Could Your Voice Be Holding You Back From Dating Success?

People tend to devote a lot of time to thinking about the opposite sex; not often do you come across someone who spends any time thinking about how those desirable people actually sound when they talk. This, however, is not the way the conscious mind deals with attraction. As far as the unconscious mind is concerned, voice is a pretty important part of the package.

Why should these two parts of your brain have different priorities?

Our conscious minds are shaped by the lives we live today – what our friends say, what our favorite movies and books encourage us to think and so on. Our UNconscious minds, on the other hand, aren't really in touch with what our society is like today. This part of our mind is far slower to catch up. As far as it is concerned, we still live in caves and attract the opposite sex with cave drawings and the ability to hunt well. It still tends to judge attractiveness in the opposite sex in ways that made more sense thousands of years ago than they do today.

Voice quality tends to be an important clue to mating suitability among animals that are lower down on the evolutionary ladder. As far as the unconscious part of her mind is concerned, we are the same as all those animals. When women are asked in surveys about what kind of skin complexion or level of facial hair they prefer in a man, their answers are all over the map. They even tend to disagree about whether a rich man makes a better mate than one who is not. They disagree because they use their conscious minds.

When women are asked to judge a man for suitability purely based on the sound of his voice, though, they have exactly one answer – the deeper the voice, the better. Women's first thoughts when they hear a man with a deep voice is that he is probably wonderfully attractive and successful.

Men associate depth of voice with attractiveness and dating success, too – their own. There have been many interesting experiments conducted over the years that grant us interesting insights here. In one experiment, male test subjects were called in to compete with another man for a date with an attractive woman. Both the woman and the competing men were only accessible over the phone. The researchers would let each test subject speak first to the competing man (who was only a stooge of the researchers and not a real competitor) and then to the woman whom they were supposed to win over (another associate of the researchers).

Researchers going over the tapes at the end of the study, found one clear pattern – when the test subjects thought that the competing man was too good for them, they unconsciously used a higher voice pitch when they subsequently spoke to the woman. When they judged themselves much better than the competing man, they spoke to the woman in a lower-pitched voice. Apparently, when men feel that they have a real chance, they try to get an extra edge by lowering their voice. When they know that they don't have a chance, they use a higher voice – in a personal sign of defeat.

Women unconsciously change their voice and style of speaking, too. Ovulating women tend to use smoother voices when they speak to men. In fact, there is research to show that men tend to find the voices of the women who are ovulating much more attractive than at other times of the month.

Our unconscious minds don't judge people by the quality of their voice only when there is a little genetic success in the balance. There are studies by researchers in advertising, for instance, that find that people respond far better to certain kinds of voice pitches.

In one experiment, researchers had practiced speakers speak about a couple of topics – one controversial and the other not. They then electronically raised and lowered the pitches of these voices (without making them sound unnatural) and played them to test subjects. The results were quite emphatic – irrespective of the messages being expressed, listeners tended to trust lower-pitched voices more than higher-pitched ones. Speakers who spoke quickly were judged to be more trustworthy, intelligent and energetic, too (this may explain why television advertisers, successful politicians and glib salesmen like to talk fast).

While studies like these are mainly meant for advertisers, they can teach the dating public a few tricks, too. If you tend to have a high-pitched and halting speech style (whether you are a man or a woman), you could be restricting your own chances. You may want to practice with friends or family, or even consider taking voice and speech lessons for better results.