The Greatest Near-Miss of All Because No One Was Willing To Admit They Were In Love

An insightful post from the Australian journalist Rachel Hills today, addressing what she perceives to be a trend in ‘Australian courtship’ - in essence, the maintenance of ‘plausible deniability’:

There is no need to ever acknowledge that once upon a time I liked you or you liked me. That she discreetly pretended not to notice the night he tried to kiss her, that he meant something more than ‘thank you’ by that bunch of flowers, or that perhaps she went a little overboard with the SMSes. Perpetual ambiguity allows everything to continue as it did before.

And as a strategy, it makes sense - what does Australian courtship mean, after all, if not always being able to say, “What do you mean, I was hitting on you? I was just being friendly!”

It’s not just happening in Australia, of course - I’ve witnessed this happened in the US, Canada and UK as well, as we’ve enjoyed the cultural shift in which men and women are allowed to hang out as friends as well as potential lovers, leading to what I define in Himglish and Femalese as the ambigudate. This can be a good thing, in that it can permit people to feel out the water of romance without making a commitment and feeling, therefore, that failed romance prevents the flowering of what could be a perfectly lovely friendship.

But ambigudating can also be quite a bad thing, for all too often ‘What do you mean, I was hitting on you?’ can bleed into ‘What do you mean, I was cheating on you? OK, so we’ve been sleeping together almost every night, but that doesn’t mean we were anything more than friends’. That plausible deniability or ambiguity reigns supreme in the nascent days of romance as the cool approach to take means that all too often people are afraid to say how they feel. At best, this can lead to something that could have been The Greatest Love of All becoming The Greatest Near-Miss of All Because No One Was Willing To Admit They Were In Love; at worst, this can end in a lot of tears when it turns out what one person thought was a relationship apparently meant little to the other person because they never talked about it.

In other words? Plausible deniability is all very well if you are happy for things to remain ambiguous, but if you want a relationship with someone and find yourself incapable of communicating that clearly to them - because of fear, because of shyness, whatever - then I am sorry to say that it may well be a sign that it just ain’t gonna work out.