Spring into life - get ready for love in 2010!

It has been a very long winter.

You've been wrapped up tight in woolly jumpers, thermal socks, tracksuit bottoms and thick leggings since mid-December.

But, with the sun finally emerging, it's time to ditch the winter gear, dump the winter blues and emerge for spring.

You're probably feeling a bit stale and grey. So here's some simple tips to make you feel like you're fit and ready for spring dating, whether you're male or female:

• Have a good haircut and get rid of all that wayward, wispy stuff that's been keeping you warm all winter!


• Bite the bullet and put away all your winter clothes


• Chuck out, recycle or donate tatty summer gear from 2009


• Spring clean your place so that when you meet someone special they won't run screaming from the chaos


• Indulge in some self-examination, poke around inside your head a bit, identify what went wrong last time you dated and vow not to do it again!


• Open yourself up to the possibility that your 'type' might not be your type at all. Be more flexible about who you date. Even if you don't fancy the pants off a person at first sight, you might fall madly in love with them completely unexpectedly. That's often what love's about, hitting you hard when you least expect it... so let it in


• Promise yourself to go to new places and try new things, going way outside your usual comfort zone. It'll give you a huge buzz, a new lease of life. When you feel excited and inspired people will be drawn to you like a magnet


• Drop the negative attitude. If you wander the planet endlessly bemoaning the fact that you can't find love, you probably won't find it. Decide this is the year, open up your heart and wait for it to hit you!

Love is blind... but science isn't!

Shakespeare said that love is blind. He was right. Research shows that people in love pay much less visual attention to attractive people than singles.

Jon Maner and colleagues, based at Florida State University, have been testing the theory on students. He said, "We found that when people just thought about being in love with their current partner, their visual attention got repelled, rather than grabbed, by an attractive member of the opposite sex,"

It's true. I'm in love, and I only have eyes for my lover. Everyone else pales into insignificance... even Jonny Depp, and that's going some! The last thing on my mind is looking for someone else.

Maner and his team believe this phenomenum might help explain why people who are in love don't tend to wander off in search of other mates. Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales commented, "Psychologists have long had a problem explaining the functions of romantic love: a very strong emotion that sometimes seems to take over our lives and lead to what appear to be irrational feelings and actions. What these studies suggest is that romantic love serves a very important function, tempering our natural desire to pay attention to, and to continuously seek out, the best available mate."

In other words, we've probably evolved this subconscious visual rejection of attractive potential partners because committed relationships give our children a big evolutionary advantage. As humans evolved over the millennia, long term monogamous relationships improved the chances that children would make it to adulthood. The strong - the children of monogamous parents - survived and carried on a tradition that eventually became hard wired into our subconscious.

Love is blind... but science certainly isn't!