With little more than a week until Valentine’s Day, ladies don’t have time to waste on romantic folklore. Your friends’ advice and your own gut feelings may actually be leading you astray in the search for a companion. So start paying attention to the stats and facts.
Two new books that turn looking for love into a research project are taking the guesswork out of dating, boiling down the butterflies and starry eyes to a palatable science.
In “Data, A Love Story,” author Amy Webb tells how she spent a month crunching numbers on JDate, a Jewish dating site. Then a single journalist disheartened with her lack of online dating success, Webb created 10 fake male profiles to track the flirting habits and commonalities among the site’s most popular women.
Meanwhile, “Mating Intelligence Unleashed: The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating, and Love,” by psychologists Glenn Geher and Scott Barry Kaufman, is a compendium of cutting-edge research into what makes people tick, romantically and sexually.
We asked the authors to incorporate their findings into an 11-point plan (one for each day until the big day) that will redirect Cupid’s arrow just in the nick of time for this year’s holiday.
Lesson #1: Trim your online dating profile
“There is a direct correlation between profile length . . . and the likability of that person,” according to “Data, A Love Story.” Once a profile hits the 500-word mark, it becomes oppressive and, according to author Amy Webb, pathetic.
All you want and need are three fantastic sentences, she says.
“You don’t want a super-long profile or a ton of specifics, because you don’t know how those things will be interpreted,” explains Webb, who points to a novice mistake she made on her own (real) JDate profile.
What was the sin? She referenced an abstruse “Curb Your Enthusiasm” joke.
Lesson #2: Go for the big laugh
Whether you have to brush up on joke books or recent episodes of “Modern Family,” building your capacity to laugh — and amuse others — is essential if you’re going to snag a guy’s attention.
“Mating Intelligence” cites one scientific study that found “the amount of synchronized laughter during spontaneous male-female conversations predicted mutual initial attraction.”
Why do we like people who make us laugh? Because there’s a strong correlation between humor and intelligence. And natural selection dictates that we’re going to search for the mate who can protect us by figuring out how to survive in a complex world.
Lesson #3: Get yourself a sexy new profile pic
The best female profile pics Webb saw “showed some skin” and were taken with natural light. Also, there was only one person in them. “Don’t put a photo of yourself up that has other people in it, especially if they’re the same gender, because you have no idea how those other people will be perceived,” Webb warns.
Unless you want guys writing to say, “Hi, who’s your friend?”
Also, know that if you’re petite, you’ve got a big advantage. Despite it being statistically improbable (since the average American woman is 5-foot-4), all 96 of the desirable women Webb interacted with during her experiment listed their height as 5-foot-1 to 5-foot-3.
Lesson #4: Learn to identify narcissists
“Narcissist” is just a fancy word for self-obsessed jerk. They may be charming at first, but that won’t last.
“Research shows that narcissists do not tend to do well in long-term relationships, and suffer from all sorts of intrapersonal and interpersonal problems,” according to “Mating Intelligence.”
Luckily, they are easy to spot. Warning signs include men who talk about themselves, name-drop, hog the mirror, steal your limelight and put others down (especially underlings or strangers).
So what kind of personality is best? Depends on what you’re looking for. According to “Mating Intelligence,” both men and women go for extroverts for short-term flings, but samples from dating agencies indicate that men prefer introverted mates for long-term relationships.
Lesson #5: Speak the language of love
“The best-performing profiles were those that read as easygoing and spontaneous,” writes Webb, who found that JDate’s most popular gals use the same 10 words to describe themselves. The language that drives men wild? “Easygoing,” “love,” “laugh,” “optimistic,” “laid-back,” “outgoing,” “fun,” “down-to-earth,” “pleasure” and “adventure.”
Work these into your profile and you’ll quickly secure enough men for your own personal dating database.
Lesson #6: Flaunt your brainy babeness
Intelligence and creativity are two of the most sexually attractive traits. “Mating Intelligence” touts a study by evolutionary psychologist David Buss, who found that intelligence was the second-most-desired trait in a sexual partner across 37 cultures. (No. 1 was kindness.)
Creativity was also ranked highly, and Buss discovered that creative people tend to have more sexual partners. To tap into this, author Glenn Geher recommends bringing creativity into the courtship: “Make music, go dancing, paint a room together. Displaying and appreciating creativity is highly attractive.”
Lesson #7: Make the first move
If you haven’t yet tapped into your inner Sadie Hawkins, it’s time to stop being a wallflower and get your dance card filled. The femme fatales who land the most men ignore outdated ideas about who makes the first move.
“Who doesn’t want to be approached?” Webb asks. “If you message them or favorite their profile, you’re validating them. You’re telling them in a passive way that you’re interested,” says the author.
Lesson #8: Get in touch with touching
Start reaching out and touching people, giving them friendly pats and caresses. If you practice now, it’ll be second nature when your V-Day amour is sitting by your side, whispering sweet nothings in your ear.
“Research shows that the littlest touch can go a long way,” says Geher. “If you just do a touch on the elbow, it’s really a signal. Those kinds of little bodily signals matter.”
Also: “Smiling is huge.”
“If we look at the same face
of a person smiling or not smiling, that person smiling is rated a standard deviation more attractive than the not-smiling photo,” he says. “The entire scale shifts up.”
Lesson #9: Log off at 11 p.m.
Only desperate women send an introductory e-mail after 11 p.m., Webb says. When her male avatars received messages after that, 82 percent of the time they came from women whose profiles violated her 500-word rule. In other words, the unpopular girls.
“Just because in the digital space things are much more efficient and faster, it doesn’t mean that the dating process should be more efficient and faster,” she says. “If you wouldn’t call someone at 3 a.m. just to chitchat, you shouldn’t do that online.”
JDate all-stars made their moves during work hours (11 a.m. to 4 p.m.) or after dinner (7 to 9 p.m.).
Likewise, when a prospect introduces himself, it’s best to play it cool. The top tier of female contenders waited an average of 22 hours to respond to initial messages from Webb’s e-binder full of men.
Lesson #10: Flirt over IM, but not for long
Webb found that 87 percent of JDate’s most popular chicks used instant messaging, rather than e-mail, to flirt. But they always made sure to mention that they had someplace to be.
“Because of IM’s conversational nature, it was much easier and more natural to flirt,” Webb says. “Some women would ask what I was wearing. Others would tell me they were on their way out the door to meet up with friends and describe what they were wearing, which inevitably meant talking about skin.”
Webb says she “rarely got to end the conversation first.” This, she deduces, leaves men with a sense of urgency.
Lesson #11: Make them show you the money
By now, you should have a bevy of admirers waiting to squire you around town.
After you’ve laughed, touched his arm and painted his portrait, what’s next? If you still have doubts about him, test his intentions by sharing your Amazon wish list.
“Costly displays are attractive. This is why florists and BMW dealerships stay in business,” Geher says, pointing to research by Dr. Daniel Kruger. “Investing money in gifts for your partner signals that you’re willing, quite literally, to exert costs on yourself for the sake of your partner. That’s attractive.”
Romance is a numbers game
The book “Mating Intelligence Unleashed” cites more than 1,000 studies to make its points about love, sex and relationships. Among them were the following findings:
What’s your chance of scoring with speed dating?
Likelihood that you’ll wind up having sex: 6%
Likelihood that you’ll wind up in a long-term relationship: 4%
Bang for your buck
Spending $40 to attend a three-hour speed-dating session is a pretty good bargain. You’d need to spend $1,000 and 75 hours to make similar connections at bars or cafes.
Source: “From Dating to Mating and Relating: Predictors of Initial and Long-term Outcomes of Speed-dating in a Community Sample,” European Journal of Personality, by J.B. Asendorpf, L. Penke and M.D. Black. (2011)
What would you spend your love money on?
Researchers gave subjects a budget of $20 to invest in a mate. Here’s how much they budgeted for each characteristic, depending on what kind of relationship they wanted:
Long-term relationship
Women
Physical attractiveness: $5.36
Social status/resources: $6.48
Warmth/trustworthiness: $8.14
Men
Physical attractiveness: $8.54
Social status/resources: $2.82
Warmth/trustworthiness: $7.64
One-night stand
Women
Physical attractiveness: $11.86
Social status/resources: $4.30
Warmth/trustworthiness: $2.34
Source: “Sex Similarities and Differences in Preferences for Short-Term Mates: What, Whether and Why,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, by Norman P. Li and Douglas T. Kenrick. (2006)
Men are sluts!
No surprise here. Researchers arranged for attractive members of the opposite sex to ask subjects these three questions. This is the percentage of men and women who answered “Yes.”
Will you go on a date with me?
Men: 50%, Women 50%
Will you come back to my apartment?
Men: 69%, Women: 6%
Will you have sex with me?
Men: 75%, Women: 0%
Source: “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers,” Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, by R.D. Clark and E. Hatfield. (1989)
dschuster@nypost.com