Scientists Identified 29 Sexual Signals Your Partner Is Sending

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So there I was, on a Friday night, horny, deploying my secret weapon…The Sex Look.

I have patented The Look. It is a proprietary blend of Bridgerton, Lauren Bacall, and a peer-reviewed level of mammalian mating confidence. It’s not a pornographic look. I would describe The Look as the general erotic temperature of “The dishwasher is loaded and nobody has a fever.”

My system has four trademarked steps.

Step one: tilt the neck.

Pheromones live in the neck — this is science. I read about it somewhere. (Don’t look it up unless you shop at Goop.) The apocrine glands are involved, so tilting the neck releases them into the local airspace. Just tilt your head slightly down, like a woman who already knows where the body is buried.

Marilyn Monroe perfected the Look, and if it worked for Marilyn…okay, bad example.

Step two: narrow the eyes.

Not all the way. You need to see your target. About 60 percent closed.

Step three: Smile. Sort of.

The mouth does a thing. The mouth thing is harder to describe, and I will not describe it on Substack, but you have seen it in a movie. You know the mouth thing.

Step four: wait.

I waited.

I waited some more.

As my grandmother Ella used to say, if subtlety doesn’t work, stop whispering into the soup and ask for the salt. So I added some salty words.

“Babe, why isn’t my sex look working tonight?”

He looked up from his phone. Genuine confusion.

“Sex look?”

“My sex look. You know, the one I do when I want to do things to you.”

“You have a sex look???”

What followed was an embarrassingly annotated lecture on my facial choreography. I explained the neck. The eyes. The mouth. The Goop science. The apparently exquisite emotional ballet I had been performing for years, like Martha Graham in a TJ Maxx nightshirt. And it turns out, I have been giving myself neck cramps and eye wrinkles for nothing.

Trust me on this one. If you have to give a TED Talk about your sex signals, your sex signals are not working.

But once I realized I had been seducing a man with the communicative power of a malfunctioning porch light, I had one sane thought: I cannot be the only one. Somewhere in America, a woman is arching one eyebrow with the confidence of Cleopatra while her partner thinks, “She hates the curtains.” Somewhere, a man is touching his partner’s shoulder with what he believes is unmistakable intent while she thinks, “He wants me to move so he can find the charger.”

And then I found the Canadians.

There’s an entire forty-year body of peer-reviewed research on exactly this — on heterosexual couples missing each other’s sexual signals. Canadian psychologists built a 29-item inventory of common sexual advance behaviors, then tested how well partners read them.

So we are going to test your ability to read your partner’s sex signals.

For those of you not old enough to remember kitchy game shows, the original Newlywed Game was a 1960s show in which Bob Eubanks asked recently-married couples invasive questions about each other and then watched them publicly discover they had married a complete stranger.

We are doing that. Except instead of “where is the strangest place you’ve ever made whoopee,” we are going to ask the question researcher Kiersten Dobson built a career out of: when one of you does any of these 29 sex signals, what does the other one think it means? And how often are you wrong?

Here is how it works:

1. Print the quiz. Or open it on two devices. Each of you takes the quiz separately. No peeking.

2. For each scenario, answer twice. First, what YOU meant when you made that come-hither look (insert your preferred sex move). Second, what you READ when your PARTNER does the same move.

3. Then trade. Count your sex signal mismatches.

After the quiz, we will discuss what the research says about your answers — why some partners are not picking up what you are putting down, why some partners take a ball they were never handed and sprint into traffic with it, and how your own habits as an initiator or rejecter may be quietly rigging how you read everyone else. Lastly, we will discuss the single cleanest finding wrecking most sex lives. (Hint: It’s not the look.)

Let’s get started…