Any valid claim about what's attractive must be traceable to the ancestral environment — a harsh setting, tribes of roughly 50 people — because what was attractive there is what remains attractive now, independent of modern logic about what "should" be attractive. This functions as a diagnostic test: before trusting a new attraction idea, ask whether it would have made sense for survival/reproduction in a small ancestral tribe.
A companion principle: almost every attractive behavior carries a simultaneous unattractive trade-off (e.g., having an amazing life is attractive, but announcing it is not — see Self-Disqualifying Value Framing (Positive as Negative)). The skill isn't avoiding every mistake; it's clustering enough net-attractive behaviors that isolated slips stop mattering. One recognized exception: when arousal is high but comfort/safety is low, a net-unattractive move like qualifying yourself is still worth making to reassure her.
Social proof functions as a life-or-death evolutionary signal under this frame — women are hyper-responsive to seeing others react positively to a man, sometimes flipping a lukewarm reaction into strong attraction. See Social Proof as a Status Metric.
Source: The Science of Attraction (YouTube).