Attraction Is Like Perfume: What You Notice First Is Not What Lingers

Looks matter in dating. Of course they do. A man can hardly be drawn to your fascinating inner world from twenty feet away while you are ordering a martini, so at first he notices the obvious things: your face, your hair, your clothes, the way you move and whether you look happy to be there or as though you had been perfectly content five minutes earlier with tea and your own company.

That part is simple. The interesting part begins five minutes later.

A very beautiful woman can walk into a room, turn three heads and make one waiter forget which table he was serving, then sit down and slowly become less attractive with every sentence because the restaurant is too loud, the wine list is ridiculous, her ex was an idiot, her boss is worse and the woman at the next table has terrible extensions.

By dessert, the man across from her may still agree that she is beautiful; he is just no longer hoping dinner lasts another hour. Nothing happened to her face, which is exactly what makes attraction so funny: it keeps moving while you are sitting there.

Another woman may arrive and seem simply pretty at first. Nice dress, nice smile, nothing that causes nearby traffic to stop, but then she starts talking and the whole picture begins to shift.

She tells a story about missing a train and somehow makes being stranded in a station sound hilarious. She asks him something, actually listens to the answer, and when the waiter brings the wrong dish she laughs instead of behaving as though civilization has failed.

Forty minutes later, he is looking at her differently, and by ten o’clock she has become beautiful even though, once again, nothing happened to her face.

This is why attractiveness is such a slippery little thing. We talk about it as though it lives in cheekbones, hair and waistlines, but then somebody laughs at exactly the right moment, says something unexpected or handles an awkward moment with such ease that the whole picture changes.

A woman can become more attractive while eating tiramisu, and I consider this excellent news.

There is also something oddly charming about a woman who does not spend the entire date checking whether she is being approved of. You have seen the opposite: “Do I look tired?” “Was that stupid?” “I shouldn’t have ordered dessert.” “Do you think this dress makes me look big?”

A man came to dinner and suddenly finds himself responsible for quality control, and by the third reassurance he may begin feeling less like a date and more like a mirror with a wine glass.

Meanwhile, another woman simply eats the tiramisu. She may have exactly the same insecurities, but she has not brought them all to dinner and assigned him a shift.

Humor changes attraction too, and not because a woman needs to be performing. It is simply hard not to enjoy somebody who notices when life becomes ridiculous.

There is a difference between a woman who tells you her flight was delayed for six hours and one who tells you she spent six hours at Gate 14 watching a family argue over a sandwich until she became emotionally invested in who would get the pickle.

Same airport, much better company.

And then there is conversation itself. A surprising number of dates are really two people taking turns advertising themselves. He tells his story, she tells hers, he mentions a trip, she mentions a better trip, and before long the evening feels like competing documentaries with cocktails.

Then one person asks something because she genuinely wants to know the answer, and suddenly the man across from her stops feeling interviewed and starts feeling interesting.

That changes things.

So does the small evidence that she had a life before tonight. Not because she needs to prove how “busy” or “independent” she is, but because people are more interesting when there is already something happening inside their world.

Maybe she spent Saturday at a museum, tried to make a lemon tart that collapsed, got obsessed with an obscure book or spent the afternoon doing absolutely nothing and loved every minute of it. The details hardly matter. What matters is that she arrived with stories, opinions, amusement and a life that did not begin when he pulled out her chair.

Of course, none of this guarantees attraction. You can be funny, warm, interesting, beautifully dressed and delightful with tiramisu, and one particular man may still feel nothing because attraction remains annoyingly independent.

Attraction is a little like perfume: it has a dry-down too. The first few minutes give you the opening scent, and then the rest begins to appear — humor, warmth, ease, curiosity, confidence, little quirks — until by the end of the evening you may be experiencing something entirely different.

A woman can become more beautiful because she is funny, less beautiful because she is mean, more appealing because she is relaxed and less appealing because every sentence sounds like a complaint against humanity.

By the end of the night, the face is exactly the same, but the attraction is not.

Sometimes the opening scent gets all the attention, and the dry-down is what he remembers on the way home.