How to Make Someone Fall in Love With You

There is something distinctly spooky in the idea that there might be a set route to making one person fall in love with another. It threatens to transform what should be an unconscious mystery into a generic, programmatic manoeuvre. It threatens to rob us of free will – and turn us into marionettes.

And yet, the question of how to make someone fall in love with you need not feel cynical or coercive. It may not violate our integrity to observe that when people do feel drawn to one another, certain factors are – to a remarkable extent – reliably present. If we closely analyse a raft of successful early dinner dates, walks in the park, movie nights and phone calls, we can be almost certain that a few distinct modes of conversation will have been in train.

Three elements, in particular, appear to be central to love’s genesis:

1. Curiosity

The leading evidence for, and harbinger of, love is curiosity. To be attracted to someone is, first and foremost, to want to know more. It’s to have a constantly renewed appetite for questions. And not just any questions: ones that aim to unearth why someone is the way they are; what they aspire to, who shaped them and where they might be headed.

We feel in the presence of someone properly invested in us when we hear: ‘Why do you think you didn’t stay with them after that?’ or ‘How come the job didn’t, in the end, work out?’ Or ‘What do you believe made it so hard to say anything when …?’ and ‘Where might you want to go next?’

Of course, the questions must be gently handled. No one wants to face a volley. The curiosity that wins us over must be measured, discreet and unpressured. A lot of the time, we will be unaware that we’re even being asked anything – we will just feel we have a lot to say. Ideally, our interlocutor hovers over what we’ve said and makes remarks that subtly invite us to deepen our reflections. ‘I suppose it must have been difficult to find the energy to leave when …’ or ‘I wonder if it was sad, knowing they’re now with someone who …’ Nothing is being solicited head on, and yet a space is created in which our thoughts can evolve.

We might add, the especially important curiosity is the sort that is alive to pain: the kind that is sensitive to what it might have felt like not to have many friends at university, or to have developed a certain illness at a young age. We feel ready to fall in love with someone who signals that what truly interests them isn’t only what is going well; they enquire into our ex who never properly said goodbye; our father who, though objectively loving, was distant and preoccupied; our mother whose affections were mixed with jealousy and a desire for control.

What binds us to others, in a world that constantly requires us to smile, to win, and to face reversals with good cheer, are mutual revelations of grief and isolation. We may well feel aligned with someone who shares our interests and hobbies; we will feel intimately connected to someone who knows about, and can tolerate, our suffering.

The central role of curiosity in love tells us something poignant about what is most dispiriting in the rest of life: the constant overlooking of our deeper sorrows, the forgetting of key bits of our identity, the evidence that we barely register in the imaginations of nearly everyone we deal with, and therefore we stand to die as ignored and inconsequential as a minor sun in a distant galaxy.

Much energy can be expended on speculating why clients frequently fall in love with their therapists. Is it to do with the way these professionals evoke parental figures? Does their restraint invite seductive challenges? Are they somehow particularly charismatic people? But the answer is, in the end, relatively obvious: therapists are trained to be endemically curious. They continually ask and carefully listen. And so, we may – with no manipulative intent whatsoever – follow them in some of their behaviours: keeping a person’s narrative closely in mind, attending to hesitations and prevarications, and replaying what someone has said using slightly different words to demonstrate our attention: ‘I think what I’m hearing you say is that you never really …’

Our culture heavily associates the birth of romance with physical gestures: a kiss or an embrace. But genuine romance begins somewhere else, somewhere far less cinematic but far more nourishing: with a sense of being known.

2. Broad-mindedness

At the same time, the great terror of being known is that it will lead to being judged. Which is why the most enticing people – the ones who properly win us over – let us know, subtly, that they have a great deal of room for our weirdness (which, of course, they share in).

They don’t need to make a speech on the matter. They don’t have to say ‘I accept transgressions and don’t moralise around flaws …’ By the time any of this has to be spelt out, the game is lost.

Rather, they make their point through indirect revelations: by telling us blithely of some of the less salubrious bits of their own pasts (‘I ate five packs of biscuits in a row and cried all weekend …’) or by commenting on others’ lives in ways that suggest they don’t care for standard definitions of normality or goodness (‘Why would anyone care what he did, so long as no one got hurt …?)

The result is a sense that, around this person, we could show a great deal of ourselves without running into censure or prudishness. We could collapse; we could admit we were scared; we could say we couldn’t be bothered or hated x or y – and it would be more than fine.

And so, in their company, we relax – as we perhaps did long ago, when we were small, in the presence of an adult who remembered what it was like to be a child and let us eat unusual foods and talk to them at length about what we really felt about our teachers or our parents.

3. Kindness

The third ingredient is both the most banal-sounding and the most essential. We need to feel in the presence of someone who is kind – because we know, deep down, that we are so much in need of generous interpretation.

Why did we fail? Why are we so slow? Why were we so weak-willed? Why don’t we take more care?

There are plenty of ostensible reasons, most of them at the top of our minds every new day: because we’re wretched, because we’re not good enough, because we’re ugly and corrupt and banal and should never have been born.

We can do this very well on our own. Self-flagellation is our second nature. What we can’t do is come up with the kinder, more liveable answers – the ones that depend on love: because we had a tricky start, because we didn’t have certain lucky breaks, because we would have needed so much more encouragement.

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We spend a great deal of time hoping our future lovers might be pretty, tall or rich. These are fine qualities, but if we are ever to find a home – one that can shelter us from inner and outer storms – it will be built from curiosity, broad-mindedness and kindness. Small wonder we might respond very well to their first signs.