When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

Strategy is the enemy of attraction, mostly because people can feel it. Calculated warmth reads as a performance even when the calculation is well meant, and what it draws in is somebody responding to the performance rather than to you. Leading with actual feeling is riskier and slower, and it is the only approach that produces something you can keep.

The practical version is unglamorous: say the plain thing instead of the clever thing. Tell someone you were glad to see them, without the joke that lets you take it back. Being genuinely known is the point, and you cannot be known through a strategy you would be embarrassed to describe out loud.