“This is called flirting, Amelia!” It became the mantra of the Internet a few weeks ago. The publication of the interview – or, rather, quote – of Amelia Dimoldenberg with Andrew Garfield on the program Chicken Shop Date revolutionized social networks, and anyone chronically on-line found himself repeating clips of their looped encounter. The complete 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 ephemeral meetings between the two, in which they were already beginning to show their chemistry. The first, at the end of 2022, on the red carpet at GQ’s Man of the Year awards; and the second, in January 2023, during the Golden Globes.
But why does it seem that a large part of Internet users became obsessed with this video—just over eleven minutes long—to the point of creating fanarts as if it were the poster for a romantic comedy, or even publishing the interview on the Letterboxd platform so that people could rate it like any other movie—even if it was later deleted—? Exactly because of what Garfield says in the interview: ““This is called flirting!” [¡Esto es flirtear!]. It reminds us of a practice that we love and that, today, is being lost.
The death of love on screen
We are in a moment of pessimism for the romantic comedy genre. Despite the attempts – more or less successful – to revive it from films like Anyone but you (starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell) or the series Nobody Wants This (with Adam Brody and Kristen Bell), the love stories we encounter today are full of clichés, they are rushed and implausible, or they reproduce patriarchal dynamics that have led us to believe that love on screen is dead. And yet, in the midst of all this disappointment, the interview-date between Garfield and Dimoldenberg reminded us how much we like to see a genuine connection between two people on screen. A relationship that, furthermore, was forged at a slow pace.
This is, in fact, a large part of the success of the video: having been able to participate in that growing tension that generates desire that you hope will culminate in some way. “We live it as a process,” says Irene (@mataraunlector on Instagram), who admits that he became obsessed with the interview and their connection from the encounters on the red carpets. “In their first interactions it was already like, ‘oh how cute they are,’ and the interview was like a way to culminate the love story,” he explains.
It is interesting the turn that our conceptions of love and relationships are taking. At a time—the current one—in which the culmination of a relationship between two people seems to take place in the moment they kiss or have a sexual encounter, watching Garfield and Dimoldenberg reminded us that there can be something much more attractive than that supposed ‘end’, and it is what occurs in the during. Carmen Martín Gaite already said it when she stated in her Notebooks of everything that “nothing is straw in well-conceived 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 have understood each other perfectly. And everyone who was watching us. It was like being in love. Or as if we didn’t exist. We have traveled together to a beautiful place,” she explains.
This definition could be applied to what is expected from a loving encounter (understood as what arises between a couple or in other types of relationships): a discursive rally in which each one knows how to perfectly receive the ball thrown by the other and return it with grace, so that not only they, but also those who witness that conversation, can enjoy. However, today our way of flirting, influenced by social networks and apps of dating, has actively sought to shorten the playing time and jump straight to the winning outcome.
This, which seems to be aligned with the way society drives us to live our daily lives —everything is accelerated and there is no time to waste—he is actually showing that he is not as attractive as he seemed. A survey published by Savanta in 2022 revealed that generation zeta is increasingly tired of apps of dating and that 21% of single people who are actively looking for a partner no longer use the apps in which they were registered at the time. Because? The study also indicates that up to 90% of those surveyed have experienced at least one frustration when using these apps.
Today our way of flirting, influenced by social networks and dating apps, has actively sought to shorten the game time and go directly to the winning result
And this situation is not exclusive to generation zeta. The writer and journalist Roisin Kiberd (1989) also reflects on this in her essay Disconnection. A personal journey through the internet (Alpha Decay), in which she tells how after meeting in person a man she had hooked up with through a app —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 the physical plane, 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, that attraction that a person’s way of walking, gesturing, speaking and expressing themselves awakens in us did not arise between them.
That distance that sometimes arises 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 says, the apps of quotes “they don’t reflect my personality well 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 difficult to get the essence of me.”
Something similar happens to Esther (@estthersaez in app. You can laugh in front of the screen, but it is not the same as seeing the other person’s gestures and body language. Two aspects that are fundamental when it comes to finding someone attractive and that greatly influence when that desired ‘connection’ arises.
The in-person experience allows for that back-and-forth with comments and funny questions that is lost in an app. You can laugh in front of the screen, but it is not the same as seeing the other person’s gestures and body language
Esther Saez
— network and app user
Social networks and apps dating, therefore, they are not only seeking to shorten the experience, but they are depriving us of living the complete experience of flirting which, in most cases, is the most exciting. Myriam Rodríguez del Real, researcher and co-author—along with Javier Correa Román—of the essay Micropolitics of love. Desire, capitalism and patriarchy (Editors’ point of view) explains that this general boredom with apps of dating and our way of flirting on the Internet—swipe right on an extensive catalog of people, give a like as a way to attract attention or answer a Stories—responds to “the overstimulation that characterizes this era of late capitalism.”
We have so much to choose from that this, in turn, is paralyzing and we allow ourselves to be carried away by an automatism, feeding what the sociologist François Dubet calls the “sad passions”, that is, resentment, discouragement, anxiety or disorientation. Faced with this panorama of acceleration and overstimulation, the appointment-interview of Chicken Shop Date It has reminded us that love can be “a space for slow, calm, and collective creation and knowledge,” says the researcher.
Furthermore, their date-interview also breaks with another of the trends that has permeated Internet fooling around and has filled everything with ambiguity, mystery and a penchant for intermittent reinforcement, where one must be “mysterious and interesting enough, but at the same time time not to seem like you have nothing of interest.” 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, the attractive thing about Amelia and Andrew is that they clearly say “we are fooling around, there is chemistry here and we are not afraid to put our cards on the table,” says Rodríguez del Real.
For all these reasons, it is not unusual to observe how trends emerge that move us further and further away from the apps dating and with which we look for alternatives, whether 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 that latent desire to recover physical flirtation. to body
We’re looking forward to flirting in person again, but now the problem is that there are those who no longer remember how to do it, and others—those from generation zeta—who jumped straight into cyber flirting and don’t know any other way. Faced with the accommodation and speed to which the networks push us, the “this is called flirting, Amelia” by Andrew is a call to the creativity that can—and should—emerge in relationships, be they loving. or friendship. A type of creativity that makes us not care if 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.
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