Flirting on Planes

I’m writing this post on a BA flight from Heathrow to Warsaw*. To one side of me is a taciturn, middle-aged Polish chap, his head buried in a book. It’s in English and he’s reading slowly, as if he’s puzzling over unfamiliar words. Across the aisle is a young American woman, maybe late 20s, with long blonde hair and a huge rock on her ring finger. She’s scribbling furiously on a stack of sales reports, pausing every now and then to swig from a bottle of Diet Coke.

I haven’t talked to either of them, nor will I. It’s early, for one thing, and I’m never at my best first thing in the morning; more importantly though, they both look like they want to be left in peace.

That’s not always the case. Flying does funny things to people, especially when they’re on their own. It’s such a transient activity – and so weirdly disconnected from everything that happens either side of it – that we often adjust our behaviours accordingly. We leave our everyday lives for a few hours and step into a bubble where no-one knows who we are or what we do. For all the seatbelts and safety announcements, the scheduled meals and regulated bathroom access, it’s one of the few times we’re able literally to rise above our troubles, and that can be a tremendously liberating experience.

It’s one of the reasons why I’m ambivalent about in-flight WiFi. There’s value in being able to switch off every now and then, and most of us simply won’t do that if a link to the outside world is readily available; instead we’ll hunch over our devices as if we were on a bus or train, or just sitting in a café around the corner from home. We don’t need to be online 24/7, as much as it may sometimes feel that way.

Of course an internet connection is not the only way to isolate yourself on a flight. Headphones – whether plugged in to the plane’s entertainment system or your own laptop – will close you off to fellow passengers no less effectively than a plexiglass screen, as will an open book or magazine. Even on a packed Ryanair flight, it’s easy to achieve total solitude, and I’ll frequently take advantage of that, especially if I’m having a stressful week or just need to get some work done.

Sometimes though, I don’t want solitude. Sometimes that enforced proximity to total strangers feels exciting rather than uncomfortable – a rare opportunity to strike up a no-stakes conversation with someone you’ll never see again after you get off the plane. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I find that happens more on long-haul flights than short-haul; I tend to relax properly, which makes it easier to break the ice with whoever’s next to me, and with hours of downtime stretching out in front of us, I’m less inclined to spend it in total silence. Maybe that just means a bit of small talk about their business trip, or the city you’re both heading towards…but occasionally, if you’re both in the mood, it can end up going somewhere much more interesting.

Not everyone wants to talk, and it’s important to respect that – even more so than in a bar or café, where they can easily get up and leave at any point. On a plane, you’re a captive audience, so it’s doubly annoying when the person six inches away from you won’t take the hint and shut up. Chuck in the fact that some people don’t find it easy to close down conversations generally, and it’s clear that if you’re the one bringing the chat, you have the same responsibility as you would in any similar social situation to pick up on non-verbal cues and back off when necessary. Just because an airline seating plan has thrown you together, doesn’t mean that either of you is obliged to engage with the other.

I was thinking about all of those things when I boarded the plane earlier, in large part because of this Twitter thread from the other night. I tried to figure out why I enjoy talking to people while I’m in the air, what I get out of it, and whether I should change the way I approach those interactions in future. In the end, I decided that I stand by what I said on Monday, and, perhaps more to the point, what I wrote a while back in this blog post on the parallels between flirting and job interviews:

“Flirting works in a very similar way, albeit usually with less at stake. It’s also why it ought to be viewed more as a recreational activity – an end in itself – rather than as part of a wider process. I flirt frequently, casually, and – some have said – incorrigibly. I flirt that way mainly because I enjoy it, but also because I don’t see it as something that’s goal-orientated. It’s fun, pressure-free conversation, and if it turns into anything more, that should be seen as a bonus.”

And that’s the crux of it: fun, pressure-free conversation is exactly what I want when I’m flying. Obviously I’d love to feel a bit of a spark with someone too – or a generous dollop of chemistry, if I’m really in the mood – but even when those things are there, it can still be just a really good way to pass the time. It’s that lovely grey area between dull, formal chit-chat and full-on, balls-to-the-wall seduction, where all you’re focused on is making each other’s lives a little happier for the duration of the flight.

My first real experience of that came back in 2010 on a red-eye from LA to London. Shortly after take-off the entertainment system malfunctioned; I’d already finished the books I had with me, and I don’t sleep well on planes, so I was suddenly faced with 10 hours trapped in the middle of my five-seat back row, with nothing to watch or read. Luckily the woman next to me was amazing: wry, playful, super-smart, and sexy as hell. We spent the first half of the flight talking about our lives, our faces inches apart as people slept all around us. I wanted to kiss her after an hour, and by the time another three had passed I was pretty much in love.

After napping for a while together I woke up to find her head on my shoulder, which prompted a fit of the giggles when she opened her eyes a few minutes later. The whole thing was cheerfully intimate in a way that shouldn’t have been possible with someone I’d only just met – yet somehow felt completely natural, in the circumstances.

We didn’t swap numbers at Heathrow – she had a boyfriend, I’d just finished a road trip with my ex and needed to figure out where my head was – but that didn’t remotely devalue the experience we’d just shared. The flirting, the conversation, the intimacy – those things really did feel like ends rather than means.

That’s been the case with subsequent flights as well. On a red-eye from New York two years ago, I spent pretty much the whole six hours chatting to a really cute Brooklyn schoolteacher, while her grandmother dozed in the seat next to her. She was heading to London for a week of sightseeing, and although we talked briefly about meeting up, both of us knew it wasn’t really a viable prospect.

I did go on a date with a Canadian woman I met at Heathrow while we were both charging our phones at the same power hub. She was flying from Vancouver to Helsinki, I was going from Warsaw to Chicago, and in our 20 minutes together we arranged to meet for drinks in London the following week; it was great, as these things often are, but while we’ve stayed in touch it was never going to be more than a bit of fun, given the circumstances.

The success criteria for flirting shouldn’t just boil down to getting someone’s number or securing a date – if they did, the whole thing would be far less enjoyable. Flirting is about endorphins and energy; chemistry and confidence. It’s freestyle jazz, not formal composition; there is no defined outcome, and the minute you bring one to the table, you automatically reduce the likelihood of getting what you want. Instead just enjoy that unexpected connection for however long it lasts, whether you find it in a bar, on a train, or seven miles above the Atlantic Ocean.

When it’s done – when you’ve gone your separate ways – use it to feel better about yourself, rather than getting hung up on what might have been. File it away in the ‘fun memories’ folder in your brain, and go click on it whenever you need an ego boost, or just something to make you smile. Most of all, if it happens on a flight just remember this: it was almost certainly better than the movie anyway.

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*That was three days ago – sometimes I write slowly…