Maybe you are not getting many dates. Or maybe you have the occasional hot first date that never leads to second date or to a happy relationship. This article is about how changing your focus leads to dating success. Psychology Today writes about the fatal flaw in dating advice.

Most dating advice promises to lead us to lasting love, but erodes our chance of ever finding it. It relentlessly focuses on one thing – your attractiveness. In reality, the secret to success is less about your attractiveness, and more about your attractions.

The list is endless: Learn to be irresistible. Play hard to get. Act confident. Become an alpha man. Attract an alpha man. Become a feminine goddess. Become a bitch.  These tips shine with the promise of self-transformation, but embedded within is an ugly Trojan Horse – the belief that, when it really comes down to it, you’re simply not attractive enough.

That’s not to say that becoming more attractive isn’t a great thing; it is. It’s a gift to ourselves and to our future partner. Yet when it becomes our primary path to finding love, it’s like being slowly poisoned, without ever knowing the source.

Remember when we wrote about how online dating kills the chance of mixed attractiveness relationships?

Here is one more complaint about new dating apps. They kill the chance of mixed-attractiveness relationships. Think of the movie Roxanne with Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah. Hannah’s character, Roxanne, is a striking beauty whereas Charlie, played by Martin, has a huge nose which distorts his features. In the 1987 movie Roxanne comes to love intelligent, resourceful and poetic Charlie despite his unattractive looks when she gets to know him. That would never happen today if the two of them used dating apps!

If we all weren’t in such an all fired hurry for sex on the first date maybe we could find more friends, even the elusive and poetic Charlie from Roxanne. In this regard APS (Association for Psychological Science) writes that longer acquaintance levels the romantic playing field.

Partners who become romantically involved soon after meeting tend to be more similar in physical attractiveness than partners who get together after knowing each other for a while, according to new findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“Our results indicate that perceptions of beauty in a romantic partner might change with time, as individuals get to know one another better before they start dating,” says lead researcher Lucy Hunt of the University of Texas at Austin. “Having more time to get acquainted may allow other factors, such as another person’s compatibility as a relationship partner, to make that person appealing in ways that outshine more easily observable characteristics such as physical attractiveness. Or perhaps another person might actually become more attractive in the eyes of the beholder by virtue of these other factors.”

It turns out that opinion about desirability changes with the length of acquaintance. Factors such as sense of humor and honesty come to light and overshadow physical attractiveness, especially if the physical attractiveness is not combined with other positive features.

In short, change your focus from your attractiveness and the attractiveness of your new friend to things like sense of humor, interest in the things of life and honesty. This leads to more enjoyable dating and lasting relationships.