My best friend called me cute, so I flirted back. A few compliments later, I was being told that all boys were the same. Apparently I had missed a fairly important change in the conversation's terms and conditions.
We're both eighteen, and we've been friends for seven years. When she started flirting with me the other day, I took it as a bit of fun between two people who knew each other well. I wasn't making a move. I thought we were having the sort of conversation where you could return a compliment without accidentally announcing a romantic agenda.
So I returned several. I kept the tone playful, matching what I thought she was doing. There was no grand confession on my side, no attempt to move our friendship into a different category. As far as I was concerned, we were joking around.
Then she got angry. The conversation stopped being about whether I was cute and became about whether she believed in love at all. She said boys caught feelings, pretended to love girls, then had sex with them and left. It was a much bigger accusation than I had expected to meet at the other end of a compliment.
I tried to explain that a guy could say something nice to a girl without secretly wanting a relationship or sex. In this particular case, I had seven years of friendship behind that explanation. I'd never even hugged her. I'd never seen her romantically, and I'd always wanted to respect the boundaries between us. For us, the friendship had never included even that much physical affection.
None of that seemed to help. She kept telling me not to do it again, while I tried to work out how responding to the flirting had become the offense. She was clearly upset, but I couldn't work out what she wanted from me in that conversation. Whether we'd understood the original flirting differently was still an open question. I had only my own version of what I'd meant.
Eventually I stopped complimenting her. This seemed a reasonable response to being told to stop. It also turned out to be the wrong response, because she then told me I mustn't stop. Until that point, I'd at least thought I understood the instruction, even if I didn't understand how we'd got there.
By then, the playful mood had gone. I wasn't enjoying the exchange or trying to keep the flirting going. I was exhausted by the switch from banter to accusation and then to being asked for more of the thing I'd just been lectured about.
I started answering with a plain okay. There wasn't much enthusiasm left to put behind it. I wanted the conversation to end so I could go to the store and spend a little time away from my phone. After seven years of friendship, that afternoon my immediate ambition was to run an errand.
