As you may have noticed, I've been reading and thinking a lot about storytelling and writing recently. I'm trying to write a love story, so one of the things I'm focussing on is how to show that two people like each other, that they're attracted to one another, that their feelings are growing and changing, and that they love each other. Here are some of my thoughts, just as I'm figuring these things out.
The big, obvious part of that is in the decisions characters make throughout the plot. For example, the climax of a love story typically involves the lovers being separated until one or both makes a sacrifice that allows them to be together. That sacrifice, made purely for selfless reasons and not in the expectation of winning the other person back, shows that one person truly loves the other. Even though it does usually result in the other person being won, the person making the sacrifice can't do it with that intention or it's not a true sacrifice, it's manipulation.
Love stories usually involve characters developing small rituals together, like in-jokes or just parts of their daily routine. For example, in the movie Eurovision: The Story of Fire Saga, the two main characters have a little routine they do when they greet each other. You probably have little rituals, habits, or nicknames between yourself and specific friends or lovers, unique to those relationships. That's what happens when you build a loving (platonic or romantic) relationship with someone. You develop a shared history and language.
There are also 'tie signs', little signals that people give out, intentionally or not, to show their relationship to one another. Say you go to a party, filled with people you don't know. Some people will introduce themselves and outright tell you, e.g., "This is my husband, this is my daughter." But a lot of the time, you won't need to be told. You'll recognise couples by their wedding or engagement rings, or by their body language. For example, they'll stand closer than friends or strangers usually would, or hold hands, or one will have their arm around the other, or they'll use terms of endearment or in-jokes when they speak to each other. Or perhaps they have some sort of verbal shorthand, so they'll be able to have a conversation without needing to say some of it out loud, because they already know.
Actually, the show Chloe is quite interesting there, because the main character will use 'tie signs' usually reserved for friends to imply a closer relationship than exists. For instance, she'll introduce two characters to one another, giving each one the impression she knows the other well. Why would someone be taking charge of the introduction if she's not the hostess and doesn't know either of the people she's introducing well? People don't usually do that.
Flirting and 'chemistry' are quite interesting. Flirting, as far as I can pin down, is about testing the waters. One person knows they would like to explore a more intimate relationship, and they are making small checks to see if the other person would also like that. That greater intimacy might be sex, or it might be a romantic relationship, or even just friendship. I've been googling, but a lot of what I've found is a very broad overview. It'll be a list of body language, or lists of "flirty lines." The former is useful, because body language plays a huge role in flirting, but the latter isn't really how most people flirt. Sure, some people do go up to strangers in a bar and say a line as an opening gambit, but most of the flirting I want to write about isn't that. So, what I've been doing instead is noticing when I realise characters are flirting and trying to figure out why I think that. What did they do that made them sound/seem flirtatious? Most of my examples are from TV shows simply because I can watch more TV in a day than I can read books. There is another reason, which is that TV shows and movies are made by lots of people, not just one, so you'll get a broader range of body language and dialogue. Plus, you then have to figure out how to turn that into words yourself, so you're not at risk of just copying someone else's writing.
There's a moment in Taskmaster (season 6, episode 4) where something Alice Levine said to Russell Howard struck me as oddly flirtatious. To be clear, I am not saying Alice was flirting, and that made it more interesting. What was it about what she said that came across that way? It was during the "have the most fun" task, and Alice Levine's suggestion was that she should mime having a bath while Russell Howard played football. The first thing is that those are quite couple-y things to do, like you could imagine if they were dating they might easily spend an afternoon that way. If someone were intending to be flirtatious and they said that, it would basically be an invitation to roleplay being a couple, to see if the other person might be interested in the idea of actually being a couple. Plus, suggesting you mime having a bath might prompt the other person to think of you having a bath, which is quite an intimate image. Again, I'm not saying this was Alice's intention, I'm saying this is why someone else could say exactly the same thing with the same tone and intend it as flirtatious. I think Alice was just trying to win the task and said the first thing that popped into her head.
There's also a moment at the end of the videogame Shadow Hearts II, where the director uses camera angles to trick us. Normally, when someone is thinking about kissing someone else, their gaze moves in a triangle, from eyes to lips. If you're looking at someone's eyes and lips while slowly moving closer to them, you're thinking of kissing them. I think most of us understand that when it happens, even if we don't think about why we understand that. By this point in the game, one character has made her attraction to another clear, but whether he responds to her feelings is less clear. He's spent most of the game trying to revive his true love who sacrificed herself for him at the end of the first game, so I thought it was obvious he wasn't ready to move on, but I didn't know if the director of the game knew that. Anyway, they trick us with camera angles. The camera focuses on eyes, lips, eyes, lips, making us think that is what the characters are looking at and making us feel like they're about to kiss.
Speaking of kissing, Hitch had it right. You go 90% of the way and wait for the other person to complete the last 10%. That's what flirting is. You put something down and see if the other person picks it up. If they do, great. If not, back off.
The other thing people do when flirting is to slowly invade each other's space. One might ask the other to dance, and, through words and body language and depending on the dance, invite them to hold hands, or place their hands in certain places, or just to be within each other's space in a more intimate way. Each moment is a small invitation, which can be accepted or rejected. It's another little check, another tiny step towards closer intimacy.
In stories, sometimes you can have the hero grab the heroine (or vice versa, or hero/hero or heroine/heroine) rather than invite her. Sometimes that's because you're creating tension between the two in a different way - they're enemies, or they're arguing about something, like in a love-hate or Slap Slap Kiss relationship. Those are all viable options, since romance novels are, by definition, set in a universe where the two main characters are into each other so consent does exist whether or not they check (if it didn't, it would be a horror or a thriller, not a romance, e.g., You), but I'm trying to write a gentler, more realistic kind of flirting.
Where I am with this now is that it doesn't so much matter what your characters say. They might use words to suggest ideas to one another, like how suggesting you pretend to have a bath could be used to prompt someone to picture you in the bath, or they might make an ambiguous statement that the other person could take in a romantic way if they wanted to. But, more important than what they say is what they do. For example, say you're writing in first person or third person restricted, from your heroine's point of view. If you mention that her love interest licked his lips, you've told the reader two things - that the love interest licked his lips and the heroine was looking at his lips when he did. If she notices the colour of his eyes, the fact she's noticed enough to think about it means she was looking at them. The last thing I tried was a scene in which, after every bit of dialogue, one character moved closer to the other or some other bit of body language was noted. I think that was quite successful, in terms of conveying the increasing tension that I was going for.
The other evening, I was flicking through channels and came across the end of Naked Attraction (this is how everyone watches Naked Attraction). That's a TV show in which one person - in this case, a man - comes out on stage to meet six people he might be attracted to - in this case, I think five women and one non-binary person - they might be interested in. Those six are all completely naked and standing in boxes which expose them bit by bit. First, everything below the waist, then everything below the neck. At this point, the person doing the choosing strips off and they're all naked when the faces are finally exposed. Nothing is censored. I am not exaggerating about any of this.
Anyway, by the time the faces are exposed, the chooser has already removed three (I think) of their potential options, leaving three. In the episode I watched (the second half of season 9, episode 1, with tree surgeon Dmitri choosing), I paid attention to the body language. You'd think the nudity would help, but it actually didn't - it was the faces that revealed the most. When the boxes went up and their faces were exposed, that was the first time the options got to see the chooser and one, green, was clearly not into him. I knew that, but how did I know that? I'm pretty sure it's the way her smile faded, from real to fake. Her smile stopped going to her eyes once she saw the guy doing the choosing. There was also the way she gave her reply to his question as if it were a line she'd memorised (which I'm pretty sure they all are) rather than as something she was saying to him. Luckily, Dmitri either picked up on this or was also not that into her, and she was able to leave.
Conversely, another contestant, Kate, was really into Dmitri, or at least that's the vibe I had when I saw her face. Again, how did I know that? I'm not sure. Some of it is that her smile was real, but so was the third contestants' (Lucy), and I didn't get the same vibe from her. I think Katie was more smiley, but that can be personality, not attraction. According to the host, Katie's nipples hardened when she spoke to Dmitri, but I didn't notice that and I think, realistically, most characters won't be outright looking at each other's nipples while flirting.
Dmitri chose Lucy (who had a forked tongue) over Katie, but, Lucy didn't show up for their date and Katie came instead. Apparently, the date is held at 9am the next day. If I hadn't read that, I'd have thought Lucy had started a relationship with someone else and that was why she'd cancelled, because I don't think she was disinterested, even if she wasn't as interested as Katie. Instead, I wonder if Katie and Lucy had a word, and together decided Dmitri had made a mistake and Katie should go instead.
Either way, after their date - in which both Dmitri and Katie showed interested body language - we got another update, a few weeks later. In this one, their body language was totally different. They sat on a sofa together, but Katie perched right on the edge, sitting on as little of the sofa as possible. Her body - knees, feet, hands, etc - all pointed away from him. Her entire body was signalling discomfort and a desire to escape. The relationship had fizzled out because, reading between the lines, he'd realised she was looking for a relationship while he was only interested in sex. He did "jokingly" suggest they have sex anyway - a "joking" suggestion being another way of testing the waters while flirting, since the other person could choose to take it seriously if they want or they can both pretend it's a joke if they don't - and she turned him down.
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