Edits I Made to My Flirting Style After Three Weeks in Marseille

Three weeks in Marseille is long enough to see patterns in your own behavior, the way a long manuscript reveals its author's favorite crutch words. Mine, it turns out, are sorry, no worries, and the phrase if that is okay, used as punctuation. I have decided to strike all three. Let the record show that I tracked these changes in the margins of my head.

First edit: cut the apologetic opening. In my first week I began every conversation with a man at a bar with a slight flinch, as though asking permission to be present. In the second, a fishmonger named Luc told me, kindly, that I was allowed to enter a room before introducing myself. I have been entering rooms ever since.

First edit: cut the apologetic opening.

Second edit: shorten the sentences. Flirting is not a subordinate clause. A woman at a cafe near the Panier taught me this without meaning to, answering a man's long compliment with a single raised eyebrow and the word really. He never recovered. I took notes. The eyebrow, I should add, is the one cosmetic upgrade I have fully mastered.

Third edit, and the one I am proudest of: leave a gap. In Lisbon I filled every silence with a joke. In Marseille I practiced letting a pause sit between me and a man at a harbor restaurant, with the sea doing most of the talking. He leaned in, as people do toward a pause. I smiled, said nothing clever, and the evening improved by about forty percent. I may have invented that number.

What I am keeping: the laugh, which arrives uninvited and cannot be edited, and the habit of enjoying the attention without apologizing for it. If you like a heroine who takes control of a slow evening, Hannah's library confession on TheFriend is a lovely study in pacing. She cuts exactly what needs cutting.

Meet Hannah: open Hannah's profile on TheFriend.