How Guys Measure First Impressions: The 22/30 Scale

A few good friends of mine have come up with a formula to quantify their early impressions of the women they seek out, meet or begin dating. It's pretty simple: the total possible score is 30 points, which breaks down into 10 points for a woman's face and looks, 10 points for physical attraction (her body), and 10 points for her personality. If this sounds incredibly shallow that's because it is; but first impressions are always shallow, and some aspects of this unfiltered, realistic window into how guys size up women in the early going might just surprise you...

It turns out none of my guy friends is under the illusion that he will ever meet (or be worthy of) a 30-point woman. So when this conversation started, there was an intense debate over how many points are realistic to look for. After a lot of haggling, it was decided that 22 points was a reasonable number. A 22-point woman, my friends concluded, is a woman who actually exists, someone attainable who you might just have a future with.

The conversation got even more interesting (or ridiculous, depending on your point of view) when it turned to how to allot these 22 points. My friend Jason tried to keep things balanced: he thought he'd give 7 points each to face and personality, and add the extra point for a physical attraction score of 8. Carl, on the other hand, wanted to give a full 10 points to a woman's face, leaving 7 for personality and just 5 for her body. Jason scoffed. John thought his best chance at something meaningful would come with 9 points for personality, 7 for body, and 6 for her looks. Jason then waffled and upped his physical attraction score to 9, and the debate continued like this for awhile.

By the time our friend Evan showed up, everyone had more or less solidified his preferences, and Jason and Carl were busy rating the women they'd dated recently. But Evan is happily engaged and getting married this summer. So he jumped in with a different take: wasn't it all kind of pointless if you didn't get a 10 personality? Evan admitted that looks are crucial at first, but he also swore he never would have gotten engaged with anyone less than an 11-point personality, someone he fit with in more ways than he could have ever imagined. Jason, Carl and John all got quiet and nodded. No one could really argue with that. But no one else had found that perfect thing, either, so pretty soon the rating game got started right back up again, with Carl and John bickering about how to rate a woman they had both dated, and Evan just watching and smiling.

Why would I share these obnoxious insights into the way guys think? I can name at least three reasons why this information could be a lot more useful to you than it might first appear. For starters, even in a tiny sample of three guys, you can see that no one agreed about what's most important in a first impression. For Carl it was looks, for Jason physical attraction, and for John it was that early hint of the right personality. The lesson here is that even with a shallow, completely oversimplified rating system, it's still obvious that guys are looking for different qualities in women: the wrong combination for one guy can be the perfect one for another. So, keep in mind that (1) if one guy doesn't sweat your mix of qualities, it doesn't mean that same mix won't knock another fella's socks off.

Further, there was hardly any agreement when my friends tried to rate the women they dated who we all knew. A face that one guy rated at just a 6, another thought was an 8 for her great eyes; a body one thought was a 9 dropped in at a 5 for someone else because she was too skinny (see my post on how guys see beauty for more insight). So (2) not only do guys look for different qualities in the early going, but they also evaluate those qualities in very different ways, another argument for your unique look being a hit with the right dude.

Finally, not only did Evan contribute wisdom about what's actually meaningful in the long run, but no one ever asked him to rate his own fiancee. Not because she's not attractive, or cool (she's both), but because everyone knew that was something sacred. The unspoken understanding that came into the room with Evan was that when you found that thing, there was no point anymore in rating it. The whole system just went out the window. So to finish, (3) you can forget about all of it when you make a real connection, because you're going to rate a string of 11s for the right guy, and you better make sure he does for you, too.