“Consent should never be assumed. Chemistry should never need subtitles.” Azalea Tailor

There was a time in life when I didn’t have to vet everything that came out of my mouth for risk of offending someone. Men and women flirted freely, a compliment could simply be a compliment, and human interaction didn’t come with quite so many terms and conditions attached. I’m not entirely sure when that changed, but over the last decade or two we seem to have moved into a permission-based culture. I understand why, some of those boundaries desperately needed redrawing. But somewhere between men shouldn’t assume and men need to ask, I think we’ve made the conversation around desire far more binary than desire needs to be.

By now you know, I’m fuelled by lived experiences and a very interesting conversation with a man recently did just that. It made me question whether modern dating has finally managed to make one of the most beautiful forms of engagement unnecessarily complicated. It started with him asking me a question and ended with my libido wanting to quietly pack a small overnight bag, call an Uber and leave.

“Can I ask you something?” he casually asked. Oh God, my spidey senses started to tingle. I don’t know about you, but nothing remotely sexy has ever followed “Can I ask you something?” It has the same erotic energy as “Can we have a quick chat?” or “I’ve been meaning to say something.” Your body doesn’t lean in. It braces for impact.

“When do I get to kiss you?” Sorry, what? Not whether. Apparently, the kiss had already been approved by a committee I didn’t remember sitting on and we were simply experiencing a minor scheduling issue. The unfortunate answer was never.

Now, before anybody starts furiously typing that permission is a must and consent is important, yes yes, I know. Of course it bloody is. I’m not suggesting men should start grabbing women by the face and hoping for the best (although with the right man, that’s sexy as hell) just because I declared asking permission unsexy. Nobody needs that headline, least of all me. But consent comes in many forms, and this particular encounter got me thinking about what each of them actually looks like when you take them out of the textbook and put them into real life.

Informed consent, where you’re given all the facts before deciding what you’re agreeing to. So, here are the facts: I’d spent an hour and a half with you, in Costa Coffee, in broad daylight, trying to engage in conversation while children were running around like uncaged animals. Does that put me in the mood to want to kiss you? No, no it does not. I don’t even drink coffee.

Then there’s implicit consent, communicated through behaviour rather than a formal yes, which brings me to a rather significant problem, in this particular situation anyway. There had been no lingering eye contact. No accidental-not-accidental touching. No inching closer. No moment where the conversation stopped because suddenly neither of you were particularly interested in talking anymore. None of those delicious little shifts where you both know something has changed and the space between you suddenly feels much smaller than it did five minutes ago.

Nothing I had done suggested I wanted his mouth anywhere near mine. He hadn’t interrupted a moment between us by asking when he could kiss me, he’d invented one. And no wording was going to make that sexy because the problem wasn’t really the question. The problem was that nothing had happened between us to make the question make sense. So when he asked when he got to kiss me, my first thought wasn’t how respectful. It was have you not been paying attention, were we even on the same date?

We talked about it afterwards, because apparently nothing spices up an evening quite like a post-mortem into why someone didn’t want to be kissed, and he said something that made me stop taking the piss for approximately thirty seconds. “In this day and age, permission is a must.” Bugger. Because I heard him. More annoyingly, I understood exactly what he meant. Men are being told, quite rightly, that they shouldn’t assume access to a woman’s body. Friendliness, a date or accepting dinner isn’t consent. Attraction on his side certainly isn’t consent on hers. We needed that conversation and I have absolutely no desire to roll any of it backwards.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said afterwards, partly because there was an irony neither of us seemed to notice at the time. If permission really is a must, “When do I get to kiss you?” doesn’t actually ask for it. It skips straight past whether I want to be kissed and asks when he can collect.

Because I stand by this: no self-respecting woman wants to hear “Can I kiss you?” like we’re twelve and somebody dared you to kiss her behind the bike sheds. And “When do I get to kiss you?” is even worse, because you haven’t actually asked me anything about what I want. You’ve assumed the kiss is happening and apparently we’re now trying to find a mutually convenient appointment.

Try changing your narrative to something like: “I really want to kiss you.” Now you have my attention. Those six words do something entirely different. You’ve told me what you want without telling me what I want. You’ve expressed desire without assuming access and, crucially, created the space for me to give you my consent or not. That isn’t the same as asking permission like you’re waiting for someone to stamp a form. You’ve put your desire into the room and left me completely free to show you mine.

All of a sudden explicit consent has entered the room without seduction having to leave it. I can tell you I want you too. I can move closer. I can kiss you myself. I can smile and pull you towards me. Or I can make it very clear that absolutely none of the above will be happening tonight, or any other night for that matter. You’ve expressed what you want and given me the freedom to respond with whatever my version of yes or no looks like.

And before you think I’ve appointed myself Minister for Kissing and issued national guidelines based entirely on what turns me on and off, it’s not one size fits all. Every woman communicates desire differently. Some women are bold. Some are shy. Some flirt shamelessly. Some become quieter around someone they find genuinely attractive, clearly I don’t fit into the latter ;-).

A naturally tactile woman whose love language is touch may go around touching everyone, so touching your arm means nothing. While a woman who rarely touches anyone might have just screamed “I want you” without saying a word. There isn’t a universal checklist where three seconds of eye contact plus one hair flick and a hand on your knee earns you a kiss. Consent isn’t a points system. Pay attention to the woman in front of you and learn how she communicates desire.

With me, admittedly, you’d have to be spectacularly unobservant to miss it. I’m not a wallflower. If I want you to kiss me, I will make my attraction known. I’ll flirt. I’ll hold your gaze. I’ll touch you. I’ll move closer. I’ll probably look at your mouth in a way that makes plausible deniability increasingly difficult. You won’t need a Ouija board, three close friends and a degree in female body language to work out whether I fancy you.

But another woman’s yes may be quieter than mine. That doesn’t make it less real. It means you need to pay attention to her, rather than memorise a collection of supposed female signals and start ticking boxes until you think you’ve accumulated enough points for a kiss. Because there’s a world of difference between reading the woman in front of you and deciding you’ve earned access to her because she laughed at one of your jokes.

One is assumption. The other is chemistry. And yes, chemistry can be misread. Confidence can look like flirting. Friendliness can get mistaken for attraction. Attraction can disappear beneath nerves. Two people can spend an entire evening wanting each other and both go home convinced the other wasn’t interested because apparently evolution occasionally enjoys a laugh.

Human beings are messy. Desire is messy. There isn’t a rule that removes every ounce of uncertainty from intimacy, so why are we trying to create one? What we can do is pay attention, not just to the absence of a no, but to the presence of a yes. Enthusiasm. Reciprocity. Interest. Whether the person in front of us is moving towards the moment with us or whether we’re dragging the possibility into a room where it wasn’t previously invited.

For me, seduction has always lived in that reciprocity. The look that gets returned. The touch that lingers because neither person wants to move first. The conversation that changes temperature. The tiny closing of space where you both know exactly what’s happening and nobody has had to issue a bloody meeting request.

Yes, I want a man who respects boundaries. But I also want a man with enough confidence, awareness and sexual intelligence to notice when I’m inviting him closer, and enough emotional intelligence to notice when I’m very definitely not. I don’t think those things contradict each other. In fact, the ability to pay attention to a woman is part of what makes a man safe enough for her to want in the first place.

Maybe that’s why his comment “In this day and age, permission is a must” stayed with me. He was right about the principle. I just think we’ve started confusing permission with needing a permission slip. Because “I really want to kiss you” and “Can I kiss you?” both leave me with no confusion as to your intentions. Both tell me exactly what you want. But one asks me to make the moment happen by granting permission. The other tells me what you want and gives me the space to show you whether I want it too. One expresses desire and creates the space for me to consent to it. The other makes me feel like I should sign a waiver.

And yes, maybe that distinction is subjective. Desire always is. What makes one woman weak at the knees will make another suddenly remember she needs to put the bins out. There is no universal script for seduction because there is no universal woman. Which is precisely why paying attention will always beat following one.

We absolutely needed to get better at consent. I just hope we don’t get so good at asking permission that we forget how to create something worth saying yes to. 💋