The Unbearable Lightness of Being: On Flirtation

The Unbearable Lightness of Being has some pretty gut wrenching descriptions of the struggle that some peope have in relationships that are less than completely committed.  The first part of this excerpt is an interesting set up for some of the feelings that are created by infidelity.  The second part's description of an academic approach to flirting seemed completely spot on for me when I read it.  Its hard to be genuine when you would rather not be engaging the opposite sex outside your own relationship in the first place:

p.142-43

What is flirtation?  One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty.  In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without the guarantee...

Tomas kept trying to convince her that love and lovemaking were two different things.  She refused to understand...

She merely wished to find a way out of the maze...She took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and fialed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love.  How she wished she could learn lightness!  She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

If for some women flirting is second nature, insignificant, routine, for Tereza it had developed into an important field of research with the goal of teaching her who she was and what she was capable of.  But by making it important and serious, she deprived it of its lightness, and it became forced, labored, overdone.  She disturbed the balance between promise and lack of guarantee (which, when maintained, is a sign of flirtistic virtuosity); she promised too ardently, and without making it clear that the promise involved no guarantee on her part.  Which is another way of saying that she gave everyone the impression of being there for the taking.  But when men responded by asking for what they felt they had been promised, they met with strong resistance, and their only explanation for it was that she was deceitful and malicious.