At a basic human level, sex is costlier for women than it is for men. For a woman, sex can lead to months of pregnancy followed by years of child-rearing.

Understandably then, women have evolved to become masterfully efficient at distinguishing potential suitable partners from everyone else.

It’s like women’s instincts are measuring guys up against a checklist of alpha male qualities, which then trigger feelings of attraction, if and when enough boxes are ticked.

4) Attraction is built (almost) instantly

It doesn’t take months or years to steadily build attraction with women, or even hours of time spent on dates. It really only takes a few minutes to spark attraction; actually, four minutes or less, to be exact.

When I look back at how I discovered this, the clues were staring me in the face all along:

• Hiring managers typically decide on whether the candidate is successful within the first few minutes of the job interview. They then spend the remainder of the interview looking for evidence to support and confirm that decision.

• Malcolm Gladwell calls this process thin-slicing. It’s a natural human tendency to see a glimpse of something (or a ‘thin-slice’) and then infer conclusions from it. Just like when someone cuts you off when you’re driving, you automatically think that the other driver is an inconsiderate person in all other aspects of their life too.

• And of course, Hollywood figured this mental shortcut out decades ago. Why do you think movie trailers are only 2-3 minutes long? Because billions of movie marketing dollars have been spent figuring out that it only takes a few minutes of clips to convince you to spend a couple of hours of your time and your hard-earned cash on a trip to the movies.

So I researched this phenomenon and sure enough, there’s now a growing body of scientific evidence showing that women report feeling attracted to a guy, within just a few minutes of meeting him.