Along with all the other nightmares that come with dating, the question of whether the person you are doing it with actually likes you is certainly up there in terms of sources of stress. In one study which set people speed dating and monitored the results, researchers found an unusual sign to look out for; how they are swaying their bodies. You don't need IFLScience to tell you that throughout life, we give away a lot of unconscious signals through our body language.

Smiling all the way to the eyes, for example, can show familiarity, whilst clutching your stomach and rubbing it might indicate you are in severe need of a poop, if my own children are anything to go by. As well as this, how well your own body movements sync up with the people around you can tell onlookers a few things about your relationship. Researchers from Mc Master's LIVELab were initially interested in looking into 'interpersonal synchronization' as people's movements start to sync up when performing a simple task.

But with the equipment at hand already, in 2018 the team turned their attention to speed dating. “We don’t usually look at romantic relationships,” lead author Andrew Chang explained in a statement at the time. “What we were interested in at the beginning was how people work together to do something simple, like move an object. From a previous study, we developed a tool that can measure how individuals cooperate with each other based on their body language – more specifically, their body sway.” Chang and the team attempted to find out whether it was possible to tell whether potential romantic partners were interested in each other by analyzing their body sway, and how well their bodies swayed in sync with each other.