There’s Nothing Wrong With Some Harmless Flirting (Wink, Wink)

It began innocently enough.

The happily married woman was going for a bike ride. She slipped off her wedding ring because her hands were swelling. Then, while gliding along in the dappled sunlight, it happened.

“For the first time in years, a man smiled at me as he was going by,” said the woman, a 41-year-old Santa Monica screenwriter. “Then another man smiled at me. I have no idea if it was because I didn’t have my ring on, but now I take it off to get that thrill.”

And she recommends the ploy to all her married girlfriends.

Safe flirting, playful boy-girl stuff not intended to land an invitation, is something happily married women do all the time. Flirting is the FDA stamp of babeability, proof of value in the mating marketplace.

Mind you, this is not brazen flirting, like lifting a jacket to reveal a thong or licking the lips. It can be just like normal behavior, except that it’s not. Like graciously offering water to the really sweaty, really hunky painters. Or situating yourself near the incredibly handsome dad of the boy on your kid’s soccer team. As one flirtatious married man so aptly proclaimed, “Hey, I’m married, not dead.”

“We are meant to be hormonal creatures,” said Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and co-author of “The Great Sex Weekend” (Putnam, 1997). “We are not like bees where we mate once and die. . . . You have to be careful flirtatiousness is not mistaken for a promise. But people should be allowed to smile with a wicked glint in their eye without being confronted with an invitation. And if someone admires you as an attractive person, you bring that home to your mate.”

Nicole Gregory, a 46-year-old Van Nuys mother of one, was thrilled to discover a strange man quite obviously flirting with her in the grocery store. She kept running into him and he kept talking to her and she liked it.

“I thought, ‘Oh, I’m flirtable,’ ” gushed Gregory. Like so many married women with small children, Gregory felt that motherhood had banished her from the collective male radar. “I was so pleased someone was flirting with me. It was a nice ego boost. I told my husband about it.”

The flirting need not even be sincere. Jennifer Synnott, 32, always parks near the valet guy at her office building because he is a reliable flirt.

“He says, ‘Hello,’ and smiles,” said Synnott. “I smile back and say, ‘How are you?’ He will say, ‘Great, now that I saw you.’ I know it is just a line, but I always park near him. It’s ‘Feed me that line one more time, honey.’ ”

Some flirting is unconscious. When someone achingly good-looking walks in, smoothing your dress, primping or glancing up, then away is as reflexive as a quickening pulse and pounding heart.

The subconscious aside, most women know when they are flirting, according to one study of college women. And sometimes they flirt for a very old-fashioned reason: to get something from men.

“I got lots of attention and really good service,” said Betsy Moore, 32, a married mother of two, who swears she never wears makeup, after she applied red lipstick before taking her car to the mechanic. All the mechanics abandoned cars they’d been working on to repair hers. For free.

Ultimately, said Schwartz, flirting is a healthy reminder that we are sexual beings. And, she said, it stays healthy as long as it doesn’t cross over into “My husband doesn’t come home on Wednesdays.”

“Just the other day, I overhear these two women, both married, one very pregnant, say they find any reason to go to this grocery store where these two young Italian men always make some swell flattering statement,” said Schwartz. “These women just love to go and get that little charge when they buy their toothpaste,” she said. “It’s better than fluoride.”

Birds & Bees is a weekly column on relationships and sexuality. Kathleen Kelleher can be reached via e-mail at kellehr@gte.net.