“That’s called flirting, Amelia!” This became the internet’s mantra a few weeks ago. The publication of the interview – or rather the quote – of Amelia Dimoldenberg with Andrew Garfield on the program Chicken Store Date revolutionized social networks, and anyone chronically online found himself repeating extracts of their encounter in a loop. The full video, which has almost nine million views on YouTube (and has become one of the most viewed on the English comedian’s channel), is the culmination of the two fleeting meetings between the two, in which they began already showing their chemistry. The first, at the end of 2022, on the red carpet of the GQ Man of the Year awards; and the second, in January 2023, during the Golden Globes.
But why does it seem that a large portion of Internet users have become obsessed with this video of just over eleven minutes, to the point of creating fanart as if it were the poster for a romantic comedy, or even publish the interview on the Letterboxd platform so that people can rate it like any other film – even if it was deleted by the rest – ? Exactly because of what Garfield says in the interview: ““That’s what we call flirting!” [¡Esto es flirtear!]. This reminds us of a practice that we love and which, today, is being lost.
The death of love on screen
We are in a period of pessimism for the romantic comedy genre. Despite attempts – more or less successful – to revive it from films like Anyone but you (with Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell) or the series Nobody wants that (with Adam Brody and Kristen Bell), the love stories we encounter today are full of clichés, either rushed and implausible, or reproducing patriarchal dynamics that have made us believe that on-screen love is dead . And yet, amid all this disappointment, the timing of Garfield and Dimoldenberg’s interview reminded us how much we love seeing a real connection between two people on screen. A relationship which actually developed slowly.
This is largely the success of the video: being able to participate in this growing tension which generates a desire which we hope will culminate in one way or another. “We experienced it as a process,” says Irene (@mataraunlector on Instagram), who admits to having become obsessed with the interview and their connection since meeting on the red carpets. “During their first interactions, we were already saying ‘oh, how cute they are’ and the interview was like a way to cap off the love story,” he explains.
It’s interesting to see how our ideas about love and relationships are changing. In an age – today – where the climax of a relationship between two people seems to occur when they kiss or have sex, watching Garfield and Dimoldenberg reminded us that there can be to have something much more attractive than one assumes. ‘end’, and that’s what happens in the pendant. Carmen Martín Gaite already said it when she declared in her Notebooks of everything that “nothing is straw in well-crafted love and nothing is as interesting as the process.”
An accelerated society that no longer knows how to flirt
in the movie Challengers by Luca Guadagnino, Zendaya’s character compares the tennis match she just played with her opponent to a relationship. “For fifteen seconds we played real tennis. We understood each other perfectly. And everyone who looked at us. It was like being in love. Or as if we didn’t exist. We traveled together to a beautiful place,” she explains.
This definition could apply to what we expect from a romantic encounter (understood as what happens in a couple or in other types of relationships): a discursive exchange in which everyone knows perfectly well how to receive the thrown ball by the other and send it back. with grace, so that not only they, but also those who witness this conversation, may benefit from it. However, today our way of flirting, influenced by social networks and apps meetings, actively sought to shorten the playing time and move directly to the winning outcome.
This, which seems to correspond to the way society pushes us to live our daily lives —everything is accelerated and there’s no time to waste – he’s actually showing that he’s not as attractive as he seemed. A survey published by Savanta in 2022 found that the Zeta generation is increasingly fed up apps dating and that 21% of singles who are actively looking for a partner no longer use the apps in which they were recorded at the time. Because? The study also indicates that up to 90% of respondents experienced at least one frustration when using these tools. applications.
Today, our way of flirting, influenced by social media and dating apps, has actively sought to shorten the game time and go straight to the winning outcome.
And this situation is not exclusive to the zeta generation. The writer and journalist Roisin Kiberd (1989) also reflects on this in his essay Cut. A personal journey through the Internet (Alpha Decay), in which she recounts how, after meeting in person a man with whom she had a relationship through a application – and with whom he had spent a lot of time chatting – he realized that what was happening between them through chat no longer worked on a physical level, because “their interactions were limited by the parameters of the screen “. That is to say, their “digital personalities” seemed to understand each other, but when the physical aspect came into play, this attraction that the way they walk, gesture, speak and express themselves awakens in we did not occur between them.
This distance that sometimes appears between our way of communicating in a chat and in the physical world is one of the reasons why Irene (@mataraunlector) assures that “she hates flirting on networks and in “apps”. In his case, he said, the apps of quotes “they do not reflect my personality at all, I think that when you meet me in person I have a character that attracts attention and if you only know me through a chat it is very hard to get my gas.”
Something similar happens to Esther (@estthersaez in application. We can laugh in front of the screen, but it’s not the same as seeing each other’s gestures and body language. Two aspects that are fundamental when it comes to finding someone attractive and which greatly influence when the desired “connection” appears.
The in-person experience allows for that back and forth with comments and fun questions that get lost in an app. We can laugh in front of the screen, but it’s not the same as seeing each other’s gestures and body language.
Esther Saez
— network and application user
Social networks and apps therefore, they not only seek to shorten the experience, but they deprive us of living the full experience of flirting which, in most cases, is the most exciting. Myriam Rodríguez del Real, researcher and co-author, with Javier Correa Román, of the essay Micropolitics of love. Desire, capitalism and patriarchy (Editor’s point of view) explains that this general boredom with apps dating and our way of flirting on the Internet: swipe right on a vast catalog of people, give a as as a way to attract attention or respond to a story – responds to “the overstimulation that characterizes this era of late capitalism.”
We have so many choices that this in turn paralyzes us and we allow ourselves to be carried away by an automatism, fueling what sociologist François Dubet calls “sad passions”, that is to say resentment, discouragement, anxiety or disorientation. . Faced with this panorama of acceleration and overstimulation, the meeting-interview of Chicken Store Date It reminded us that love can be “a space of slow, calm and collective creation and knowledge,” explains the researcher.
Furthermore, their latest interview also breaks with another of the trends that have permeated Internet nonsense and filled everything with ambiguity, mystery, and a penchant for intermittent reinforcement, where you have to be “quite mysterious and interesting , but at the same time so as not to seem like there is nothing interesting. A behavior that leads us to measure our words or increase waiting times to respond to a message, which ends up generating anxiety and insecurity. However, what’s appealing about Amelia and Andrew is that they clearly say, “We’re having fun, there’s chemistry here, and we’re not afraid to put our cards on the table,” says Rodríguez del Real.
For all these reasons, it is not uncommon to observe the emergence of trends which take us further and further away from apps dating and with which we look for alternatives, whether it is signing up for an activity just to meet people or placing an upside-down pineapple in your shopping cart, something that, although anecdotal and comical, demonstrates this latent desire to rediscover the physical flirtation of the body.
We can’t wait to flirt in person again, but now the problem is that there are those who don’t remember how to do it, and others – those of the Zeta generation – who have jumped straight into cyber- flirt and know no other way. Faced with the accommodations and speed to which the networks push us, the “That’s called flirting, Amelia.” by Andrew is a call to the creativity that can – and should – emerge in relationships, even loving ones. or friendship. A type of creativity that makes us not care whether at the end of the road there is a kiss or not, because the only thing we really want is for the conversation to continue.
