6 ways to make someone fall in love with you:

1) Dim The Lights

Nighttime is the right time.

Via The As If Principle: The Radically New Approach to Changing Your Life:

Describing his findings in an article entitled “Deviance in the Dark,” Gergen noted that when the lights were on, none of the participants purposefully touched or hugged one another and that 30 percent of them felt sexually aroused. When the group was plunged into darkness, the situation was very different. Now, almost 90 percent of them touched one another on purpose, 50 percent hugged, and 80 percent were sexually aroused. In addition, the people who were in the dark room were far more likely to start talking about important events in their lives and find one another attractive. Gergen’s footage revealed that a few of the participants even started stroking one another’s faces and kissing. Simply by finding themselves in the sort of situation that lovers enjoy, people quickly started to behave as if they had been struck by Cupid’s arrow and so found one another more attractive.

2) Wear Red

It makes men more attractive to women:

…we demonstrate that women perceive men to be more attractive and sexually desirable when seen on a red background and in red clothing, and we additionally show that status perceptions are responsible for this red effect. 

It makes women more attractive to men.

…men who viewed an ostensible conversation partner in a red versus a green shirt chose to ask her more intimate questions. In Experiment 2, men who viewed an ostensible interaction partner in a red versus a blue shirt chose to sit closer to her. These effects were observed across participants’ perceptions of their own attractiveness (Experiment 1) and general activation and mood (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that red acts as a basic, non-lexical prime, influencing reproduction-relevant behavior in like manner across species. 

3) Share Secrets

Emotional, personal information exchange promotes powerful feelings of connection.

Via Sam Gosling’s book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You:

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 thirty-six questions crafted to take the participants rapidly from level one in McAdams’s system to level two.

(You can read some of the questions used here.)

But how effective can this be, really? 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 forty-five-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.

4) Girls, Chin Down. Guys, Chin Up.

Yeah, your chin placement affects how attractive you are:

As predicted,tilting female faces upwards decreased their perceived femininity and attractiveness, whereas tilting them downwards increased their perceived femininity and attractiveness. Male faces tilted up were judged to be more masculine, and tilted down judged to be less masculine.

5) Lots Of Eye Contact

Stare into each other’s eyes:

In two studies, subjects induced to exchange mutual unbroken gaze for 2 min with a stranger of the opposite sex reported increased feelings of passionate love for each other.

In fact, you can tell which couples are in love by how long they stare into each others eyes.

6) Exciting Beats Pleasant

Do exciting things together — not pleasant things.

Via The As If Principle: The Radically New Approach to Changing Your Life:

At the end of the study Aron asked everyone to rate how happy they were with their marriage. Those who had spent time engaging in exciting activities (such as skiing, hiking, dancing, or going to concerts) were significantly happier with their relationships than those who had been encouraged to carry out pleasant activities (such as going to the movies, eating out, or visiting friends). His results show that the key to long-term love involves people avoiding the lure of the familiar and instead inviting excitement into their lives. By acting as if they are out on an exhilarating date, couples can turn back the hands of time and easily recreate that loving feeling.

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