Being in love is practically indescribable and utterly unmistakable. The heart flutters, the constantly thinking-about-them, the rush when they call or text or you see them (mega rush). You often find yourself speechless when trying to describe your feelings and gush endlessly about how amazing your sweetie is. “Objective” is not a term that comes to mind.
Yet being objective can be extremely helpful in learning the science behind falling in love. How does a guy get a girl to fall in love with him, and what’s going on behind the scenes that makes all of those butterfly-bellied, jelly-legged, starry-eyed moments happen? Social science and hard science combine to bring you the ultimate guide to making her fall in love with you.
Actualized.org’s Leo brings a boatload of tried-and-true field research to the table in this video on getting a girl to fall in love with you. The TL;DW boils down to this: do. Everything. Except for being clingy or needy. Contrary to popular belief, girls do not want guys who are clingy or needy, or who make them the center of their universe. Girls want guys who have their own lives, who are decision-makers, and who invite adventure and excitement into their lives.
What Leo really describes is how to get a girl to become attracted and stay attracted to you. So here’s how, guys:
1. Personality attracts women, not looks. Hey, guys who get too hung up on your imperfections: you’re doing it wrong. Get your awesome, unique personality shining and we won’t be checking out any of those imperfections anyway. The opposite is also true: if you’re boring and have nothing interesting to say, then we’ll start picking up on the imperfections. Because at this point we’re already bored and disinterested, and now we’re going to be on the lookout for flaws.
2. Women enjoy a wide range of emotions and men who can tune into us emotionally and do things that elicit those emotions are more attractive than men who don’t…even if they’re the “bad” emotions like anger, jealousy, etc. Shake up our world a little bit. You’re more interesting that way.
3. Women love sex but it takes a lot more to get us stimulated than it does to get you stimulated. You’re going to have to slow way down, take it easy, and focus…on…us. Leo’s contention is that you should be giving your lady at least five orgasms a night: personally, to me that sounds impossible. Maybe I need to seek out guys who’ll try harder.
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And finally, once you do attract us, don’t stop doing all of the stuff that attracted us in the first place. You need to keep doing all of that cool stuff and keeping us engaged so we don’t get bored with you and look elsewhere. After we’ve been attracted to you for long enough, the likelihood is that we’ll fall in love with you.
So this all sounds cool, but is it backed up by hard science? The answer is an emphatic yes. Thanks to the spectacular technology of magnetic resonance imaging we know that the brain of a person in love looks a lot like the brain of a person on cocaine: their pleasure threshold is lowered so it actually takes less stimulation to make them feel just as happy, and pain and aversion centers in the brain are firing less, so things that would usually bother a person don’t really get to them when they’re in love.
Also, because the pleasure center threshold is lowered, anything that increases pleasure is felt even more acutely. Furthermore, surges of feel-good chemicals dopamine and norepinephrine give us that racing heart feeling as well as the desire to be with the person who is the object of our love even more and more, and the neuromodulator oxytocin (the “commitment neuromodulator”) also increases, which heightens our instincts for pair bonding. People in love also have lower serotonin levels; they are in fact comparable to those of people who have obsessive-compulsive disorder. This helps explain the rather obsessive tendencies of a person in the early stages of romantic love and infatuation.
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Finally, I have to say that, as a single, heterosexual woman, I started off researching this article with a lot of skepticism. It was really nice to be rather blown away by both the social science experiments Leo conducted for Actualized.org and it was pretty cool to see that human chemistry backs it all up. So, guys, now that you know what to do…what are you waiting for?
