Flirting IRL is having a pop culture moment, from ‘Chicken Shop Date’ to Charli xcx

There’s a unique feeling that comes with watching two people flirting wildly with each other. You’re a spectator to something that feels intimate, yet public, both of them dancing around the idea that they clearly fancy each other but haven’t yet plucked up the gumption to shoot their shot. On the one hand: Should I…. leave you guys to it? On the other: Sorry, but I just can’t look away.

This is how I felt watching the latest Chicken Shop Date episode with Andrew Garfield, an 11-minute flirt-fest of “powerful vibes” with Amelia Dimoldenberg that I had to watch in instalments because I couldn’t handle the chemistry between the two. I literally felt jealous watching it.

Garfield, who’s currently promoting his latest romantic movie We Live In Time which also stars Florence Pugh, declares in the interview that he and Dimoldenberg have had, in fact, two meet cutes. We all saw their viral first red carpet meeting back in 2022, in which Garfield sauntered up to Dimoldenberg and declared “I think you’re great” before proceeding to tell her he’s seen all her “Chicken Shop things.” “I’m asking you out right now,” Dimoldenberg says in the very same clip.

Their second meet cute happened at the 2023 Golden Globes on the red carpet. But, this video also mentions the fact that the pair were at a party together where a) Amelia was wowing with her dancing and b) Andrew asked for her number. Hello? What?!

“This is called flirting, Amelia!” Garfield bellowed at one point in their latest meeting. “This is called flirting.” Yes, Andrew, we can see that. And, so did more than 5.3 million viewers who tuned in to watch the mega-viral video, which topped the YouTube trending videos over the weekend.

Flirting is having a major pop culture moment right now. And the internet’s reaction to the latest Chicken Shop Date forms part of a landscape of our current cultural fixation on the art form of a good old fashioned flirt. The internet was ablaze with a kind of high-school K-I-S-S-I-N-G energy, along with an abundance of memes, shipping, and general commentary. Some hailed the video the “the greatest rom com of the year,” others focused on the granular blush-worthy details: “I think something is wrong with me because I am blushing at Andrew saying ‘I don’t like games Amelia.'” Side note: there’s nothing wrong with you, we were all swooning.

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But it’s not just Andrew and Amelia and our hope that they will soon be betrothed. The internet is crushing on multiple couples, both real and fictitious, for their excellent flirting on main.

Running parallel to the Chicken Shop Date buzz this past weekend was another swoon-worthy interaction between Suki Waterhouse and fiancé Robert Pattinson. For an ELLE video, Waterhouse prank-called Pattinson, pretending that she’d been asked to be the new host of Love Is Blind. Pattinson’s voice sounds like he’s smiling as he talks to his beloved and, as one commenter aptly put it: “he talks like he is kicking his feet and twirling his hair while talking to her.” A true highlight (which prompted many memes) comes when Pattinson asks, “Darling, have you gone mad?” Stop it, you guyssssssss, I can’t cope.

Speaking of IRL couples, brat summer isn’t just about partying and living unapologetically as oneself, it’s also about being publicly cutesy with your fiancé. Charli xcx had the entire internet begging her fiancé, producer George Daniel, to please do the “Apple” dance that swept TikTok, created by Kelley Heyer. It all started when the brat artist posted a doe-eyed TikTok video of her asking George, “Babyyyyy, why don’t you want to do ‘Apple’ though?”

More adorable content came our way when Charli followed up her request as a birthday present. And then again when TikToks emerged of the singer performing “Girl, so confusing” during the co-headlined Sweat tour with Troye Sivan, when she called out George onstage for not singing along. “George, I don’t see you singing,” she said (with autotune), before smiling at him and shouting, “Come on!!!” He’d better be singing now!

Seriously, though, I want what they have.

Crossing over into the fictional realm, we’ve been blessed with a decent run of TV series with protracted, infuriating sexual tension-ridden storylines. The kind where you’re yelling “kiss!” at the screen. Disney+’s adaptation of the 1988 Jilly Cooper romance novel Rivals is one such example. Alex Hassell plays beguiling yet incorrigible rake Rupert Campbell-Black, who’s bewitched by Taggie O’Hara (Sex Education’s Bella Maclean), and their palpable chemistry is both mesmerising and infuriating as they continue throughout an entire series to not even so much as kiss on the lips. Get a grip, please!!!!!!!

That’s not even mentioning Rivals’ slow-burn, eked-out romance between Cooper stand-in Lizzie Vereker (Katherine Parkinson) and businessman Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer), the appeal of which Parkinson puts down to the rarity of long-game romances in the online dating era. “I’m not sure how many slow burn relationships are allowed to happen in a world of Tinder and so on,” Parkinson told the audience of a Rivals preview screening in London in September.

Not remotely debauched, but just as swoon-worthy is Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, which helped reignite every millennial’s teenage crush on Adam Brody of The OC’s Seth Cohen fame. The series, which has thankfully just been renewed for a second season, is a refreshing break from tired rom-com hetero archetypes, in which we watch a self-actualised female protagonist fall for an emotionally unavailable male counterpart. Noah (Brody) is kind, reassuring and open-hearted in his courtship of Joanne (Kristen Bell). In short, he’s the unproblematic romantic ideal that we have all been yearning for.

So, what’s the deal? Why’s everyone so obsessed with flirting right now?

My theory is that the pandemic has had a profound impact on the way we regard flirting. During the lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, going on dates wasn’t possible, casual sex was banned, and our only way of interacting with potential partners was through our phone screens. Romance was temporarily on hold. Many of us single folk experienced something called touch hunger or even touch deprivation, where we don’t receive enough or any physical contact (something neuroscientists tell us is a vital human need).

Many of us retreated into a fantasy world of romantic fiction (with the encouragement of SmutTok — TikTok’s dedicated community of bodice ripper lovers), and since then romance and erotic lit has seen an astronomic rise in popularity in the publishing world. Since 2020, U.S. print sales of romance and erotica books have doubled from 18 million in 2020 to over 29 million in 2023, as reported by the Guardian. In the UK, sales of romance novels have increased by 110 percent over the same timespan, bringing in £53 million ($69 million) a year.

At the same time, meeting online is now the most popular way U.S. couples meet, according to 2019 research by sociologists at Stanford University.

Slow burn romances are, as Parkinson says, a rarity in the age of rapid swiping and job interview-esque first dates. Somewhere along the way, we adjusted our expectations and decided we had wanted everything all at once: we had wanted to fast-track our online dating matches into IRL boyfriends without the fun part… the lingering eye contact, the lust-filled looks from across the room, the buzz you get when their leg touches yours for the first time, the way their eyes light up when you walk into the room. As much as I’ve accepted that dating apps are not going anywhere, I also miss the pre-dating app days (yes, I’m a millennial) when we’d have blazing crushes on people we’d met organically and, every now and then, we’d muster the courage to awkwardly ask someone out.

I think we’re currently obsessed with watching people flirt — whether it’s a fictional couple in a TV series, or two celebrities who are either dating or should be — because in our disillusionment with dating app culture, we are seeing a resurgence of old-school romance. We’re turning to offline dating events to try and claw back the coveted chemistry you get from spending time with someone in real life developing a connection.

Flirting is having a moment right now because we’ve all realised how much we missed the feeling of lusting after someone in real life. Perhaps it’s time we all went outside into the world and flirted brazenly with a sexy stranger.