Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [72]
This sequence can take anywhere from a few minutes to hours, but there are certain rules the encounter must follow if it is to progress, according to Perper. Each stage is what he calls an escalation point, and each person’s response to each escalation is crucial to the outcome. If one person touches the other, but the other never reciprocates, that will derail the encounter, and it will stop escalating. Also, the signals that the two people send to each other must go from less intense to more intense for the couple to move through the five stages. A quick example will show why. If a man expresses strong admiration of the woman in conversation by saying something like, “You are very beautiful” (a strong signal), but she responds tepidly (“Hmmm, well, it’s very dark in here”), the man will adjust his enthusiasm level to her own, and the encounter will begin to de-escalate. Perper also found that women are usually the ones to escalate.
Before you run off to the nearest bar and try this out, I do have one warning: all of this usually occurs subconsciously. Attempting to manipulate the process runs a very high risk. If the other person catches you doing it, you can kiss your chances good-bye. So, how should you go about mirroring someone? Studies show that it is best to do it imperfectly and to allow a time lag of a few seconds before you do mirror a movement. My own advice would be to let the mating dance take its natural course and simply use these “rules” as a way to judge whether you and your partner are both feeling the same way about each other.
One final thought for those men and women who are desperate to meet someone when they hit the bars: stay until the end. A group of researchers went to a college bar and asked a number of individuals to rate the attractiveness of the opposite sex at the bar that night. They repeated this three times: at 9 p.m., 10:30 p.m., and midnight. What they found was that both men and women raised their ratings as the time grew later. This effect was even more pronounced for men than for women. Although tempting to dismiss this as a classic case of beer goggles, the researchers determined that the rating’s boost was not related to alcohol consumption, which means the goggles were entirely self-induced. So, if you can wait until last call, you just might get lucky.
A FEW MORE UNKIND WORDS FOR SEX
Which brings us once again to sex. Not to beat a dead horse, but I am going to repeat my advice to women: be very careful about whom you sleep with and how quickly you sleep with him. It’s clear from a number of studies that some women use sex as one way to lure a man into a long-term relationship, but that is, at best, a risky strategy. In all likelihood, women will fall prey to what some researchers have dubbed an “affective shift.” According to one study, men’s and women’s feelings about their partners change after the first sexual encounter, and the results should give pause to any woman interested in a long-term relationship. For women, there is a distinctly positive shift after first-time sex. In other words, they care more about a man after they have slept with him. There are obvious evolutionary reasons for this: women need to be concerned about finding someone to help raise the children, so they are biologically designed to try to push relationships in the direction of a long-term commitment. This is yet another reason women need to be careful about choosing their sexual partners. Although a woman may think she just wants a fling, she could wake up the next morning and find that she has developed a much stronger attachment to the man than she expected.
Men react in an entirely different fashion to that first encounter—or at least some men do. For a man who has a lot of sexual partners, having sex for the first time with a women leads to a decrease in his physical and sexual attraction for