How to Make Someone Fall in Love With You in 90 Minutes or Less

by Nicholas Boothman

  How to

  Make Someone Fall in Love with You

  in 90 Minutes or Less

  by Nicholas Boothman

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING • NEW YORK

  “We are each of us angels with only one wing; and we can only fly by embracing one another.”

  —Luciano de Crescenzo

  Dedication

  It’s one thing to write about something, it’s another to live it. That’s why I dedicate this book to Wendy, for her sage collaboration, and to our grown-up children, Joanna, Thomas, Sandy, Kate, and Pippa, for opening my eyes to more aspects of love, romance, and broken hearts than most Hollywood screenwriters could ever imagine!

  acknowledgments

  This is a simple book about a complicated subject. It could never have come into being without the cooperation of the thousands of people who let me pry into their personal worlds and discover how, specifically, love unfolded for them—I thank you all for your generosity.

  I am indebted to Lori Moffatt, Laura Schaefer, and Nicholas Gianone for their generous professional advice; and to Leigh Bateman, Dawn Bedford, George Billard, Sarah King, Laura Silverman, Carolyn Van Humbeck, John Walker, and Scott Wilder for their hands-on experience. I am deeply grateful to Martha Flach Wilkie and Lori Speed, for their creative input and support.

  My gratitude goes to Kim Small, Suzie Bolotin, Cassie Murdoch, Beth Levy, Janet Vicario, Barbara Peragine, Pat Upton, Paul Hanson, Jenny Mandel, David Schiller, Peter and Carolan Workman, and all the lovely souls at Workman Publishing—the classiest group you could ever meet—for their support, sincerity, and sense of humor.

  Finally, my deep respect goes to my editor, Margot Herrera, for catching yet another thousand thoughts in flight and letting them wing their way into these pages.

  contents

  introduction who says you can’t hurry love?

  part 1

  GET READY

  The first steps toward falling in love are knowing yourself and finding the person who will complete you.

  1 what is love?

  the architecture of love • love by chance • love by design • there’s someone for everyone

  2 who will complete you?

  the principle of completion • key feelings—the forever component • matched opposites • know yourself first • mutual enthusiasm

  3 getting out there

  the art of socializing • the two key rules • socializing action plan • excuses, excuses • there’s no rejection, only selection

  4 finding your matched opposite online

  the players • targeting the right sites • creating a captivating profile • the pros and cons • e-mail dos and don’ts • the meeting

  part 2

  GET SET

  Fine-tune your people skills so that when you meet your matched opposite, you are ready to connect.

  5 a fabulous first impression

  it’s all about attitude • actions speak louder than words • standing tall, feeling terrific • poise, pace, and posture • the seven keys to dressing well

  6 hello, how are you, how do you do?

  using body language to build trust • eye contact, a smile, and an open stance • engineering introductions • introducing yourself • free information

  7 approaching strangers

  for the brave, the direct approach • soft questions and influential suggestions • the indirect approach • asking for a date

  part 3

  GO!

  Put it all together—move from connection to intimacy to love in 90 minutes or less.

  8 conversation and chemistry

  good questions and attentive listening • looking for “me too” triggers • getting in synch—matching and mirroring • hunting for common ground

  9 the art of flirting

  promise-withdraw • the principle of scarcity • opening lines • public, social, and private flirting • sexual innuendo • sensory preferences

  10 creating intimacy

  sharing yourself through self-disclosure • low-, medium-, and high-risk revelations • conversational road map • incidental touching • knowing when to put on the brakes

  11 getting to love

  letting go, having faith • you don’t have to say “I love you” right away • the importance of romance • putting it all together

  workbook your imagination station

  epilogue it all begins with you

  introduction

  who says you can’t hurry love?

  Can you really kindle the flames of love in 90 minutes or less? It sounds crazy and shallow—or does it? When I published my first book, How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less, people thought it was crazy and shallow too, until they learned that we actually decide whether or not we like people in the first two seconds of seeing them. By the time 90 seconds have passed, you can be well on your way to turning a first impression into a lasting relationship, be it for friendship, business, or romance. Whether they are aware of it or not, so-called socially gifted people—you know, those people who can just walk into a room full of strangers and strike up a compelling conversation with anyone—send out signals with their bodies and speak in ways that make other people immediately like, trust, and feel comfortable with them. Once you know what they do and how they do it, you can create that kind of first impression too.

  In friendship and business, this precious 90 seconds can have you off to a flying start. Given the right circumstances, with both of you sending certain signals and talking in a certain way at the right time, it can also be a prelude to love, taking you from attraction to connection to intimacy to commitment. For a small percentage of couples, these events unfold almost instantaneously, causing them to fall in love at first sight. Most couples intuitively sense the process but have to fumble their way through by trial and error before—weeks, months, or sometimes even years later—they finally click. But the process doesn’t have to be so protracted—and you don’t have to leave it to chance.

  In order to write this book, I analyzed almost two thousand romantic relationships—from couples who fell in love at first sight to those who were friends for years before becoming romantically involved. I spoke to couples who’d been together for 50 years and teenagers who’d been passionately in love for a few months. I interviewed past and present partners of the same men and women to discover what they got wrong the first time, what they learned from their experiences, and how they got it right with their new partners. I talked with people who had lost partners to illness or accidents, and had believed they could never love again until circumstance brought new love into their lives. I gave seminars and workshops to test the ideas in this book, and as a consequence got invited to weddings. I have known and worked with desperately insecure and physically disadvantaged folk who, miracle of miracles, found enduring romance beyond their wildest dreams even after they had given up all hope. This latter group reinforced something I have always known: There is someone for everyone and they often find each other when they least expect it.

  Through all this research one thing became clear: It’s not about length of time, it’s about emotional progression, with each stage unfolding in precisely the right order. If you understand the architecture of falling in love, the stages involved, and how to build and choreograph them properly, it’s absolutely possible for two people to fall in love in 90 minutes or less. Researcher Arthur Aron, PhD, found this out in a series of experiments he conducted at the University of California. A man and a woman who had never met were put in a room together for 90 minutes. They
were each told that the other person was going to like them, and were instructed to exchange intimate information, such as their most embarrassing moments and how they would feel if they lost a parent. Every so often, a researcher would come in and tell them to express what they liked about each other. They were also told to gaze into each other’s eyes for about two minutes without talking. At the end of the experiment, they left through separate doors. Many of the couples confessed to feeling deeply attracted and close to the other person. Indeed, the very first pair of subjects married soon after and invited Dr. Aron and his colleagues to the wedding. Conclusion: With the right person, specific body language, and mutual self-disclosure, you can bring about strong feelings of love and intimacy. Dr. Aron affirmed that the subjects’ expectation that the other person was going to like them had a huge effect. “If you ask people about their experience of falling in love, over 90 percent will say that a major factor was discovering that the other person liked them,” according to Dr. Aron.

  Ninety minutes is as long as you’ll need to look deeply into another person and get a strong feeling for what makes them tick—and to allow them to look deeply into you and do the same. If you both like and admire what you see, you can harness your mutual enthusiasm to propel the emotional progression rapidly toward unity. Not only that, if you’ve really found the right person, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t last forever.

  Ninety minutes is as long as you’ll need to look deeply enough into another person to get a strong feeling for what makes them tick—and to allow them to look deeply enough into you to do the same.

  My research revealed three other simple truths.

  1. Falling in love and staying in love are completely separate events. Falling in love is an addictive, intoxicating, exciting, and head-spinning chemical affair. Your body is flooded with feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin and you’re on top of the world. But staying in love is a whole different story. After the happy neurotransmitters shut down, as they inevitably will, you need something more than chemical memories to keep you together.

  2. We don’t fall in love with other people; we fall in love with the feelings we get when we are with them: the spiritual and emotional awakening, the lowering of inhibitions, the joy of feeling safe and warm and full of hope, the feeling of completeness—the thrill. We turn those emotions into words and carry them around as stories. As the stories are told, the romance grows. We’ll be discussing ways to direct and accelerate these stories later in the book.

  3. As comfortable and tempting as it might feel to be attracted to someone who is just like you (after all, like attracts like), or as stirring and romantic as it might feel to be pulled toward your exact opposite (opposites attract too), it simply doesn’t work over the long term.

  No matter what you might have read or heard elsewhere, the truth is that exciting, loving, lasting relationships are an artful blend of the two: just the right amount of “like attracts like,” so you actually like, respect, and can put up with each other; and just the right amount of “opposites attract,” so you can enjoy being silly together and keep the sparks flying. The person who has the right combination of these two things is what we call your matched opposite. Matched in values and motivators, opposite in behavior and personality traits.

  Hold up your hands in front of you. You don’t have two left hands or two right hands. You have a perfect pair of matched opposites. Individually, they can do many things, but together they can work wonders.

  I’m often asked, “How do you know when you’ve found the right person?” Most of the people I interviewed for this book said the same thing: Normally, when you fall for someone new, there are the head-spinning feelings of excitement and desire, but there’s also tension. When you meet your matched opposite, however, that tension is replaced by an enormous, unmistakable sense of calm—and relief.

  The number one reason for divorce in the world is that many people marry the wrong person in the first place. This book is about finding, attracting, and connecting with the right person—your matched opposite—and then establishing mutual emotional intimacy in 90 minutes or less. Part 1 will help you gain a fuller understanding of yourself and who your matched opposite may be. Part 2 will show you how to fine-tune your people skills so you make a fabulous first impression and are ready to connect. Part 3 will show you how to move from connection to intimacy to love—fast.

  By now you may be wondering who I am to tell you how to make someone fall in love with you. Good question. I’ve been studying human behavior for the past 30 years. For the last ten I’ve been a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). This discipline examines how, without thinking, we use words to empower or demoralize ourselves and others.

  I earned my NLP credentials studying with the method’s two founders, Drs. Richard Bandler and John Grinder, in New York, London, and Toronto. Before that I worked for 25 years as a fashion and advertising photographer with studios on three continents, and founded a business consulting company called Corporate Images. What I learned both as a photographer and as a student of NLP led me to write a couple of books on turning first impressions into lasting relationships—one for the social arena, one for the business world. But when it comes to this book, my best credentials are that I was lucky enough to find my matched opposite more than 35 years ago, after we had both come out of unhappy marriages.

  She Had Me at Hello

  As a teenager, I was the guy that almost never got the girls. Sure, I would go to dances and parties and hang out in cool coffee shops, but I’d still catch the bus home alone. Fortunately, I was ambitious and I was optimistic. After a few years of lonely bumbling, I joined a rock group, learned to ride a horse, and got a part-time job delivering wedding cakes to hotels. As I met more and more people, I soon figured out it’s not what you think, it’s the way that you think it; it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it; and it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Before long, I wasn’t going home on that bus with the lonely hearts club band anymore. I was attracting and connecting with girls; and in my early twenties, I met a beautiful girl and married her. What I learned the hard way was that attracting and connecting is only the first step—attracting and connecting with the right person for you is something else.

  The marriage broke up and I moved to Portugal. I opened a fashion photo studio on the top floor of a beautiful building in the heart of Lisbon. In making the rounds with my portfolio, one name seemed to crop up over and over in conversations with advertising agency people. “Do you work with Wendy’s modeling agency?” “Wendy modeled for Yves Saint Laurent in Paris; she knows what she’s talking about.” “Wendy danced with the National Ballet, you know.” “Wendy flies her own plane.”

  “No, I don’t work with Wendy, and no, I haven’t met her yet!” I replied. I was getting fed up with hearing about her everywhere I went. Before long, “Miss Perfect” was at the top of my list of people I didn’t want to meet.

  Then an opportunity emerged that proved irresistible to my immature sense of mischief. One of my new clients, the editor of the country’s leading women’s magazine, called to ask if I would shoot the cover for an upcoming edition. It turned out not to be as glamorous an assignment as I’d hoped. It was for their annual knitting issue. She wanted a shot of three kittens sitting in a basket of wool.

  “Where am I going to find three kittens?” I asked myself the moment I’d put down the phone. Ooh, I know, said my inner rascal. Why don’t I just call up Wonder Woman Wendy and let her take care of it?

  I tracked down her agency and dialed the phone number. The receptionist asked me to hold, and a few moments later a voice came on the other end: “Hello, this is Wendy.”

  “Hi. My name’s Nicholas Boothman, and I’m a photographer.”

  “Yes, I know,” she replied softly.

  I went on to tell her I needed three models—kittens. I was expecting some change in her polite tone of voice but she r
emained gracious and calm. I pushed my luck a little further to see how she’d react. “I’ll also need a small basket, some balls of colored wool, two pieces of chipboard 50 centimeters by one meter, two hinges, and some cooking foil.” Most modeling agencies would tell a photographer to get stuffed if he tagged on a shopping list of props, but Wonder Woman just kept calmly saying yes after each of my requests. We finished by agreeing on a date and time.

  I was also drifting into some kind of gravity-free zone. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  An old wood-and-metal cage elevator serviced the historic building that housed my loft studio. At precisely 5 P.M. on the appointed day, I heard the motor start up and assumed one of Wendy’s assistants had arrived. The elevator came to rest and a few seconds later I heard my receptionist, Cecilia, open the door. Top marks for promptness—Wendy trains her people well, I thought. (Among Portugal’s myriad charms, punctuality is markedly absent.) Cecilia came in to my studio followed by the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life. Caramba! She’s sent one of her models, I thought. An orchestra began playing in my head as this calm, beautiful, impressive female turned to face me, leveled her bright blue eyes at mine, smiled, held out her hand, and said, “Hello, I’m Wendy.”

  It’s hard to explain how I felt but I’ll try. I seemed to lose my sense of reality; I couldn’t process very well what was going on—it was like being in shock. As the orchestra upped the volume in my head, she started speaking.

  “I have the kittens. You didn’t ask for it, but on the way over I had them checked by a vet and he gave them a mild sedative; we’ll have to wait 30 minutes for it to take effect. I brought the chipboard and the hinges. I assume you’re going to make a reflector—you didn’t ask for screws but I brought some. I assume you are going to glue the foil to the wood. You didn’t ask for glue but I brought that too.” Wow! She was right, I’d planned to make a reflector to bounce backlight onto the kittens so the direct flash wouldn’t scare them. I was impressed and humbled. I was also drifting into some kind of gravity-free zone. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Yes, she was extraordinarily beautiful, but it was her general presence that was getting to me. She was so gracious.