Can you really kindle the flames of love in 90 minutes or less? And why 90 minutes and not 27 minutes or 6 hours? 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 studied men and women all over the world as they connected and made an emotional impact on one another. 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 even spoke to gigolos in the sunshine resorts of southern Europe to learn their secret for making instant connections with men and women, anywhere, anytime, and without hesitation. 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.
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.
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, Ph.D., 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.
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. It just sounds much better and more romantic to say, “Chris, I think I’m falling in love with you” than to admit, “When I’m with you or think about you, I get these overwhelming feelings of excitement, expansion, and longing!” We’ll be discussing how these feelings can be directed and accelerated later.
Note About Point of View
Although this book is written from a heterosexual point of view, it applies equally to gay men and lesbians. The basic human requirement is the same in all loving relationships—we need to share our experiences with someone we trust and respect in order to feel complete and happy. So I ask gay readers to forgive the fact that all my examples and advice describe relationships between men and women. I defaulted to heterosexuality for simplicity’s sake, but in affairs of the heart we are all the same.
3. Certain people balance us and make us feel complete socially and psychologically, while others make us feel insecure and tired, zap our self-confidence, or turn us into someone we are not. People in vibrant, long-term relationships are very aware that they complement rather than antagonize one another. They are a social and psychological team. If you end up competing or criticizing and trying to change each other after the chemistry wears off, your future together is limited.
When you meet the person who balances and completes you, the one you trust and feel comfortable with, you have found your matched opposite. I coined this term because it describes the way you and your partner fit together or click, and when it happens, you both know it. Being with this person is simultaneously an indescribable joy and an enormous relief. He or she will be like you in many ways but your opposite in certain key areas, and it’s highly likely you’ll have a happy, committed, and loving, long-term relationship. This book will show you how to find your matched opposite and tell you what to do once you have. 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.
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 20 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.
By the time we’re about 13 years old, most of us have developed fixed patterns of thinking. In fact, we have learned to think without thinking—we act and react in predictable ways. Every day we go out into the world and experience it through our five senses, then put that information into words. It’s a process called making sense, and it goes like this:
1. You put your experiences into words.
2. Your words become thoughts.
3. Your thoughts become ideas.
4. Your ideas become actions.
5. Your actions become habits.
6. Your habits become your personality.
7. Your personality becomes your destiny.
As you get older, the same old processing patterns are still playing themselves out, but the pace has accelerated. In romance, he rejects you and whammo!—a predictable (and useless) response: “I feel bad. I’m going home to eat ice cream and watch sitcoms with the dog.” Or she turns up late because she hit traffic and whammo!—a predictable (and useless) response: “I can’t stand it when I’m kept waiting, dammit.”
If you’re unhappy with how certain aspects of your life are playing out, the best way to fix them is to make adjustments at the thinking-without-thinking level that’s responsible for the problem. You’ve got to get back to the put-your-experiences-into-words level, a.k.a. your self-talk, that interior dialogue we all have with ourselves. Anything else is like putting a Band-Aid on your forehead when you have a headache. If your love life isn’t happening, you can keep doing what you’re doing and hope someone will turn up, or you can get to the root of the problem and make adjustments to your internal programming—looking at the cause of your dilemma (the way you’re thinking) and not its effect. These adjustments will make a difference in the way you act and respond and will eventually transform your destiny. That’s a small part of what you can do with NLP. As you go through this book, you’ll be making quite a few adjustments to the way you think without thinking. What you choose to change is up to you.
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 freelance fashion and advertising photographer with studios on three continents, and founded a business consulting company called Corporate Images. What I learned both as a fashion 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 30 years ago, after we had both come out of unhappy marriages.
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 listening to all the stories, 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, 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. What’s more, 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 woman’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 photo-grapher.”
“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 remained 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 fifty 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.
An old wood-and-metal cage elevator serviced the historic building that housed my 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 in my head began playing Ravel’s Bolero 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 a few notches, 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.
While we waited for the kittens to mellow out, I started assembling the reflector. As I set up the shot, Wendy went to a window that looked out over the Baixa, the area of downtown Lisbon where for centuries poets, painters, and writers had gathered in coffeehouses. “I love the Baixa,” I said in her direction, “it’s so full of energy and romance.” “Me too,” she replied. I was dissolving. “Would you give me a hand?” I asked. She turned to face me and held up her palms, “Two if you’d like.” She smiled again, and my heart melted.
There we were, kneeling on the floor, facing each other across the meter-long piece of chipboard. We began scrunching up the foil, Wendy from her end, me from mine, working our way toward the center. When we arrived there, our hands touched momentarily. It took my breath away. What happened next was surreal, yet I can remember it in minute detail. A rush of energy bigger and wider than anything I’d ever felt swept from my feet up through my body and out over my head straight at her. I looked directly into her eyes and I heard this voice—I know it was my own, but I didn’t hear it from the inside like you normally do, I heard it from the outside—and it said, “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever said, but I love you.” The orchestra inside my head had been going like crazy, but suddenly it stopped. Wendy was looking straight at me. “Oh my God,” she said. “What are we going to do now?” I knew she felt the same way. I had found my matched opposite and Wendy had found hers.
What we did do, after I completed the assignment and Cecilia took the kittens home for the night, was spend hours and hours and hours talking. We had so much to say. We shared our hopes and dreams, our opinions and experiences. We laughed at the same things, felt passionately about the same things. It was like a deep friendship set to music.
Wendy and I had much in common. She was a Brit, just like me. We were both expatriates in Portugal. She had a mischievous twinkle in her eye, just like me, and she was dressed in a stylish but low-key sort of way, which was how I fancied my own look to be. Most important, we were in similar businesses and shared a strong spirit of adventure.
But there were also aspects of her that I sensed were not like me. She had patience and a mind for detail. She was strong, solid, and private. The way she looked and listened and paid attention made me feel like I was the only person in the world who mattered.
When I got up that morning, I had no idea just a few hours later my world would be changed forever. Wendy made me understand things in ways I’d never thought of before, and I told her about places and people I’d discovered but about which she knew nothing. I felt proud and important and invincible as we laughed and shared together. She felt safe talking with me as I cherished and respected and valued her ideas. I had never been able to talk to anyone that way before; it was almost as if we’d been chasing each other around the cosmos for lifetimes and had finally come together. It was bliss. We spent the next few weeks meeting whenever we could, talking and laughing, sharing and dreaming, and just being close.
We’ve been together ever since. We’ve raised five children into adulthood and we are still nuts about each other. The way we met has stayed fresh in both our minds, and the sheer romance of it all has had a strong binding effect. Yes, we’ve had our tough and difficult days, but the idea of ending the relationship—of saying goodbye to the person who makes us feel complete—has never even been an option. It would be like tearing our hearts in half.
I guess it’s pretty obvious to most people that Wendy and I have a strong and happy marriage. People are always asking us for our secret. In the beginning, I brushed this question off, thinking that the answer was obvious—mutual respect, common interests, attraction, etc. But as the years passed and the question kept coming over and over again, I began to realize that there might be more to it than meets the eye. So, using my NLP training, I decided to try to identify the common threads in all successful relationships, from dating through mating, and lay them out in a simple, practical, concrete way. I also wanted to show people how to make the most of their time and avoid depressing pitfalls, and help them learn from others’ mistakes. How often have we heard people say, “If only I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have got myself into this mess”?
Specifically, I set out to
• find couples who have fallen deeply in love and stayed energized and amused with each other for a long time;
• determine what all these couples have in common and what resources they draw upon; and
• break the lessons they can teach us about meeting, connecting, and uniting with our matched opposite into a series of easy steps that anyone can follow.
I interviewed happy, long-term couples and others whose relationships were in various stages of disarray. I reviewed research, read books and articles on the subject, and eventually realized that almost no one was addressing something fundamental: The most successful couples embody a very delicate balance of two maxims—like attracts like and opposites attract.
There are hundreds of books about dating, flirting, playing hard to get, getting him to propose, getting her to say yes, and the like. But I was amazed at how they all seemed to miss the obvious. In the most vibrant, rewarding relationships, the people involved are matched opposites. That’s what every single person hoping to find love should be seeking—a person who makes you feel whole, someone you really click with. There’s more than one matched opposite out there for you; there are lots of them and they’re all over the place. Nevertheless, most people you meet won’t be your matched opposite. You’ll meet plenty of people who are charming or exciting but they may not be right for you. So if you meet someone you like a lot but it’s not working the way you’d hoped and you don’t feel a clear sense that it’s right, let the relationship go. It’s not your fault, and it’s not personal; it’s just that you are not matched opposites.
Since my first two books were published, I’ve appeared on scores of television and radio talk shows and been interviewed by dozens of magazines. As a consequence, I get loads of e-mail asking for help in relationships. This book is the response to all those people who’ve asked me, “How do I go about finding a loving, long-term relationship?” They seem to wish someone would take their hand for a little while, tell them what to do, and guide them through the confusion to their goal. This book is for everyone who’s ever felt that way. It’s the best I can offer. It’s got proven techniques for connecting and making a terrific first impression. It will guide you out of your nervous uncertainties and into a loving, lasting relationship. At the same time, it will demand that you be yourself and do what comes naturally. It is written from the heart and, like my other books, it’s tested and it works.
So, don’t sit back and relax. Instead, lean forward and make up your mind to act upon what you’re about to read. You may or may not want someone to take you by the hand, but if you’re ready and committed, all you have to do is turn the page and begin at the beginning.
