How Do Men Fall In Love? 6 High Value Traits Men Routinely Fall In Love With

Author: Sarah Meyer & Renée Shen

How do men fall in love?

Well, it’s an emotional and biological process that is easy to trigger in men when you know how to do it, and are willing to do it. 

And when it comes to men and dating, there’s nothing more important inspiring a man to fall in love with you.

Why?

Because for a woman, a man who falls in love with you is offering you the highest form of value - his emotional resources. 

It’s relatively easy for women to get sex, attention, gifts and fun dates, although individual mileage can certainly vary there too! 

But a man who is in love with you, provided you love him back of course, will open up your world and your life in a powerful, transformative way.

He will give you far more than you ever imagined anyone could. 

And he’ll give completely different, unexpected things, too - things you didn’t even know you needed.

But first: why do men fall in love? 

It may come as a surprise to you, but men actually want to fall in love and commit to a woman, it’s just that many women don’t inspire that emotion in them.

And there’s a reason why they do want to fall in love. It’s because evolution - and biology - wants them to.

It benefits the woman, and it benefits the man and the children you have together in huge ways.

Now:

While no-one is perfect, and maybe even because no-one is perfect, a man who is in love is going to act completely differently to a man who is simply looking for sex and companionship. 

Part of the reason for this is due to the fact that when a man only wants sex with you, meaning that he hasn’t fallen in love and he considers you to be ‘one of many’ potential women, he doesn’t feel any emotions towards you.

And he won’t feel attached to you either. 

But a man being attached to you and feeling for you emotionally is what inspires the most valuable and desirable behavior from him. 

I’m talking the type of behavior that inspires deep envy from other women around you - because this is what every woman wants in a man:

• A man who protects her
• A man who only has eyes for her
• A man who can’t take his eyes off her, nor detach himself from her
• A man who wants to take care of her for life
• A man who cares deeply about how she feels and wants to make her happy in every possible way
• A man who is deeply and irreversibly emotionally invested in her and their children

Every woman covets that.

It’s just that many of us deny it or pretend we don’t, for fear that we could never have it.

Well, we can.

You can!

If you understand how men fall in love and why.

Before we discuss how men fall in love, it’s important to establish exactly why it’s important for a man to fall in love with you, rather than just coming together with you out of convenience.

For most of human history, women and their babies were dependent on men for protection and provision. 

Research with early humans (as well as our relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos), speculates that men played a key role in keeping male thieves and rapists away from the “nest”. 

If a female did not have a male around who was willing to protect her nest and her sexual resources, she would be vulnerable to wandering predators. 

It is also well-documented that paternal investment in offspring was critical to the survival of increasingly fragile human infants, born at earlier and earlier gestations as their heads evolved to be larger. 

This does not occur with chimpanzee babies, who are raised exclusively by females. 

And then we have the more obvious situations where if a man was in love with you, he being the man) would be doing a large proportion of the hunting, and he would share food with you.

He may also fight off wild animals and intruding tribesmen, protecting both you and the tribe as a whole from outside threats.

Of course, none of this is meant to suggest that women were weak or incapable in hunter-gatherer times. 

Women also hunted, and were very much capable of defending themselves, but they simply fared better when they had a man at their side. 

And this is how evolution works…

When something works better for us, it tends to persist, and it tends to shape our behaviour so that we associate a feeling of reward and a sense of desire with that particular thing. 

Because of these early conditions, we have evolved to share our lives (or at least, to share 4-5 year pair-bonds) with men, and to seek out emotional fulfilment through relationships with them.

Note that I said emotional fulfilment, because this is the key. 

It was not a woman’s casual sexual involvement or companionship that helped us obtain protection and provision from men in hunter-gatherer times. 

More on that: Think Casual Sex Is Harmless? Think Again.

Perhaps casual sexual involvement helped women to some extent, I am sure that it meant men would give them a little something, and as such it was better than nothing for women. 

But casual involvement with a man was simply not enough to inspire the kind of self-sacrificial, deeply invested behaviour from men that mattered in terms of women and children’s survival. 

Women were best taken care of when men fell in love with them.

Thinking about this today, we don’t necessarily need a man around to fight off other men, or to kill animals for us. 

Maybe we don’t even need him to change our tyres or fix the gutter anymore either. 

But being in love with a man is still one of the highest forms of meaning to us, and one of the most powerful sources of security, well-being, and happiness in our lives. 

It helps us raise our children well, and it helps us orient ourselves in the world and to cope with hardship and suffering. Or at least- it should. 

The problem is that women no longer have the right information or the right models in front of them to show them how to inspire love from men. 

On that note, did you know that there’s one specific emotional trigger inside of a man that you can appeal to to make him fall for you? 

CLICK HERE to Discover What Is The One Specific Emotional Trigger Within Every Single Man in this World That Inspires Him to WANT to Commit to One Woman, Want to Take Care of Her, Worship Her and Only Her?

How do men fall in love? 

Firstly, they don’t fall in love for the reasons that women think they do.

We are taught that we simply need to be the sexiest or the smartest woman available to him. 

But what happens then when we get old, or have children and can’t prioritise our careers anymore? 

I don’t know about you, but I’m really, really relieved that this actually isn’t how things work with men at all! 

This common misconception (that women need to be the sexiest and the smartest), is actually an ideal that’s closer to the way women choose partners. 

We seek a mate at the top of the social hierarchy, because it affords us more resources and better potential survival and reproductive success. 

Of course, we’re not cold-blooded connoisseurs either, but it’s useful to understand that when it comes to having a man fall in love with you, it doesn’t have very much to do with how impressive or skillful you are at all.

Instead what makes a man fall in love is your:

1. Mate value; and
2. Your ability to inspire him to feel emotional attraction and emotional connection for you

Related: 12 Powerful Signs Of Emotional Attraction From A Man.

In the early stages of dating, both men and women go through an often subconscious process of sizing up each other’s mate value. 

D.Shen shares more about this in his brilliant article on the Two Traits Of Women That Men Routinely Fall In Love With.

You can also watch his incredible video on this here:

As humans, we are naturally attuned to specific indicators of value that act as proxies for: 

• Fertility status
• Potential strong genetics that could be passed on to our children; and 
• Skills that we might be able to bring to a partnership

Some of this is indeed focused on physical appearance. 

For example, for men, the markers that characterise the best mates do include physical things like: 

• Waist-hip ratio
• General youthfulness; and 
• Hair length

So it wouldn’t be correct to say that sexiness or physical attractiveness don’t matter at all. 

But when it comes to the conundrum how do men fall in love, we need a lot more than just sex appeal or a fun personality. 

And we don’t need to be the sexiest option out there. 

We just need to demonstrate enough reproductive value to him to trigger his initial interest and attraction.

And this will of course depend on the individual man and what he is looking for, as well as the more specific traits that are more generally attractive to men. 

A man who is not at all attracted to you in the beginning is probably not going to fall in love with you. 

Once we get beyond the initial attraction, though, it’s much less important to focus on physical appearance. 

So how do men fall in love? 

Let’s look at 5 high value traits that men routinely fall in love with. 

Remember as you read through these, that we’re not wanting to just go around and get a whole bunch of men to fall in love with us. 

One-sided love is not true love, it’s just infatuation (as Renée describes in this article on How To Make Him Chase You & Value You). 

And one-sided love is a whole lot cheaper than the intimate, reciprocal process where two people fall into love together. 

With this in mind, it might be more helpful to think of these 5 traits as traits that help facilitate the mutual process of falling in love. 

As nurturers and life-givers, women have a natural capacity to care for others. 

We have many other capacities too, and these are valuable as well. But in terms of forming a special bond with a man and raising children with him, a caring personality is very important. 

According to one study, men rated women who seemed more kind and generous as more attractive than those who did not, even after controlling for physical attractiveness first. 

And this seems to be for good reason - it’s obvious that more nurturing maternal behaviour is better for babies, from rats to chimpanzees to humans. 

Beyond mothering, a caring personality is also a good indicator that you are not going to be a selfish, demanding partner. 

No-one wants to be paired with someone who is difficult to please and routinely requires a lot of resources. 

And while men are probably not going through the relationship keeping track of how emotionally generous you have been, he will naturally react to your energy in the relationship as the two of you spend time together. 

A partner who cares about you, who wants you to succeed, and who knows how to cooperate, support, and solve problems with you, is always going to make you feel better than a partner who mostly just takes from you. 

This is true regardless of whether you are a man or a woman. 

And we are all much likely to fall in love when we feel understood and cared for- when someone makes us feel special. 

So when we wonder to ourselves - how do men fall in love - often the answer simply is that men want a woman who cares about them. 

And this is really easy to do in theory, and especially in the early stages of a relationship. 

But what about when a man isn’t doing all the things that make you want to show him how much you care? 

What if you’re scared? 

What if you don’t want to “give too much”? 

This is where caring about a man goes beyond generic behaviour, and becomes truly high value.

And it is something that signals to him that he wouldn’t want to let you go.

Truly caring about a man means that even if he pulls away for a time or is focused on something else, you still show up with your interest, warmth, and responsiveness. 

You don’t just always go to punish him for supposedly neglecting you, and you don’t habitually distance yourself so that he has to do all the work to keep the relationship going. 

Instead, if a man is focused on something else, you allow him that space and you show an interest in what he’s doing, because his fulfilment and pride in himself matters to you. 

Similarly, if he makes a bad joke, if his feelings are important to you, you won’t just roll your eyes or cut him off for unintentionally hurting you. 

Because that would make him feel even worse about his bad joke, which was probably an attempt at connecting with you. 

So when you wonder how do men fall in love, know that you offering your attunement and understanding is one of the ways he will fall in love with you.

This is because you’re offering yourself vulnerably, which creates one important thing we discussed earlier:

An emotional connection.

This is what it means to care about someone else. 

It doesn’t mean that you have no boundaries, but it does mean that your man’s feelings are actually on your radar, and have an influence on your behaviour.

Being attuned to a man is similar to caring about him, and it’s also a prerequisite for caring. 

In this context, I’m describing a process by which you can understand your man’s cues, feelings, and intentions in a way that helps you respond to him and connect with him. 

This can be harder than we think it is because men and women can run some very different patterns.

Our hormones and biology lead us in different directions (although we can be similar in other ways). 

It’s especially challenging that some of the greatest triggers for fear and anxiety in women are actually some of the key ways men release their own fear and stress. 

For example, pulling away and focusing on a task is relieving for men, but when a man does this, it tends to stress women out or magnify their fear of abandonment. 

So, how do men fall in love?

One of the ways is by being attuned to you and by you being attuned to him.

Without this attunement, he cannot actually fall in love with you!

Now:

There’s a whole lot that goes into understanding a man and being attuned to him. 

To help you, here’s an article on How to Understand Men In Relationships: 5 Universal Truths.

Some of learning how to attune to a man is personal to him, and you’ll have to figure it out for yourself.

If you simply observe him and pay attention to the things that light him up, as well as the things that make him go quiet or get scared, you’ll know a lot more about him. 

Other things are more generic to men, like the fact that they can be a little less emotionally expressive than women. 

This doesn’t mean that your man doesn’t love you just as much as you love him.

Ultimately, if you are attuned to your man and willing to notice him and learn about him, you will show up as a high value woman in your relationship. 

It’s rare for a man to meet a woman that truly understands him. 

It’s also rare for a man to meet a woman who is actually interested in him and who he is, rather than just thinking about what he can do for her. 

When you show up as this woman, it will be incredibly hard for him to just forget about you.

Of course, a man needs to be attuned to you too, and to show this by adjusting his behaviour in response to yours as he gets to know you. 

Falling in love is not possible without a high level of mutual attunement. 

But if you are willing to take the lead on this and establish that deeper connection with a man in the early stages, this will make him far more likely to come back to you with the same kind of generosity. 

When a man meets you, he’s very quickly going to decide whether you’re the ‘one and only’ type of woman, or the ‘one of many’ type of woman.

I won’t go into this in great depth here, because it is a thesis in and of itself (and as if this article isn’t already a thesis), but this is an area that the relationship expert Renée Wade has plenty of insight on.

As Renée shares with us, men place the women they meet in one of two baskets:

1. The one of many basket, or
2. The one and only basket

How a man treats these two women is like night and day. 

And how a man feels about the women in these two baskets is also like night and day!

In fact, if you’re in the ‘one of many’ basket, he will have no feelings towards you at all.

He will just keep you around for as long as he needs to as a source of sex, attention and company.

However, if you show up with the 5 feminine traits of ‘the one and only’ woman, he will fall in love, be attached to you and want to take care of you for life.

Click here to find out more about our home study course “Becoming His One and Only”.

(The promise of this course is for you to have your chosen man fall in love with you & beg you to be his one & only by embodying these 5 feminine secrets, even if he’s been distant, avoidant, or losing interest…) 

Men tend to fall in love with women who are open to them. 

This can seem like a subtle trait, but it’s actually crucial and fundamental to deeply connecting with men. 

If you want to pick one thing to focus on, pick this one.  

Why? 

Because a woman’s openness brings out a different part of a man.

It inspires a different pattern of behaviour in him that builds polarity between the two of you and creates the conditions for deep, lasting emotional attraction.

Here are 8 Mistakes That Destroy Polarity With Men.

Let’s look at some specifics.  

If a man feels that a woman is open to him, that signals first of all that he has won her approval and acceptance. 

This is a great feeling for him, and, if he is a well-adjusted man who is attracted to you, this allows him to begin to trust you and invest in you emotionally. 

This process often begins quite early after meeting someone that you’re attracted to. 

In the early dating stages, you can demonstrate your openness by: 

• Smiling
• Laughing at a man’s jokes
• Letting yourself make mistakes in front of him; and 
• Asking him about him and his life

Your openness is particularly important for inviting a man into emotional intimacy with you. 

Emotional intimacy is not necessarily natural to men the way it is to women- so you need to be the one to trigger that in him and help him to form that bond with you. 

Here is ONE specific emotional trigger inside of every single masculine man in this world that makes him WANT to commit to you, take care of you and ONLY you for life.

Now, to build emotional intimacy, you need to be responsive to the things he does, and to show your genuine emotional reaction as the relationship progresses. 

You need to show him that you appreciate and value his presence in your life.

Specifically, you need to show him that:

• His praise and his attention can light you up and make you happy
• That you miss him when you’re apart, 
• That you are open to his advice and input; and
• That you don’t think you can solve all your problems by yourself

And when you have sex, you need to show him how this truly makes you feel - vulnerable and invested in him. 

You also need to be open to the pleasure that he can make you feel, and allow him to surprise you and show you parts of yourself you didn’t know were there.

In a good relationship, all of this will happen naturally. 

And in that sense, being open to a man simply means not suppressing and covering up all of those natural responses that you have as a woman. 

As much as we’re often taught not to be a burden to a man, he actually needs to feel needed and useful to you in order to fall in love with you. 

Otherwise, why would you be loyal to him?

Throughout your relationship with a man, being open to him continues to be really important. 

The process of falling in love (and staying in love) is to some extent about experiencing openness together, and slowly removing the barriers between you so that you share in each other’s joy and suffering. 

Try to remember that this openness is perhaps the greatest gift that you can give to a man. 

It is also the greatest source of meaning for the two of you as a couple, and it will go a long way towards creating a healthy relationship that can last a lifetime.

Much of the dating advice out there is based on gimmicky tips that encourage you to hold back your time, attention, approval and energy. 

The goal is to present these things as scarce resources that are difficult to obtain. 

To be perfectly honest, if you’re lucky,  this can work in terms of building attraction in a very superficial, short-lived way. 

Before a man truly has an opportunity to get to know you and intuit your value as a partner, you might be able to manipulate him into thinking that you’re better than you really are. 

And one way to do this is to make him feel like he has to work for your attention.  

The problem with this is, if you want a loving relationship with a man, he’s going to have to get to know you eventually. 

And that’s going to happen quickly - because humans are actually very responsive to signs of what we call high mate value. 

Sooner rather than later, your potential value to him as a mate will be all too apparent, flaws and all. 

So it really doesn’t serve you to try to keep this information from a man by trying to make him work harder for your time and attention. 

This may create short-term interest, but it will only delay the process of actually getting to know each other. 

Ultimately, this just leads to more pain and more wasted time. 

Playing power games like this also does you a massive disservice as a woman. 

It also makes it much harder to work out a man’s intent.

Because maybe he’s really enjoying the game, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to fall in love with you. 

His interest and his intrigue are cheap, and can easily shift to the next woman when he gets bored. 

MORE: 15 Sad Signs Your Boyfriend Is Losing Interest.

When we think about the question - how do men fall in love, we need to understand that we are aiming for emotional attraction and emotional connection. 

Here’s How to Build Emotional Attraction With A Man.

And in order to maximise emotional attraction and emotional connection, you and your man both need to show up as your full, unique selves, with all your natural capacity to care for and respond to each other. 

Otherwise, what is the point of having a relationship? It cannot happen if you play power games. 

In fact, if you play games, you come across low value. 

A desirable, high value man is going to notice scripted and fake behaviour, and he’s going to notice perfectionism and manipulation. 

Even if he doesn’t know exactly what’s going on at a conscious level, he will sense that what you’re doing feels off, and he will be repelled. 

The only men who will be attracted by this behaviour, in contrast, are more low value men, or narcissistic men. 

So if you want to fall in love with a high value man, and have him fall in love with you, throw away the play book and be willing to make mistakes. 

Open yourself up to pain and humiliation - and also to euphoria and connection. 

Note that this doesn’t mean that you should stop working on yourself, or stop trying to get out of your own head and  attune yourself to a man. 

Those things are valuable and necessary. 

But playing games to create short-lived excitement and attraction will get you exactly that: short-term results at the expense of long-term connection. 

Now: did you know that there are 7 common signs that a woman is low value in the eyes of all men?

Do You Know What These 7 Signs Are & How to Avoid Them Like the Plague? 

CLICK here to discover the 7 common signs that a woman is perceived as low value in the eyes of men in this special report. 

(Why is this important? Because men and women perceive value very differently and you don’t want to be making mistakes that would cause quality men to dismiss, abandon or alienate you.) 

The final trait that makes men fall in love is playfulness. 

This may not be an obvious one - most  people would guess things like physical attributes or career success instead. 

But playfulness is actually really important, both intrinsically and because it is associated with many other signs of high mate value. 

Playfulness brings an infinite quality to a relationship.

It fosters things like:

• Unpredictability
• Growth; and 
• Resilience

Playful women are more likely to be securely attached, and they tend to be better at building attraction with men, a process that ideally continues throughout a long term relationship and marriage. 

By the way, if you’re curious to know whether you’re securely attached or insecurely attached, you’re in luck because we have a women-specific quiz that can help you find out.

QUIZ TIME: Do I have secure or insecure attachment patterns? CLICK HERE to find out with our specially crafted women-specific 10 Question Quiz!

(Why is this important? It is because your core attachment style largely dictates and influences what happens in your relationship. Thus it’s imperative you understand your core attachment style!)

Playfulness has infinite value in your romantic relationship and in getting a man to fall in love.

Humour and fun are great at reducing tension and creating connection, and they are also sustaining in hard times and times of suffering. 

While women may be more attracted to masculine humour and wit, it seems that men are attracted to a playful disposition in a woman. 

A woman’s playfulness signals that she is open to the man, and that she appreciates what is special about him. 

She will be able to laugh at his jokes and enjoy and respond to his humour, which will help him feel her loyalty and respect. 

Playfulness also indicates that a woman trusts a man, enough to suspend her sense of certainty and control. 

Having just begun to venture into this kind of trust with a man myself, I can say that this is no small thing. 

It says a lot about what I think of him, and about who he is as a person. 

When we think about the question, how do men fall in love, playfulness is a great place to start. 

There are a lot of movies that depict playful beginnings to relationships that end up lasting a lifetime- like, spoiler alert, in the Notebook.

If you’re serious about becoming more playful and would like to discover unique and high value ways to incorporate more playfulness into your personality, look no further than playful banter.

Specifically, you’ll benefit from utilising the dark feminine art of high value banter. 

David Shen, the co-founder of NCRW and The Feminine Woman has a free class on High Value Banter.

CLICK Here to Take the Free Class and Discover What the Dark Feminine Art Of High Value Banter Is.

If you’d like to apply some of this knowledge about how men fall in love to online dating, here’s something special…

Here’s a quick video from Renée on The one Trait of Dating Profiles That Men Fall In Love With:

Ultimately, none of us gets to answer the question of how do men fall in love without falling in love ourselves. 

We can’t just use this to stay one step ahead of men so that we can feel in control. 

It only works when you’re responsive and ready to open yourself up to the possibility of pain, loss, euphoria, and fulfilment.

So many of us are not truly willing to do this. 

This really is more of a practice - a practice of openness to life - than it is a process of making sure all trauma has been dealt with so that you're “ready” to fall in love. 

Finally, let’s answer some frequently asked questions on the topic of “how do men fall in love”.

Some studies have suggested that men may fall in love within around 88 days. 

They may be faster to fall in love than women, and they’re likely to express their affection earlier on than women. 

This may reflect differences in male and female biology, where women are naturally more cautious than men about who they fall in love with.  

Women carry more risks and burden if they choose the wrong partner, so they are slower at falling in love. 

This was especially true before the invention of the contraceptive pill and when infant mortality rates were high. 

In the modern social environment, however, it may be the case that men face more risks through divorce court and marital legislation than they did before. 

It’s also certainly not true that men did not face any costs for falling in love in a primal environment - because generally speaking this would mean that they did not pursue other mating opportunities, at least for a long period of time.

It may also be the case that for men, falling in love with a woman is more of a unique bonding experience than it is for a woman. 

Women often have close, deep emotional connections with other women. 

But men’s friendships tend to have a very different emotional quality, with connection built on shared experiences and interests.  

Perhaps once a man goes through the process of opening himself up to a woman and becoming emotionally invested in her, it’s very hard for him to hold back because most likely, he hasn’t felt anything like this before.

According to evolutionary theory, men who are looking for long-term partners pay attention to characteristics that indicate a woman will be a good, invested mother. 

This happens at a subconscious level, even if the man does not want to have children. 

After all these years of evolution, we are to some extent hard-wired to find these kinds of characteristics appealing, because they are good for our genes. 

Maternal characteristics that are attractive to men include include:  

• Compassion
• Altruism (cooperativeness)
• Generosity
• Loyalty; and 
• Openness 

Men are also drawn to personality traits that indicate that a woman will be a good partner. 

These include signs of 

• Emotional availability
• Secure attachment; and 
• Trust

Generally speaking, men are more likely to fall in love with women who are playful, open, trusting, who look up to them, and who approach him with warmth and caring.

Studies estimate that it takes men between 88-97 days on average to express their love for a woman they are dating. 

For men under 35, 20% of them will declare their love within a week. 

Ultimately, the time that it takes for a man to fall in love depends on how you met and how much time you’re spending together.

It also depends on how confident he is that you love him in return. 

But it’s clear that the process of falling in love is usually in full force after about 3 months of dating.

If you would like help with your personal situation or to get coaching with Sarah, CLICK HERE.

Sarah Meyer

Sarah has a Masters in psychology and works as a special education advisor in early childhood. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand, with her partner and two children. She has a passion for evolutionary psychology, attachment theory, and personality psychology.

CLICK HERE to get coaching with Sarah.

Renée Shen

Author & Editor For National Council for Research on Women. Founder of the popular women's dating & relationship advice website, The Feminine Woman and co-founder of NCRW.

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