Pick something that gets the heart going and you’ll come across as more attractive. There’s real science behind it, and it’s on your side.

The dinner date is the default for a reason. It’s easy to suggest and hard to argue with. It’s also, for a first meeting, a slightly strange choice. You sit across a table from a near-stranger under bright lights, signed up for at least an hour, with nothing to do but talk and eat and pray the conversation doesn’t stall between courses. When an awkward silence lands, there’s nowhere to put it. And if you’re nervous, which most of us are, it shows.

There’s a better way to spend a first date, and psychologists have been quietly pointing at it since the 1970s.

The wobbly bridge

Picture a narrow footbridge slung about 70 metres above a river canyon just outside Vancouver. It sways as you walk. The handrails are low. Crossing it, your heart thumps and your palms go damp whether you like it or not.

In 1974, two psychologists, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron, had a woman wait at the far end of that bridge and approach men as they came off it. She asked each of them a few survey questions, then offered her phone number in case they wanted to hear how the study turned out. Then they ran the exact same routine on a second bridge, low, sturdy and frightening to nobody.

The men who’d crossed the scary bridge were far more likely to call her. Something about that crossing had made her more appealing. And the giveaway detail: the effect vanished when the interviewer was a man, and it vanished on the safe bridge. The write-up ran in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology under a title that rather gives the game away, “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety.”

Why the body gets confused

So what actually happened? The men’s bodies were doing what any body does on a wobbly bridge: racing heart, quick breath, a jittery hum of adrenaline. The catch is that a racing heart and a quick breath feel almost exactly the same whether you’re frightened or smitten. Handed those signals with an attractive person standing right there, the men’s brains reached for the more flattering explanation. Not “this bridge is terrifying,” but “she’s doing this to me.”

Psychologists call it the misattribution of arousal. It grows out of an old and rather likeable idea: that we work out our own feelings partly by reading the situation we’re in, not purely from what our pulse is doing. Put simply, the buzz has to be about something, and a good-looking face is a very tempting place to pin it.

And it isn’t only a first-date trick. When Aron and colleagues later looked at established couples, the ones who regularly did novel, mildly exciting things together, rather than the same comfortable routine, reported happier relationships. Shared buzz seems to help at every stage, not just the start.

Before you book a skydive

Now for the honest part. The bridge study is fifty years old, it’s been prodded and re-run with mixed results, and the effect is real but modest, not a love potion you can bottle. Nobody is promising that a climbing wall turns a so-so match into the love of your life. What the research points to is gentler and more useful than that: a bit of shared excitement gives a new connection a lift, and its absence, two strangers pinned to a table, gives it very little to work with.

Better first dates

So you don’t need a canyon. You just need a first date with a pulse: a little energy, a bit of novelty, and something to do with your hands so every pause isn’t a small emergency. A few that do the job:

• Mini-golf or a few rounds of darts. Gentle competition, plenty to laugh at, and nobody has to hold eye contact for an hour.
• A climbing wall. Even as total beginners, you get instant teamwork and a shared “did we really just do that.”
• A walk to a view. A coast path, a hill, a headland. Talking side by side is far easier than talking across a table, and the scenery does some of the work for you.
• Ice skating, a food market, a gig, a paddle on flat water. All of them hand you a shared experience instead of an interview.

The thread running through them isn’t danger. It’s a bit of a buzz, something new to both of you, and an easy exit if the spark doesn’t show up. A coffee you can leave after twenty minutes beats a three-course dinner you’re trapped inside for two hours. For something closer to home, our guide to unique dates in Sydney is a good model for the kind of thing that works, and it’s easy to borrow wherever you live.

Save dinner for later

None of this bans dinner. It’s lovely once you already like each other and a silence feels comfortable rather than fatal. For a first meeting, though, give yourselves something to do. Get outside, get a little way out of your comfort zone, and let your heart race for reasons that have nothing to do with the bill. Keep the candlelit table for date three, when you’ve earned it.

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The science here comes from Dutton and Aron’s 1974 bridge study and later work by Aron and colleagues on novel, arousing activities. The effect is well known but modest, so treat it as a fun nudge rather than a guarantee.

Sources

• The suspension-bridge study: Dutton & Aron (1974), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
• How the effect works: misattribution of arousal (overview)
• Novel, arousing activities and couples: Aron et al. (2000), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology