Humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to successfully carry out two tasks: survival and reproduction. According to Harvard psychologist Paul Gilbert, “Emotions evolved to guide animals in pursuing specific motives and goals (e.g., to find food, avoid harm, seek out sexual partners, rear offspring). They function as short-term alertors and regulators of behavior and can be grouped into their evolved functions.”

Sexual attraction is nothing more than an evolved emotional response that tells us a particular individual would be a good candidate to pass on our genes. When a woman is beautiful you feel physical attraction for her because her beauty indicates that she is fertile and is free of disease. Looking at attraction from an evolutionary lens allows us to understand what universally attracts women and why. Then, we can reverse engineer those traits to become more attractive ourselves.

Women and men evolved to look for different traits in a suitable mate because of their differing levels of parental investment. A man can invest as little as two minutes in the child-making process, women invest 9 months in which they are made extremely vulnerable, followed by over a decade of raising a defenseless child.

The difference in parental investment is the underlying reason why men tend to have a much more casual attitude towards sex. For a man to want to have sex he merely has to find a woman physically attractive, but for a woman, sex is always a bigger investment, on an unconscious, emotional level, she doesn’t understand that birth control and condoms mean that casual sex represents almost no risk of impregnation. This means she needs to feel like a man who sleeps with her offers something more than an attractive body.

This means if you signal that you have qualities with reproductive value, women will feel an automatic, unconscious sexual attraction for you.

What women want

Women want offspring with the best possible genes. Women have evolved over the millennia to respond to what are called honest signals. An honest signal is evidence of good genes that cannot be faked. For example, a peacock’s feathers are an honest signal. A peacock develops its heavy and elegant plumage even though the display is a significant burden because they act as an honest signal. The more burdensome a male peacock’s feathers are, the better their genes must be, because they were able to not only survive, but thrive despite the heavy burden.

For women, physical fitness, height, and other features of physical attractiveness do trigger attraction because they signal good reproductive health. However, women are more concerned with behavioral evidence of reproductive value than men because women need to select for males who will not just provide good genes, but make good fathers.

The most important honest signal of reproductive value is confidence. We evolved in hunter gatherer tribes of 50-150 members, in these tribes, status was the best measure of a male’s good genes, those who had good genes would naturally rise to higher status. The power of male status had led mean to obsess over money, because it implies high-status, and thus will lead to reproductive success. You would be wrong, confidence is a far better signal of status, women evolved to judge a man’s status by his behavior, there were no Rolls-Royces or Rolex watches to judge status by in the environment we evolved in. In hunter-gatherer tribes only a high-status male would act confidently, and so, confidence is an honest signal. If a male who were low-status acted dominant or assertive, by making a move on a desirable female for example, higher status males would see this as a challenge to authority. At best a low status male who tries to assert himself would be put in his place, at worst he would be ostracized or killed. To survive, a low status-male would have to take what he could get and do as expected. Fortunately, in the modern world, acting confidently is a comparatively risk-free behavior. Unfortunately, building confidence is challenging because it requires you to overcome a primal resistance to confident behaviors that exists to keep you alive. Confidence is a necessary honest signal to develop, because if you act confidently you are signaling that you are high-status, and if you are high-status you have high reproductive value, and high reproductive value automatically triggers attraction. However, confidence is not everything, another powerful honest signal is almost entirely ignored by the dating advice industry.

Women are hesitant to sleep with a man who presents himself confidently because if a man is confident, he is less likely to invest in any offspring he produces. High-status, confident males will have access to many females, and therefore have no need to invest much time or resources in any one of their children.

This means that women evolved to desire men who are not only confident but also emotionally committed. Women must have the impression that a man is going to stay around and help take care of her child.

Women seek the best combination of these traits they can get. There are other factors that signal good genes, but these two are by far the most important, and they are under your control.

We are going to first focus on improving your confidence because without it, nothing else will work. The smoothest line, trick, or technique will not generate attraction in any woman if you do not carry yourself confidently, because we evolved not to respond to clever words, but confident behavior. There is no confidence cheat-code or short-cut, but confidence can be built if you approach it like a skill.