I tell you, I have never been so attractive to my wife, even though she married me because I am brilliant. My lack of communication made her unsure if I had concerns about us and the relationship, it seems, along with an extra dose of 'cold' and 'distant'. In reality she could not see me pointing wildly to the coffee maker and then my throat from where I was bedridden.
But it turns out there may be something to "playing hard to get", according to a timely study in Psychological Science. The authors of the paper say a woman is more attracted to a man when she is uncertain how much he likes her.
It makes no sense, right? Do we not like people about as much as they like us? We're not puppy dogs, after all. Most research agrees that we like most people as much as they like us.
Yes, but it's when the feelings are unclear that interest increases, say Erin Whitchurch and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia, co-authors with Daniel Gilbert of Harvard. If a woman is unsure how much a man likes her, she becomes more inclined to think about him and wonder how he feels and then perhaps find him more attractive the more she thinks about him.
Like all studies of this kind, a little suspension of disbelief is merited. A woman will be more inclined to wonder if George Clooney likes her than a guy at the gas station who looks like Quasimodo, his level of interest regardless. And the participants in the study were 47 female undergraduates at the University of Virginia. College-age women are generally no more rational than college-age men (a nice way of saying 'vaguely nuts') and I am inclined to believe any woman over the age of 35 who receives the 'unsure' response actually assumes he is not interested and moves on.
But let's play along and talk about the study. The female students were told that the experiment was designed to study whether Facebook could work as an online dating site and were told that male students from two other universities had viewed their profiles and those of 15-20 other women.
See? It's already like "The Bachelor", where it is less about the actual man and more about beating out other women.
Then these women were shown four male Facebook profiles they were told were real but were actually fictitious.
Some of the participants were told they were seeing the four men who liked them the most while others others were told the four men had rated them about average while a third group were told the men could be either the ones who liked them most or the ones who liked them about average. Basically, that last group had the most uncertainty about the level of interest the men had in them.
No surprise, the men who liked the women about average were rated more attractive than the ones believed to like the women a lot but the ones rated most attractive were the guys who the women were unsure about. Even though they were all the same men.
"Numerous popular books advise people not to display their affections too openly to a potential romantic partner and to instead appear choosy and selective," the authors write. Women in this study made decisions based on very little information on the men, a common situation at an Internet dating site. "When people first meet, it may be that popular dating advice is correct: Keeping people in the dark about how much we like them will increase how much they think about us and will pique their interest."
So, don't call until the third day after you meet her and, if you go on a date, don't call at all for like a week after that. Then tell her you were rescuing puppies from a wildfire or something. Or, don't date anyone under the age of 30 and save yourself all of this nonsense.
Citation: Erin R. Whitchurch, Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert, '“He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not . . . ” Uncertainty Can Increase Romantic Attraction', Psychological Science February 2011 vol. 22 no. 2 172-175 doi: 10.1177/0956797610393745
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