Is there any harm in flirting or is it all just harmless fun? If you’re married, it depends.
Flirting with your spouse is not only fun, it’s a highly recommended way to increase the romance and intimacy in your relationship and keep things from getting stale. Flirting with anyone other than your spouse is an absolute no. As in, it’s never ok.
Some of you won’t like that, but I’m not trying to make friends here. I’m trying to save, heal, and restore marriages, and that requires some straight talk. Just because something is passed off as “normal” doesn’t make it right, and saying “everybody does it” is not only a cop-out, it isn’t even true.
The question you should be asking is, “How does my spouse feel about it?” More pointedly, “How would my spouse feel if he or she could see me right now flirting with someone else?” The reason I ask that second question is that people in relationships that are less than what they should be often don’t tell the truth, even to each other. It’s not uncommon for someone to say, “My wife/husband doesn’t care if I flirt,” when the truth is, there isn’t enough trust or intimacy there for the other person to feel that he or she can tell the truth about how it makes him or her feel.
The bottom line is, you can either love your spouse the way he or she was meant to be loved, or you can be selfish and not experience the type of fulfillment that a great marriage brings. You really can’t have it both ways.
If you want a happy, fulfilling marriage, your actions – all of them – have to be motivated by love. Love is something you make. Love is something you do, and if you do it right, your spouse will know that there is no one else on your mind or in your heart. A person with that level of security will open up and show you the kind of love in return that makes playing games with anyone else utterly unappealing.
Does a little “harmless” flirting hurt anything? You bet it does. It hurts the one you’re supposed to love, and it hurts yourself by working against the very thing you should want the most; a marriage characterized by closeness and outward expressions of love for one another.
The Restoration Tour 