Everyone has a girlfriend voice. It’s the voice you use when you’re talking to your significant other, and you want to sound beautiful, sultry and sweet. It’s the voice you use when you’re talking to your lover before the two of you drift off into a lovely sleep. I don’t know about you, but when I’m talking and joking with my best friend, I sound like an guffawing 26 year old man. Yes, I even switch genders. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but the undeniable truth is that I would never use the voice I use with my best friend to speak with a significant other.

In all the times that I have heard people using their girlfriend voices, I have noticed three major defining characteristics:

1. The pitch rises a couple of octaves.

2. The volume gets turned down quite a few notches.

3. The voice used bears a striking similarity to the voice one would use to speak with a small cat.

If the phone call is made from a bed, two additional defining characteristics emerge:

1. Vowels are drawn out for longer periods of time, speech is slower.

2. Seductive, sultry breathy quality skyrockets.

At this point, the man or woman on the receiving end is rendered helpless. Take me, baby.

I don’t know what it is about the girlfriend voice. Maybe the softness in the voice creates a sense of intimacy. It feels special to be talked to in a soft, sweet and soothing voice, especially when the woman in question speaks to everyone else like she’s a frat boy at a football game. The girlfriend voice says, “You’re special to me.” “You make me feel soft inside.” And that’s enough to send the butterflies inside me into a delightful frenzy – fluttering in a dance that rushes in waves from my head to my toes.