because Honey, he’s not flirting. If he says it’s platonic, it probably is. Unless there’s a winkyface. That would change everything.
