Schrödinger's Flirty Cat

I am yet to write about dating on this blog for the simple reason that I'm not very good at it and it would in any case threaten to devolve into me complaining that short guys can't catch a break in this gender-normative world (I once went on a Tinder date in which the woman's face literally dropped within nanoseconds of discovering I'm 5'4". It would have been hilarious if didn't also etch itself in pain on my memory). Nevertheless, it always was going to be impossible to resist writing about something so completely stupid, so sublimely ridiculous as dating forever. There's just too much farcical humanity in watching the English desperately fumbling around with an activity they all at some level suspect of being inherently American.

Ha ha, I have no idea what I'm doing

Anyway, I wanted to get down an idea more concerned with flirting in general than dating per se, because it has arisen several times in conversation with friends and I can't find any reference to it on the internet so far, so I smell millennial gold. I have named the concept Schrödinger's Flirty Cat, or SFC, and it describes just about every flirtatious encounter to some degree. 

To recap the concept of Schrödinger's Cat, at least as far as it pertains here, if you stick a cat in a box with a vial of poison that could be randomly released at any time and then seal the box, you have before you a cat that in observational terms is both alive and dead at the same time (Terry Pratchett tells us that there is a third possible category, Bloody Furious). According to various interpretations of quantum mechanics, both the universe in which the cat is alive and the one in which it is dead exist simultaneously until one of those universes is killed off for good by the opening of the box and the observation of the cat.

Pictured: a bastard

Now the Flirty Cat operates on a similar principle, except that she represents your chances of getting off with someone on a given evening. In Schrodinger's thought experiment, the poison vial was triggered by the decay of radioactive material, that is a random event that couldn't be predicted or observed from outside the box but determines the state of the cat. In the version in which you are, say, chatting with someone attractive at a house party, while you have methods of varying reliability to check how successful you will be if you lunge in for a snog (apparently playing with hair is a good sign?) the fog of war (or more likely a mix of alcohol, terror, self-loathing and occasional heroically misinformed confidence) means there is no solid observational evidence that you won't make a fool of yourself.

This is because the workings of someone else's mind are as unreadable as the decay of an atom inside a locked box to you. There are various guesses you can make, but most people are terrible at this and even if they aren't it will still be a guess. Much like the moment the poison vial breaks, the moment a mind is made up to go home with you is known exclusively to that person and cannot be deduced. So two universes have to exist simultaneously for our hero leaning against the stairs with a warm can of Red Stripe and what he hopes is a good line in nonchalant but sexy witticisms. In one universe all this arm-touching and coy glances are leading somewhere and he will spend a good portion of the rest of his night intimately acquainted with someone else's tonsils. In the other he has totally misread the situation and this lovely girl is humouring him and is just about to recognise someone over the other side of the room who can get her out of there. At the point when one of them either makes a move or says "no thank you" one of those universes collapses.

"I just have to dance over here for a bit"

Now, the interesting bit is the way social propriety requires us to actively cultivate both those universes at once - to simultaneously believe you are interested and not interested, that the Flirty Cat is alive and dead. After all, if you don't succeed with someone you will want plausible deniability that you were never interested in them because a. rejection is humiliating b. you might get another chance and c. you might just want to be friends afterwards. So a flirter must pursue a line where retrospectively he or she can never be said to openly chirpsing right up until the point where their mouths have collided. It doesn't take Erwin Schrödinger to work out that this kind of thinking is going to cruelly sabotage anyone's game even if it is rational for each party (and at each party).

The basic problem is that no one can telegraph their intentions straight out, for obvious reasons. We're left with a pantomime of trying to give vague, deniable signals and read them back and then make a gamble, and for some people, myself included, this is all a bit much. I know some people who resolve this problem with the quintessentially British solution of self-referential irony: giving very clear signals by clearly pointing out that they are flirting, look at me, aren't I ridiculous. This method cunningly succeeds in verifying whether the Flirty Cat is alive or dead without ruining the social situation - at least this way if you don't succeed it is at least deniable that you were trying particularly hard, and you can retain your dignity and the possibility of further conversation. But it seems a bit of a ridiculous farce to go through every time.

What is so damaging to people's chances is attempting to flirt in situations where ostensibly everyone is just being friendly. It was just a given to me as a teenager that you got with people at parties or on nights out; I never stopped to question why we were meant to do this on occasions when the default setting was friends having fun with each other. The potential for miscommunication is terrific - yes there are some people who navigate it well, but also a vast number who are simply going to get it wrong most of the time. The English are a bunch who have almost made a national mythology out of fucking this stuff up, and we relish it even as it kills off the self-esteem of many thousands of our countrymen. 

A true Englishman in the tradition of Cardigan and Haig

This is why I am such a fan of Tinder and the arrival of large-scale tech-driven dating on these shores. Tinder or OKCupid or what have you cannot entirely resolve the SFC paradox - you still need to maintain a universe in which the date goes badly but you retain some dignity - but it removes a large quantity of the unknowns, since you have both turned up knowing you are specifically on a date. I am heartened to see many of my friends discovering the ease of this scenario relative to what they thought their flirting abilities were. It's neither rocket science nor quantum physics, but clearly it is working for a whole bunch of people. 

And if you feel you're lacking in confidence when flirting with people, just think of Schrödinger's Flirty Cat. It may not help you come up with clever lines or give off a charming demeanour, but it will make you think "I am the destroyer of universes", and that can only help.