The Gateway Flirt

After my first week of Lyfting I realized there might be a situation that I encounter from time to time.

It was when I picked up a young lady and her friend at a Mexican place down the street from where I live. Within minutes I realized they were pretty buzzed from probable Margarita drinking. They spanned a huge range of topics very quickly, constantly talking over each other, and forgetting sentences as they did.

While I chatted with them, I kept noticing the girl (sitting in the passenger seat) looking at me. I'm a guy who's over 30, who has managed to overcome his limited male senses enough to be aware when a girl is checking him out. And she was.

Chat chat chat - look.

Chat chat chat - look.

I could feel the energy in the car building towards something, so I wasn't surprised when I heard it:

"Do you people ever flirt with you when you're driving them?"

One of my partners cleverly likened this to the idea of meta-media - when a news source doesn't want to risk upsetting their audience for covering a certain topic, they cover other news sources covering it. Then the gates are open and they are free to op-ed the hell out of everything to their cold little heart's delight.

The gateway flirt works the same way, but in this case it simultaneously helped and hindered the flirting process.

Help:

The flirter (her) was able to find out multiple pieces of information related to the flirtee (me), while also putting flirting on the table. She found out if people do flirt with me, if I'm open to being flirted with,  if there's some company rule against it, if I'm into her gender/type, and probably some other small details.

Hindrance:

I had no idea whether or not she was also using this meta-flirting tactic to flirt indirectly because the other guy in the car was her boyfriend. That would have been bold, but I've seen brassier moves before, so I wasn't willing to rule it out. It was only when he got out of the car first, while she awkwardly stayed behind, that I realized she was lingering to see if I would take advantage of the moment to get her information.

I had no idea what the policy was on this sort of thing, and she wasn't the sort of girl I tended to flirt with anyway, so I demurred and wished her a good day. It seemed like too much of a risk on too little a reward, and I didn't know the rules of the game yet. When flirting is happening it is REALLY important to understand the rules of the game, and the actual message someone is trying to send, lest you confuse it and have an upsetting miscommunication:

;)