IN New York, you don't have an entire evening to waste wondering if your date is The One.

But you do have a solid five minutes.

So, in the spirit of keeping painful evenings to a one-drink minimum, we've collected the top 20 cues to tell whether tonight's date is the best thing to ever happen to you - or just another great reason to get an unlisted phone number.

"You have to pay attention to everything that someone makes you feel," says psychoanalyst Bethany Marshall, whose new book, "Deal Breakers," examines personality types to handle with care. "Feeling possessed, idealized, anxious is not the same as being in love."

We also don't have that much control over what traits we're exhibiting, making it that much easier to break someone down, says Greg Hartley, a former Army interrogator and author of the new body-language tome "I Can Read You Like a Book."

"Humans are pretty primitive creatures," he says. "We want to think we're much more advanced, but we're not very different than apes. Any time a person's aroused, you can see in the face the cheeks are flushed, the lips are more full and the pupils will dilate."

Concludes our third and final five-minute dating expert, Lisa Clampitt, executive director of the Matchmaking Institute in New York: "In the caveman era, they would assess for size and skin color. We're still back in that world of assessing: Is this person friend or foe?"

With these romantic words in mind, check your stopwatches, and let's get ready to judge!