Please read the Part 1 first. Thank you.5 Be Beautiful
Ignore everything your mum told you about inner beauty – good-looking people are almost universally viewed as smarter, sexier and more successful than their homelier counterparts.

According to evolutionary social theorists, we value those attributes that improve the chances of successful reproduction, which is why men prefer younger women with long, shiny hair and hip measurements a third larger than their waists (all markers of youth, health and fertility), while women prefer taller, older men because they’re most likely to have the most resources to invest in offspring.

6 Home Is Where It’s At
Forget about long-distance romances: proximity rules. Being situated close to your potential love object – whether at the next desk or in the next street – ensures repeated exposure, bene?cial because the more we see someone, the more we like them (unless we strongly disliked them at ?rst exposure, in which case the opposite is true). That’s why we so often end up with workmates or the boy/girl next door.

7 Avoid Comparisons
All that said, it seems that we gauge prospective partners against the prevailing norms, if the ?ndings of Sara Gutierres and Douglas Kenrick of Arizona State University’s psychology department are to be believed. The researchers asked men to rate their dates’ looks after viewing Playboy centrefolds or watching a TV show with pretty female stars. You guessed it: the dates rated worse after the show or centrefolds than before.

This demonstrates a phenomenon called the contrast effect, whereby our perception of relative differences is distorted according to the order in which things are viewed. For example, if you look at a dark object after a light one, it will appear much darker than if you’d looked at it ?rst or by itself.

8 Love at First Fright
In the 1994 film Speed, Sandra Bullock tells Keanu Reeves, ”I’ve heard relationships based upon intense experiences never work out,” to which he replies, ”We’ll have to base ours on sex, then.”

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