Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Get someone to fall in love with you
RELATIONSHIP expert Tracey Cox says that around 28% of women and 48% of men say they fell in love at first sight, while the rest clearly are open to persuasion. While there is no magic potion, she believes there are five good suggestions based on science which work well at the start of a relationship:
The more you interact with someone, the more they’ll like you, says David Lieberman, a US expert in human behaviour.
Several reputable studies show repeated exposure to practically any stimulus makes us like it more.
So forget about being all aloof, evasive and unavailable when you first meet someone you fancy: they’ll just write you off as arrogant and cold and that will be that. Instead, find loads of excuses to spend time with them until you’re convinced you’ve won them over… then start being a little less available.
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Once you’re satisfied they think you’re nice, now start seeing them a little less and less – until they hardly see you at all.
This is the Scarcity Principle: people value and desire something more when it’s rare or difficult to obtain.
It’s obvious really: if piles of diamonds suddenly appeared all over the pavement, we’d no longer covet them.
The Scarcity Principle is why ‘only one left’ marketing ploys make us stop and consider buying something we don’t even really want. We’re the same with people.
You may have heard of the ‘closing-time experiment’. Researchers wanted to test the old adage that everyone looks a lot more attractive just as the bar or club is about to close.
Some of this is due to alcohol: the more we drink, the more attractive others appear to be, but even those who were not drunk found others more attractive as closing time approached simply because time was limited and there were fewer people in the bar to choose from.
If you do something nice for someone, it makes you feel good on two levels.
You feel pleased with yourself (‘Aren’t I a nice person for making them feel special!’) and extra-warm towards the person you’ve just spoilt.
To justify the effort or expense, we often over idealise how wonderful they are to deserve it. End result: we like the person more.
When someone does something nice for us, we’re pleased. But there are a whole lot of other emotions that come into play – and they’re not all good. Sometimes we feel overwhelmed – there’s pressure to live up to being the wonderful person who inspired such a gift/ act, not to mention pressure to return the favour.
It’s all even trickier if the ‘nice thing’ comes from someone you quite fancy but aren’t sure about yet.
When we’re infatuated with someone, we’re desperate to do nice things for them.
Truth is, you’re much better off asking them to do you a favour or letting them spoil you.
Harvard psychologist
Zick Rubin set out to see if you could measure love scientifically and achieved it by recording the amount of time lovers spent staring at each other.
He discovered that couples who are deeply in love look at each other 75% of the time when talking and are slower to look away when someone else dares to intrude.
In normal conversation, people look at each other between 30 and 60% of the time.
The significance of what’s now known as Rubin’s Scale is obvious: it’s possible to tell how ‘in love’ people are by measuring the amount of time they spend gazing adoringly at each other.
Some psychologists still use it during counselling to work out how much affection couples feel for each other.
It also happens to be remarkably handy information if you want to make someone fall in love with you.
If you look at someone you fancy 75% of the time when they’re talking to you, you trick their brain. The brain knows the last time someone looked at them that long and often, it meant they were in love.
So it thinks, okay, they’re obviously in love with this person as well, and starts to release phenylethylamine (PEA).
PEA is the chemical cousin to amphetamines and it’s secreted by the nervous system when we first fall in love. It is what makes your palms sweat, your tummy flip over and your heart race.
The more PEA the person you fancy has pumping through their bloodstream, the more likely they are to fall in love with you.
While you can’t honestly force someone to adore you if they’re not remotely interested, it is entirely possible to kickstart the production of PEA using this technique.
Give someone the sensation of feeling in love whenever they’re with you and it’s not such a huge leap of logic for them to decide they are.
We all know ‘bedroom eyes’ when we see them: it’s the look of lust. There’s just one thing you need to get bedroom eyes: big pupils. According to pupillometrics, the science of pupil study, this is the crucial element we respond to.
You can’t consciously control your pupils (one reason why people say the eyes don’t lie) but you can create the right conditions to inspire large pupils and get the effect.
First, reduce light. Our pupils expand when they’re robbed of it, one reason why candlelight and dimmer switches are de rigueur in romantic restaurants.
It’s not just the softening of light which makes our faces appear more attractive, larger pupils also help.
Scientists showed two sets of pictures of a woman’s face to men. The photograph was identical, except for one thing: the pupils in one set had been doctored to make them larger.
When shown the doctored photograph, men judged the woman as twice more attractive than when shown the real photo. Our pupils also enlarge when we look at something we like.
Again, this can be proved scientifically using pictures. This time, researchers snuck a picture of a naked woman into a pile of otherwise bland, commonplace photographs then watched men’s pupil size when they flicked through.
Without exception, the men’s pupils expanded on cue. This means if you fancy someone a lot, your pupils are probably already big, black holes. – Daily Mail