alt="" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_b615b46e-66be-54c0-b06d-4200e3c4ea9f.jpg"/>“She seemed so at ease with the world.”
I don’t mean to understate the effect of physical beauty; there is no question it attracts men. But even when they first meet a woman, it’s usually the woman’s personality that makes her seem special. The words men used most often to describe their fiancées were classy, nice, friendly, kind, elegant, self-assured, poised, and so forth. As it happens, in most cases the men using these words were not themselves poised, elegant, self-assured, or classy. Nor were their fiancées, in reality. But that was the way the men perceived the women they planned to marry when they first met. It’s critical that your first impression on a man be a positive one, because it often determines how he will see you from that moment on.
Marrying Up
Whether they’ve grown up in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods or upscale suburbs, men want to marry women who are in some ways their better. A majority of men want the woman they marry to meet their ideas of refinement, elegance, and decency. Often those are the reasons they were attracted to her in the first place.
Men brag about the women they are about to marry; for many, their future spouse is a status symbol. The whole idea that only gorgeous young women are trophy wives is nonsense. All wives are “trophy wives.” When we interviewed grooms-to-be, to the astonishment of my mainly female research team members, the main message the men conveyed was that they were proud of their brides.
A great example of this was two particular grooms who at first glance seemed to have nothing in common. A researcher and I met them outside a marriage license bureau in Florida. One was the son of a former congressman. He was also third-generation old money, a graduate of an Ivy League law school. The second was raised by a single mother in the inner city.
The bride of the second man could not stop telling us how he had transformed himself from a gang member to a man with a steady job. The researcher who interviewed her said she beamed when she announced he had just been promoted in the Fortune 500 company he worked for. She started by telling the researchers he had quit school in the ninth grade and had to work very hard to earn his GED. When I interviewed him, he bragged that he had passed the test for the post office on his first try. But, he added, if he had not, he would have kept on taking it until he did. He then went to community college at night, and after completing his course applied for his present job.
The first man told us he worked with very rich and powerful people, so the woman he married had to be very special. Then he explained with obvious pride that his bride would fit into his world because she was as accomplished as any woman he had ever encountered. He boasted about how wonderful she was with people. He told us of how she had shown grace and poise when she helped him entertain two dozen of his clients. He found it difficult to believe she was only twenty-five. This rather sophisticated man—a true blueblood—said it was his experience that women from the best families and the best schools usually don’t achieve that degree of sophistication until well into their thirties. He informed us that she had handled some of the richest and most powerful people in the world with the grace and artistry of a grande dame.
Immediately, the man raised in a slum chimed in, “I know just what you mean. I was blown away by my girl’s sophistication, too. We went to a restaurant, and she put her napkin in her lap and ordered me to put mine on my lap. Wow—she almost knocked me off my #@*&# chair.”
I use these two men as examples for several reasons. Both women were very attractive, but neither man mentioned it. These very different men made statements that reflected the feelings of 46 percent of the men we interviewed coming out of marriage license bureaus. This convinced the female researchers that men are not quite as shallow as most women believe.
But the main reason I cite these men is that both—along with almost half of the others who had just gotten engaged—said they knew there was something special about their women as soon as they met. Like nearly half the men we interviewed, these men admitted that sexual attraction was a factor in their choice of a bride, but claimed it was not what clinched their decision.
Making a Good First Impression
When you walk into a room, have a pleasant look on your face, but not a big grin. Why not? If you have a big smile on your face when you walk in but the minute you start talking to someone that smile disappears, it sends the message that you don’t like the person you are speaking with. Smiling is important, but most people, especially women, need to tone it down. What generally works best is the look you get on your face when you’re about to smile. Then you can break into a real grin when you meet someone, which lets him know you really are pleased to meet him.
One of the keys to making a good first impression is to match your verbal with your nonverbal messages. When you say, “Pleased to meet you,” you need to look and sound pleased. A majority of those we surveyed told us they were attracted to people who seemed to like them. It sounds very simple, but it’s a little trickier than it sounds.
About 80 percent of the people we surveyed thought they could charm others if they set out to do so. But research shows that when most people deliberately turn on the charm, they smile too broadly, and the people they meet see their smiles as artificial. Rather than create a positive impression, they either create no impression at all or, worse, turn off the very people they intended to charm. We found that many women come across as overly friendly, something you should be careful to avoid.
Practice being charming in front of a full-length mirror. Start by trying to look like a person everybody likes. It may take a while, possibly several sessions of ten to fifteen minutes, but almost everyone who role-plays being upbeat and friendly in front of a mirror eventually ups her charm quotient considerably.
Second Impressions
What I refer to as a “second impression,” most people would call the second part of the first impression—and they’re right. The division is artificial, but it lets us break down a first impression into teachable elements.
The first element of a first impression is primarily nonverbal. It’s the message you send when you walk into a room, before you open your mouth. Obviously, first impressions are not always nonverbal. Often when you meet someone for the first time, you shake hands and start to speak immediately. But it’s easier to learn the nonverbal elements of a first impression separately from the verbal parts. That’s how the young women who practiced the nonverbal elements outlined in my sales training manual made themselves more attractive to men. The women had mastered sending signals that created a good first impression. In
