Jeff: You saw Iron Man 3, you went alone?

Me: No didn’t go alone.

Jeff: Oh that’s good. Had a group of people eh. How did you like it?

Me: It was a date. I loved the movie!! And you’re so coy. “Oh a group of people eh.”

That was the text message conversation with my friend Jeff. He obviously wanted more information from me but wouldn’t ask me directly. That’s why I called him out for being coy.

“Playing coy” is one personality trait I’ve been slowly removing from my own behavior.

What is “playing coy?”

There are several versions.

1. Let’s say you’re having a conversation with someone you’re kind of attracted to or with whom you kind of want more than a simple friendship.

“I love the view from the patio here,” you say, gazing at the mountains.

“Oh I think the view I see right now is great too,” he or she says, but is gazing at you.

You reply, “But you’re not even looking at the mountains.”

You have just “played coy.” You know exactly what he/ she was intimating. It doesn’t matter if he or she was sincerely dazzled by your good looks or personality or was merely being an empty flatterer. The point is that you were being coy.

2. Another coy scenario is one that I already alluded to. That scenario involves asking a question but not really asking the question you want to ask.

Jeff’s query to me about who went with me for the movie is a perfect example.

I think of the scene from the 1986 movie Three Amigos. The three amigos played by Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, and Martin Short have infiltrated the mission hideout of the infamous El Guapo. Chase’s character Dusty Bottoms is disguised as one of the henchmen. He’s forced to lead El Guapo through the conversation in order to keep his true idenity hidden.

The pattern of speech is one reason I think of the scene. Dusty has to haltingly feed El Guapo words as the bad guy struggles to remember who he is and what they’ve done together.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=H4O0NIjBHJs&NR=1

Why do we play coy? In Jeff’s case, he was curious about what I was up to but preferred to ask me in a roundabout way. Perhaps he doesn’t want to reveal his reason for asking me about my private life. Maybe Jeff has a crush on me, maybe Jeff has a crush on the man he thinks went with me to the movie, maybe he doesn’t agree morally with dating and is giving me the chance to cover my tracks.

In the case of pretending we don’t understand someone’s actual meaning when he or she says something, there are several reasons we do that.

Insecurity is one reason. We want to hear the person say directly, “I’m looking at you and you are god’s vision of beauty.” Or insecurity makes us not want to hear the person say “I’m looking at you and you are god’s vision of beauty.”

Because I’m learning to trust my intution more often, it’s a waste of time for me to play games.

I will be direct with you as well. For better or worse.