What choice of words do you think would prove most successful and attract the largest number of replies? This was exactly the question tackled in another aspect of our journey into the science of seduction. We asked everyone involved in the speed-dating experiment to write a short personal ad containing about twenty words. We then showed these to more than a hundred men and women and asked them to indicate which ads they would be most likely to answer. The results provided important clues into a hitherto unexplored aspect of ads. Previous work into personals had examined the type of person most frequently sought by men and women.47 The results haven’t yielded many big surprises. Men tend to look for women who are physically attractive, understanding, and athletic. In contrast, women are searching for someone who is understanding, humorous, and emotionally healthy. I decided to take a different tack. I looked through the ads we had received and noticed something odd. There was a large variation in the number of words that people used to describe themselves compared to the number of words used to describe the person they were looking for.
