Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? The answer depends on whether you want a second date or not.
Scientists have found that women greatly prefer to be complimented using figurative language. They discovered that men who could adroitly wield lines such as “Your eyes are morning dew” were significantly more attractive than those who took the more direct approach and said simply, “Your eyes are lovely”.
They also found that the same applied, but to a lesser extent, if men complimented women’s possessions and houses — saying, for instance, “Your garden is a sea of flowers” versus the more prosaic, “Your door is very strong.”
The research, conducted among Chinese students, was designed to test a theory of sexual dynamics: the idea that women find complex use of language attractive and that this may be because it indicates the man has higher intelligence.
To investigate this, 116 women were shown a series of pictures of men and asked to rate them. Sometimes, the pictures were accompanied by compliments. The women were told that the compliments, which were actually randomly assigned, had been written by the men when they were asked to imagine what they would say on first visiting their new girlfriend’s house.
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These were either literal, such as “Your lips are so sexy”, or metaphorical, for example “Your smile is a naughty goblin”, a chat-up line that may lose something in translation from Chinese. Others included, “Your eyes are a gorgeous rainbow” and, a niche conversational gambit, “Your roof is a lover’s shoulder.”
Writing in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, the scientists said that the men using more figurative compliments were viewed as more intelligent, and as more attractive. This effect was even more pronounced if they applied those compliments to the women themselves, rather than the structural integrity of their houses.
“In a courtship situation where compliments serve as a sexual display of mate quality, women show a preference for metaphors, particularly novel ones, in verbal structure,” said the team from the University of Electronic Science and Technology, China.
So should single men be consulting dictionaries of chat-up lines, and resurrecting old favourites such as, “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” and “You must be tired, because you’ve been running through my mind all night.” Perhaps. But, the researchers note, those might have precisely the opposite effect. Since the purpose of the chat-up line is to demonstrate intelligence, it might be better to come up with some new ones.