Staring contests are better than pickup lines
Actions seduce better than words.
I don’t necessarily fear holding eye contact, but I don’t do it naturally. That makes me think a lot of men have trouble with it as well. Once you know this, there is an obvious way to stand out among your competition: hold eye contact.
There is no pickup line that will make a woman melt. But prolonged eye contact, without exchanging a word, that may be all you need.
Unsurprising to anyone who believes in sexual polarity, women tend to like men who are stronger than them both physically and emotionally. Neither of these are particularly easy to communicate with words, but they are easy to communicate with actions: for the physical part, you dress well (stylish while giving an idea of your physique), you walk tall, and don’t step back when she steps closer into your space. For the emotional part, once you lock eyes, not breaking eye contact means you win the dominance challenge.
I hypothesise this challenge gets its potency from one of two underlying causes. One is that it is inherently difficult for men to keep eye contact with women, so passing the test makes a man stand out and ranks him higher than many others. The other is that perhaps direct eye contact activates the primal response of being faced head-on with a natural predator (a bear, a wolf, a tiger, …). It is sometimes advised to not sit opposite each other on dates or during fights, exactly because this head-on perspective feels confrontational, almost as if the front view of someone’s face (or more specifically, seeing their attention pointed directly at you) triggers a fight-flight-freeze response which leads to a spike in emotions due to adrenaline release. You have heightened attention, heightened sensation, and also a morbid fascination for what this predator’s next move will be.
There’s also something to be said for the eyes being a definitive window into a person’s priorities. As pointed out by Jordan Peterson, there are a lot of stimuli you could theoretically focus on, and the fact that we can only direct our eyes to one point at a time, means that our world is constructed through a “value hierarchy” of what is currently most important (which we look at) and what can be filtered out. Even in conversation, it is not entirely obvious that the other person is fully engaged; for example, personally, I know that my thoughts wander rather quickly and that therefore I sometimes block out entire segments of what my ears are picking up.1 Yet, when somebody’s eyes are pointed straight at yours, you know that you are their priority out of everything and everyone that could be, and that creates tension.
In fact, this may create so much tension that it is actually the woman who buckles, which is not what you want either. It is therefore sometimes advised to make eye contact but have your body and feet face away from her, as an in-between; whatever the case may be, the eye contact matters most.
Guess who botched every high-school history class and who attended less than 10% of university lectures… ↩︎
