Want Her To Notice You? These 5 Things Are Proven To Increase Her Interest

 

This article is based on the studies collected on Eric Barker's blog, Barking Up The Wrong Tree. Join Eric Barker's 45K+ readers and get a free weekly update via email here.

You're a pretty good guy. You don't have too much trouble getting people to like you, you're easygoing and you don't have to beg to get a date.

Still, if you really want to make an impression on someone (and hopefully do away with your mate's lingering story of you as 'the guy who drank too much at last year's Christmas party and took his trousers off'), read on.

From showing your crush you're interested first (yes, that's what we said) to making her laugh, here are five tips scientifically proven to increase your crush's interest in you. After reading, you'll be well prepared to be your most charming self at the Christmas parties ahead (just make sure this time you remember to keep your trousers on... at least during the party).

5. Do Exciting Things Together
Research shows we don’t really fall in love with a person -- we fall in love with how we feel when we’re with them. This is best demonstrated by the concept of emotional contagion: we’re bad at telling what made us feel a certain way, but good at making associations. Feeling excited, stimulated and aroused is often associated with the people around us, even if they’re not the cause.

This can be taken to extremes: having someone try to kill you can actually make you more attracted to them, according to The Heart of Social Psychology: A Backstage View of a Passionate Science.

Some might find the notion that we’re just 'feeling junkies' un-romantic, but doing exciting things together can save relationships and prevent divorce -- and majorly increase interest. Doing things that excite us or get our adrenaline going (something risky like rock climbing or riding a roller coaster or even jogging -- anything where your heart rate increases) will make you (and the people you're with) feel closer. And more aroused. Boom -- you're on your way to piquing her interest.

4. Be Conscientious & Thoughtful
Conscientiousness, or the state of being attentive, thoughtful and having a desire to follow-through or do a task well, is predictive of a number of very important positive elements in life. Conscientious people make better spouses and parents -- but non-conscientious people have more sex partners. The former invest in quality, and it seems like the latter make up the difference in, well, volume.

Want to be the person she wants to settle down with? Make sure you're... you guessed it -- conscientious. That’s marriage material, chaps. Via Mating Intelligence Unleashed: The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating, and Love: Researchers reported that in a sample of 545 people, men (but not women) with low levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness tended to have a higher number of sexual partners. It has also been found cross-culturally, across 10 world regions, that low levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness are related to higher levels of sexual promiscuity and relationship infidelity, so there may be reproductive benefits to those on the low end of these traits.

3. Talk About Something Personal
Random conversation with someone you’re interested in can be a bad idea. Why? What you talk about can matter -- a lot. Emotional, personal information exchange promotes powerful feelings of connection.

Via Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is interested in how people form romantic relationships, and he’s come up with an ingenious way of taking men and women who have never met before and making them feel close to one another. Given that he has just an hour or so to create the intimacy levels that typically take weeks, months, or years to form, he accelerated the getting-to-know-you process through a set of 36 questions (read them here).

How effective is it? In under an hour it can create a connection stronger than a lifelong friendship. Via Click: The Magic of Instant Connections: What he found was striking. The intensity of the dialogue partners’ bond at the end of the 45 minute vulnerability interaction was rated as closer than the closest relationship in the lives of 30 percent of similar students. In other words, the instant connections were more powerful than many long-term, even lifelong relationships. (You can read the most effective things to discuss here.)

That said, if you're only looking for a quickie, don’t get so nervous about what you'll say that you can't speak… When a woman is very attracted to a man, whether his opening line is good or not doesn’t matter at all. Via Mating Intelligence Unleashed: The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating, and Love: When women are looking for a short-term fling, however, it may be a different story. One study conducted on college students found that women favoured men for a short-term fling if they found the men attractive regardless of the content of their pickup lines.

2. Let Her Know You're Interested
Want to increase someone’s interest in you? Might be worthwhile to make sure they find out you’re interested in them. Via How to Make Someone Fall in Love With You in 90 Minutes or Less: A subjects’ expectation that the other person was going to like them had a huge effect. “If you ask people about their experience of falling in love, over 90 percent will say that a major factor was discovering that the other person liked them,” according to Dr. Arthur Aron, head researcher of the experiment at the University of California.

This idea is affirmed by studying the effectiveness of 'playing hard to get'. What’s the best way to play that game? Establish that you’re hard to get in general -- but very enthusiastic about the person you’re with. Via Richard Wiseman’s excellent book 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute: As a result of the interviews, the researchers speculated that the best strategy would be to give a potential date the impression that in general you were hard to get (and therefore a scarce resource worth having) but really enthusiastic about him or her specifically. They tested this notion by using some of the same techniques… and found overwhelming evidence to support their hypothesis.

1. Make Her Laugh
Humor is attractive to men and women -- but not in the same way. The research shows women like men who make them laugh, and men like women who laugh at their jokes.

Via Mating Intelligence Unleashed: The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating, and Love: Recent research suggests that while both men and women say they like a “good sense of humor” in a potential mate, they differ in what they mean by this phrase. Women tend to prefer men who make them laugh, whereas men tend to prefer women who laugh at their jokes.

Consistent with this, Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, analysed more than 3,000 singles ads and found that women were more likely to describe their good humor appreciation ability whereas men were more likely to offer good humor production ability.

Why is humor sexy? Funny people are smart, and smart is sexy. Researchers Gil Greengross and Geoffrey Miller found in a sample of 400 university students that general intelligence and verbal intelligence both predicted humor production ability (see the study here), which in turn predicted lifetime number of sexual partners (a proxy of reproductive success). They found, however, that males showed higher average levels of humor production ability, which is consistent with the sexual selection perspective. From these results, Greengross argues that a sense of humor evolved at least partly through sexual selection as an intelligence indicator.

So ladies can boost their attractiveness by chuckling a bit more. And guys, you can garner more attention by learning how to make women laugh. Via Mating Intelligence Unleashed: The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating, and Love: Men in the 'humour' condition received phone numbers from 42.9% of the female participants and were refused 57.1% of the time. In comparison, men in the 'no humour' condition were refused 84.6% of the time and were only accepted 15.4% of the time. In other words, men who were observed as the humor producers of the group were nearly three times as likely to receive a phone number than those who were observed as laughing at a friend’s joke instead.