I remember the first time someone flirted with me.
I was fourteen or so, out with a male-female group for the first time. I was rather loudly telling a story to my sister when a teenage boy suddenly put up his pointer finger. “Shhh,” he said. “You’re too pretty to talk.” Insulting, but to a young teen girl, oddly flattering. It was memorable — the first time my whole brain was flooded with the addictive substance that is the male gaze.
I wish I could say that I soon grew and matured into sobriety, leaving the cheap thrill behind in my journey to adulthood. But I went to college when I was sixteen years old; my fleshly appetite for attention only grew as it was fed. And when I became a Christian in my early twenties, the old habits of interaction with the opposite sex died hard.
For a time, the only thing I knew to do was to avoid single men. If I ever encountered one who seemed “legit” — a respectable, hardworking, marriageable man with a job and a commitment to the church — I would be very rude to him. I suppose I didn’t want to seem eager. You may wonder how I could maintain such widespread impoliteness, but it was easy. There was only one single man in our church at that time.
