EVERY SPEAKER wants to draw as large an audience as possible, and I’m no exception. I love it when the room is filled with people. Still, a few years back when I approached a room in which I was scheduled to speak, I was surprised by the overflow crowd—there were at least as many people in the hallway as there were in the room.
I started by asking the audience why they were there. A very attractive young woman in the first row asked if I remembered Margie from the Chicago office inquiring whether the popularity sales skills I was teaching would work in a social setting. I explained that I speak to more than a hundred audiences a year, so I didn’t remember Margie. Then she asked: Would practicing looking positive, upbeat, and pleasant make a woman more attractive to men? I said I was almost sure it would. She said, “That’s what you told Margie, and that’s why we’re here.”
I found out later that after I had given Margie that advice, she and half a dozen other single women in her company had decided to test my theory. They agreed to meet every Friday at lunch in one of the conference rooms to practice looking pleasant, friendly, and positive. After the first meeting, they decided it would be helpful to practice at home for a week before meeting again. The following Friday, each of them would role-play meeting three different men for the first time. The women critiqued one another’s performances and made suggestions for improvement.
They ran these meetings once a week for six weeks before they had to stop. Word had leaked out of what they were doing, and dozens of women began showing up—far too many for such an intimate format to work well.
These meetings were based on a handout I used when training salespeople. I had knocked off the handout in a few hours when a salesperson told me he had forgotten exactly what he should practice at home after going to one of my training sessions.
The little handout proved very helpful. Some salespeople used it to practice, whereas others read it over before a major presentation. Most agreed it taught them how to make a good first impression.
The importance of making a positive first impression on anyone—potential client or potential mate—cannot be emphasized enough. When we asked men who had just gotten engaged what attracted them to their fiancées when they first met, most said it was how classy, positive, energetic, enthusiastic, and upbeat their future wives were. Over and over, we heard answers such as, “She was so vivacious,” or “She was enthusiastic”—or “bubbly,” or “friendly.” “I was immediately attracted to her,” many of them told us. Interestingly, while 68 percent gave some sort of physical description of the woman they were about to marry, only about 20 percent of those men described their future wives as gorgeous or sexy, whereas more than 60 percent described their personalities. That was what attracted most of them in the first place. Even men who were marrying very beautiful women were more likely to emphasize their fiancée’s personality over her physical beauty. They typically said things such as:
I don’t mean to understate the effect of physical beauty; there is no question it attracts men. But even when they first meet a woman, it’s usually the woman’s personality that makes her seem special. The words men used most often to describe their fiancées were classy, nice, friendly, kind, elegant, self-assured, poised, and so forth. As it happens, in most cases the men using these words were not themselves poised, elegant, self-assured, or classy. Nor were their fiancées, in reality. But that was the way the men perceived the women they planned to marry when they first met. It’s critical that your first impression on a man be a positive one, because it often determines how he will see you from that moment on.
Marrying Up
Whether they’ve grown up in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods or upscale suburbs, men want to marry women who are in some ways their better. A majority of men want the woman they marry to meet their ideas of refinement, elegance, and decency. Often those are the reasons they were attracted to her in the first place.
Men brag about the women they are about to marry; for many, their future spouse is a status symbol. The whole idea that only gorgeous young women are trophy wives is nonsense. All wives are “trophy wives.” When we interviewed grooms-to-be, to the astonishment of my mainly female research team members, the main message the men conveyed was that they were proud of their brides.
A great example of this was two particular grooms who at first glance seemed to have nothing in common. A researcher and I met them outside a marriage license bureau in Florida. One was the son of a former congressman. He was also third-generation old money, a graduate of an Ivy League law school. The second was raised by a single mother in the inner city.
The bride of the second man could not stop telling us how he had transformed himself from a gang member to a man with a steady job. The researcher who interviewed her said she beamed when she announced he had just been promoted in the Fortune 500 company he worked for. She started by telling the researchers he had quit school in the ninth grade and had to work very hard to earn his GED. When I interviewed him, he bragged that he had passed the test for the post office on his first try. But, he added, if he had not, he would have kept on taking it until he did. He then went to community college at night, and after completing his course applied for his present job.
The first man told us he worked with very rich and powerful people, so the woman he married had to be very special. Then he explained with obvious pride that his bride would fit into his world because she was as accomplished as any woman he had ever encountered. He boasted about how wonderful she was with people. He told us of how she had shown grace and poise when she helped him entertain two dozen of his clients. He found it difficult to believe she was only twenty-five. This rather sophisticated man—a true blueblood—said