Warning Signs a Walrus Is Flirting With You
There are, in fact, warning signs a walrus is flirting with you, and by the time you notice them it is legally and emotionally too late.
A walrus does not do subtle.
A walrus flirts the way a fridge falls down the stairs: loudly, slowly, and with tremendous follow-through.
So if a 3,000-pound bachelor with two swords in his face has decided you’re the one, you deserve a heads-up before he clears his schedule for the next fifteen months.
Meet your suitor: 3,000 pounds of pure confidence
Understand the animal courting you.
A Pacific bull can weigh more than 4,400 pounds, which is roughly one and a half of your worst ex stacked on top of each other.
He has no job, no hobbies, and a body count of clams that would make a serial killer sit down.
He has been single since the last ice age, and he is ready to mingle, aggressively, in your general direction.
This is not a man with a rich inner life.
This is a mustache that gained sentience and a gym membership.
Warning sign one: he starts singing to you from the water
The first of the warning signs a walrus is flirting with you is auditory, and it is unhinged.
Male walruses produce bell-like sounds underwater during courtship using air sacs in their throat.
Read that again.
He is submerging himself to serenade you with the noise of a doorbell being molested.
This is his mixtape.
This is him standing outside your window with a boombox, except the boombox is inside his neck and the song is “ding dong” performed by a haunted furnace.
If a walrus is going “bonk bonk bloop” at you from six feet under, congratulations, you are being wooed by a beatboxing furniture set.
He whips out the tusks (calm down)
A walrus flexes the only way he knows how.
Tusks are how walruses establish dominance and settle beef, and the biggest tusks belong to the biggest, angriest bulls.
So when he starts brandishing two feet of ivory in your direction, that’s not a threat.
That’s his LinkedIn.
He is showing you his résumé, his salary, and his ability to open a beer bottle without a bottle opener.
Human men send a shirtless mirror selfie.
A walrus sends two enormous teeth and a look that says “I have never once flossed and I never will.”
If you flinch, he takes it as playing hard to get.
Warning sign three: the nuzzle-roll-grab combo
Now it gets handsy.
Documented walrus courtship escalates through nuzzles, rolls, holds, and grabs, in roughly that order, like a very wet, very illegal salsa lesson.
The nuzzle is the “you up?” text.
The roll is him showing off, spinning around like a rotisserie chicken trying to look effortless.
The hold is when he decides personal space is a myth invented by seals.
And the grab is when your calendar clears itself, your family stops calling, and a documentary crew appears out of nowhere.
If a walrus nuzzles you, you have about eleven seconds to remember you left the oven on.
He puffs up his throat pillow
Walruses have air sacs in their throats that inflate like pillows with up to 50 litres of air.
Normally this lets him sleep vertically in the ocean like a chubby bath toy.
During flirting, it becomes a chest puff.
He inflates his neck into a bouncy castle to look bigger, sexier, and more like a man who owns a boat.
It is the exact energy of a guy sucking in his gut for an entire dinner date.
Except the walrus inflates so hard he could survive a plane crash.
If your suitor’s throat swells up like a whoopee cushion with dreams, that pillow is not for you.
That pillow is a promise.
Warning sign five: the whiskers get to work
A walrus has hundreds of whiskers so sensitive he can find a clam on a pitch-black sea floor by feel alone.
Let that marinate.
This creature was engineered by nature to locate soft, unsuspecting things in the dark and vacuum them out of their protective shell.
When those whiskers start twitching in your direction, he is not admiring your outfit.
He is reading you like a clam menu.
His entire face is a metal detector for intimacy, and it just went off.
Frankly it’s more attentive than most people you’ve dated, which says less about the walrus and more about you.
He blushes (yes, really)
Old male walruses turn pink as they age, especially the big confident ones sunbathing with their whole personality out.
So if a giant blushing marshmallow the color of undercooked ham rolls over to you, understand what that means.
He is flustered.
You made a 4,000-pound apex blob turn the color of a valentine, and he is doing his best.
It’s honestly the most romance you’ll get all decade, and it’s from something that eats forty pounds of shellfish before noon.
The clingy herd energy
Walruses are extremely social and hate being alone, piling onto each other by the hundreds like a group chat that refuses to leave you on read.
A flirting walrus brings this energy directly to your life.
He will lie on you.
He will lie near you.
He will introduce you to 600 of his closest, sweatiest friends and expect you to remember all their names.
This is not a low-maintenance love interest.
This is a barnacle with abandonment issues and a body temperature.
The actual red flags (run, don’t waddle)
Some signs cross the line from “flattering” to “call somebody.”
Pay attention if he starts doing any of the following:
- Fighting other walruses over you, which he absolutely will, because bulls brawl for mates from January through March and take it personally.
- Bringing you a clam. That’s dinner. That’s a proposal. That’s a mortgage.
- Following you onto land, where he can gallop as fast as a running human, so no, you cannot jog away from your problems this time.
- Getting startled. A spooked walrus can stampede and flatten its own friends, so a nervous suitor is a liability at parties.
And one biological detail nobody warns you about.
The walrus has the largest penis bone of any land mammal, roughly two feet long.
He’s bringing a baguette to the table and it is load-bearing.
That’s not a fun fact.
That’s a warning label.
So what do you do?
You be honest with him, that’s what.
Look that magnificent blubbery Casanova in his two beautiful whiskery eyes and tell him the truth.
You’re a human, he’s a walrus, and long distance never works when one of you eats clams off the ocean floor.
Then maybe give him a clam back, out of respect.
He fought three rivals, sang you a doorbell solo, blushed himself into a ham, and puffed his neck into a beanbag for your attention.
That’s more effort than the last four people who ghosted you.
Set your standards, in other words, somewhere just below “tusked” and just above “singing furniture.”
