“Everything you’ve been told about dating is wrong” | Dr Paul Eastwick
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Host notes that past guests and education on mating dynamics and relationship science have been informed by an evolutionary perspective. Dr. Paul Eastwick's new book takes an opposing perspective to much of the evolutionary psychology position.
Eastwick clarifies it's not a standard nature-nurture debate. He proposes a different way of talking about human nature and how humans evolve to form relationships, which is missing in current discourse, motivating him to write the book.
Eastwick's background: Scholar of close relationships in the field of relationship science, within social and personality psychology tradition, with connections to clinical psychology and family studies. Informed by evolutionary perspective, but different—emphasizes attachment perspectives with deep evolutionary roots from Bowlby onward.
Eastwick criticizes it for overestimating features of human mating:
- Big emphasis on mate value (some people more desirable than others).
- Emphasis on gender differences (men and women very different in mating).
- Emphasis on short-term vs long-term mating distinction (some good at one or the other).
These lead to misconceptions. Relationship science view focuses on attachment, compatibility, and forming relationships through small networks.
Host agrees many conversations cover short-term vs long-term and sex differences in preferences.
Mating market term ubiquitous in evolutionary psychology; Eastwick's problem: Frames relationships as competition based on desirability.
Mating market describes initial attraction among strangers well (e.g., bar, party)—people agree on desirable people (tens get attention, twos hang out in corner), feels competitive.
Research shows this phase is short-lived, especially with repeated interactions in groups. Consensus on attractiveness fades over time, reducing competitive market feel.
Example: Initial hot-or-not judgments between two people agree 70-75% (vs 50/50 chance). Online swiping creates this sense of tens and twos.
With repeated meetings:
- Agreement drops to 65%, then 60%.
- Among friends/acquaintances known for months/years: 53% agreement on hotness or datability.
Reason: As people get known, appeal diverges idiosyncratically—some become more appealing (e.g., great sense of humor), others less. Different perceivers diverge on same target.
"I'm a six. I'm not going to date a 10. But I might get to date somebody who I think is a 10 and maybe she thinks I'm a 10. That's where the magic is. That's how people form stable committed relationships because they're able to get in a relationship where they aren't really thinking that much about trading up cuz they think they won the lottery even if other people don't agree."
Consensus key: Studies use rating scales (e.g., out of 10), measure shared variance.
Initial attraction (hot button) needed to pass front door (e.g., broad shoulders, waist-to-hip ratio, long hair, good teeth/skin)—equivalent to swiping right.
Divergence requires repeated interaction beyond initial cutoffs. Online dating exemplifies quick judgments, but other contexts force ongoing interaction (school, work)—no opt-out.
Advice: For those not initially 9-10, use methods with repeated exposure (sports leagues, dance/cooking classes) to allow idiosyncrasies to emerge. Modern online dating deluge has lost this.
Host: ~40% relationships start online (dating apps); up to 50-60% including social media. Bars, friend intros limit repeat exposure.
Evolutionary mismatch: Ancestrally in small groups (Dunbar's number 150, pod of 30), daily exposure.
Office plus two: UK term for coworker who seems 6/10 initially but becomes 8/10 with daily exposure. Eastwick adds office minus twos exist; spread increases over time (plus/three/fours).
Modern dating expects instant sweep-off-feet, missing many people's strengths. Traditional organic meetings gave more chances.
Even first meetings (speed dating): Compatibility as strong or stronger than consensus. Face-to-face (speed dating, parties) better than online swiping.
Evolutionary approach sees mating as hierarchy of romantic inequality; online dating exacerbates it.
EP story: Improve attributes to trade up; date at your level (six with six) for stability, or risk partner trading up.
Data: Mate value matches/mismatches don't predict relationship outcomes (duration, happiness, cheating).
"Who you click on doesn't necessarily correlate with who you click with. We're not necessarily great judges of our own type."
Assortative mating: Observed for IQ, education, height, income, attractiveness (consensus-based). Sevens tend to pair with sevens.
Eastwick: Much from proximity/demographics (who meets whom). For attractiveness:
- Thought experiment: Guy + two women, pick matching attractiveness partner—right ~70% time.
- Explained by initial market dynamics (parties, online).
- Mismatches form after long acquaintance, allowing idiosyncrasies.
Key: Matched (7-7) vs mismatched (8-5) couples—no difference in breakup risk, misery, cheating.
Host cites: Attractive people slightly less satisfied (more options, per Mack & Murphy); high mate value delta causes mate-guarding/anxiety.
Eastwick: Meta-analyses show objective attractiveness doesn't predict long-term satisfaction. Hot people can be great/terrible partners.
Once formed, motivated biases activate (e.g., "What do others know about our relationship? Your ex was terrible; I love you for XYZ.")—defends against alternatives regardless of mismatch.
No data shows mismatches face more interloper threats; all relationships deal with temptations. Biases thinking partner > others predict longevity.
Book pushes back on "nerd improve thyself" advice (gym, clothes, hair, be funnier)—assumes gamified mate value number increases with effort, detectable by others.
Basic self-improvement like working out and eating healthy is good because it boosts desirability and personal happiness. However, overemphasis on self-improvement neglects social network solutions. Instead of just gym and avoiding late-night Domino's, prioritize hanging out in person, trying new hobbies, and meeting new people if current networks fail. Self-improvement helps some significantly but only somewhat for others, leading to frustration when it plateaus. Social avenues provide an alternative path.
Switching from online dating to friend referrals, church, or hobbies moves from a red ocean (high competition) to a blue ocean (lower competition). Improving attributes still adds value, but less so in contexts where people get to know you over time, due to mate value consensus varying by familiarity.
If exceptionally attractive, bar-hopping or party-going maximizes opportunities since deeper interactions may reveal flaws reducing appeal to some. In repeated settings like church, initial attributes matter less after months or a year.
Higher objective attractiveness widens the initial pool, allowing personality to shine and potentially elevate appeal. However, in forced interactions (e.g., shared communities), less attractive people gain appeal over time, and high-attractiveness appeal may decline. Ancestrally, limited options in a valley enforced this dynamic.
Bonding and attachment systems are market-specific, with varied preferences maximizing mating in mixed groups. Mating success prioritizes effective interdependent relationships for raising costly offspring over securing the most desirable traits.
Resource provisioning (e.g., in men) benefits long-term payoffs, but in hunter-gatherer groups, spoils are shared widely, providing prestige and community assurance. Other forms like finding honey demonstrate competence. Proxies include agency, conscientiousness, industriousness, IQ.
A pro-social 8/10 provider with status outshines an equal non-provider, suggesting objective mate value via utility. However, provisioning historically tied to protection and trustworthiness around offspring. Men evolved smaller, gentler, with reduced canines and dimorphism due to female selection for caregiving.
Provider hierarchies exist but are fluid. Success requires group belonging, contribution, and dyadic compatibility for interdependent functioning and offspring rearing.
Alternative to mating as marketplace is compatibility-driven bonding. Human attachment bonds are central to evolution. Males became gentler for increased male parental investment (MPI) due to neotenous offspring requiring alloparenting (e.g., grandmothers, cousins). Primates with competent infants show less alloparenting and MPI.
Evolutionary psychology emphasizes gender differences, but they are overestimated. Stated vs. revealed preferences: Men state valuing attractiveness more, women ambition more. In speed dating, ambition mildly boosts appeal for both genders with no difference.
Lab findings: Ambition/earning potential inspires desire equally across genders and predicts relationship happiness similarly. No gender differences hold after confounds. Macro trends show no costs to women earning/out-educating men; mismatched pairings (woman higher) are common and stable.
Divorce data thorny—often retrospective, not predictive. Man losing job raises divorce risk (30-50%), woman losing job does not, but overall gender differences small.
Women's higher education/degrees not causing singledom rise; no relationship risks in education mismatches.
Modern women saying men must improve standards likely react to disappointing online dating experiences, not real interactions. Men may retreat more from traditional social modes (plausible, though data unclear). Screens/phones reduce real-world interactions across ages, but possibly more for men (e.g., women spend more time with pets than humans).
Loneliness intervention getting men off couches into world would improve outcomes. Non-education attributes (e.g., cooking, fixing sink) offset education deltas in person. Online dating screens harshly, preventing interaction.
Online exacerbates marketplace dynamics: Tens dominate, no need to meet non-checklist matches. Face-to-face dissolves rigid criteria.
Broadly, people correctly prioritize intelligence, humor, loyalty—these matter. Both genders underestimate attractiveness and sexual skill (top predictor of relationship happiness, though not ranked high when asked).
Dyadic supportiveness crucial: Partner listens after bad day, celebrates good news more than self. Attunement to partner's goals/dreams boosts happiness—modern marriage expectation that delivers.
Underestimate vulnerability—mutual willingness to disclose deeply personal info feels special, like being chosen (aphrodisiac). Avoid pure self-promotion; slight openness/neediness (learning from other) attracts.
Resembles emotional reciprocal altruism: Asking favors feels better than giving (implies future reciprocity, helpfulness).
Age wrinkle: Younger daters (22) may misread vulnerability as low resilience/resource provisioning; by 32, seen as bravery. Single 30s friends succeed posting dogs, nephews, mindful content.
Posts get way more engagement from women in their 30s than in their 20s. They get more engagement than posting cars, Rolexes, or new deadlifts. Alpha posturing signals what you value. Posting pro-family content as a guy seeking a partner creates a blue ocean opportunity. Posting Lamborghini photos is not even a red ocean—girls don't care. No floods of women comment positively on guys posting new cars on Instagram.
As people age and gain dating experience, they learn, grow, and change through maturation. Compatibility-driven bonding works longitudinally across a dating career: over time, people discern preferences better. This explains why vulnerability means something different in 30s vs 20s—a 22-year-old with a Lambo differs from a 39-year-old posting one.
Dating over time is tricky: each next relationship differs from the previous but has similarities. Challenge is being a new person to avoid prior pitfalls while repeating what worked. It's a diadic give and take with another person. Research lags behind these conversations.
Taste and timing play a large role in attraction. For first meetings, there's a consensus component in initial attraction, but compatibility (taste and timing) is bigger and grows over time. Hard to predict: lining up tall guys doesn't guarantee appeal. Compatibility emerges through conversation, often random side tracks like shared elementary school teachers years apart—serendipity moments.
Some people excel in initial attraction (e.g., 10s have more hookups, sex partners, short-term successes). No long-term cost: attributes for short-term desirability (confidence, attractiveness) have zero correlation with how partners rate them long-term. If anything, goes opposite direction.
If a spouse gains significant weight (decreasing attractiveness), intuition suggests impact, but data shows attractiveness level correlates near zero with partner's romantic satisfaction, happiness, or desire to continue. People resist data contradicting experiences. As people age into middle age, satisfaction decreases overall due to kids, hard jobs in 40s/50s, getting out of shape—part of broader trend.
Studies measure baseline attributes to predict partner feelings 3-6 months later: confident/attractive people don't predict long-term success much.
Short-term vs long-term isn't a single dimension—think two independent dimensions. Number of notches on bedpost doesn't predict relationship happiness. Premarital sex correlations with marriage outcomes are tiny—don't worry.
People who have sex early don't have worse relationships. Interpretation matters: behavior changes perspective (e.g., 5 dates before kiss signals discipline, investment). Compatibility-driven pair bonding means subjective interpretation trumps objective data.
To date effectively, understand what timing of sex signals to the other person (e.g., date 1 vs 3 vs 5) and match their script. Signals seriousness, investment (female side); chastity/scarcity as store of value (male side).
Survey prediction: partnered/married men report longer time from first date to sex in current/long-term relationships vs short-term ones that didn't last.
Short-term: liked enough to hook up, but that's it. Long-term: liked enough to hook up + stay for breakfast, love hanging out.
Early trajectories (meeting, talking, friends, hangouts, first hookup/sex) look similar—people don't know direction yet. At first sex, ratings are far more positive in long-term relationships (good sex catapults them); short-term lacks compatibility.
Ideal study: same couple with good sex at date 2 vs date 5 to test timing impact. Cues like skin shown, choker necklace, low-cut top, arm touch signal availability, high sociosexuality, short-term intent vs long-term investment.
Journey: start with ev psych (adaptive explanations, male parental uncertainty), then modern mismatch (tall girl problem, manosphere, red pill, campus sex ratios), but relationships experienced one-on-one via nervous system—how you feel around them.
Ev psych doesn't explain relationship experience (closer to philosophy/psychotherapy). Human connection gets past 'tens beat twos' early.
Ask deeper questions early: "What is something you're worried about that you've never told anybody?" Reciprocal disclosure builds closeness—best experimental manipulation for getting people to like each other. Can do on day 1, not wait until day 10.
Attachment is around support: needing to be around the person (literally or via communication), having someone there when
Having somebody who's going to be there for me when things go badly, and having somebody that's going to be there for me when things go right. These are the critical things that people need to feel. A lot of that ends up getting wrapped up in daily goals and how to support each other with the things you want to do, but are my needs being met? These things get very complicated quickly. The essence of attachment is this sense: I am here for you. I trust that you're here for me and I'm willing to do everything in my power, within reason, to support you. It's supporting adversity and supporting growth.
Breakups are tough because not only have you lost something valuable that you cared about, you have also lost the person you would normally go to when you lost something you cared about. It's a double whammy of stress. People can't sleep, don't eat well, immune systems are a mess. The body goes into fight or flight, but there's nothing to fight or flee, so people get sick. This is tied to attachment processes because people don't have the sense that somebody's got their back, so they fall apart. If friends are going through a breakup and want to go through the story five or ten times, it's kind to listen an extra time because they've lost their support structure that would help with other bad things.
Forming another relationship helps people get over the prior one, though the longer the time between relationships, the happier the next one will be—these are small but real effects. Having support from other people and forming a coherent story about what happened really matters. The story just needs to be coherent: maybe your ex is a jackass, or you're going to do better next time. Without a coherent tale for how things went wrong, it's hard to get over it. People rehash the story with friends to construct it, especially with deception involved where you sift through pieces to understand what happened.
Why Narratives Are Essential
Narratives are helpful in general for the course of life or what you're doing this year, but especially in breakups. People need to feel they've gone through the challenge part of the story and are coming out the other side with reason for hope because they've learned something, won't make that mistake again, or gained new skills for next time. This brings optimism and prevents chaos. It's partly an open loop closed loop thing—a relationship Zeigarnik effect. You need to feel the prior thing has closed before moving on. A new relationship helps by occupying time, but if loops aren't closed, ghosts of previous relationships bleed into the new one.
In the movie My Best Friend's Wedding, discussed on the Love Factually podcast with Eli Finkele, the main guy isn't quite over the Julia Roberts character and keeps bringing aspects of that relationship into his new one, which is a disaster. People don't want to feel you're retreading your old relationship; they want this one to be new and special, carving something out together. You can't borrow pieces from the old relationship.
Visa Camparas describes a relationship as a microculture: you and your partner have a subculture only you two know—things you expect before bed, words for that building, in-jokes, clothing for Sunday breakfast. When the relationship breaks down, it's not just the loss of the person, it's the loss of this microculture. Seeing lip salve from evenings, a squirrel joke, or similar clothing triggers it. Microcultures are beautiful; people who experience their unique microculture regularly (pet names, rituals, bizarre stories like "secret squirrel route") are happier. These make relationships have life, and their loss is devastating. Compatibility is tied to history—the history with another person is a huge part of why we love them, though it's not that romantic: you could love anybody nearby. But it's beautiful that people create goofy jokes that sustain them.
People derate alternative partners: an eight with a five sees other eights as sixes, an automatic bias downgrading alternatives. When single-cubicle flirting happens, you don't notice or care because they seem less appealing. Idealization and perceived superiority of your partner make you blind to others—evolutionarily adaptive to sustain relationships, which are hard with temptations. Without biases, it'd be a horror show of always trading up. But biases cut both ways: they help sustain good relationships but make it hard to leave toxic ones, prolonging bad relationships.
Humans are creatures that attach and form attachment bonds. We're serial monogamists in sex, moving from partner to partner. You can design systems allowing attachments and sex with multiple people, like contemporary polyamorous communities where attachments don't threaten each other. But often attachment means wanting to feel special, so sex only with you. We form serial relationships over time. Attachment is key—we need attachments, romantic or not, or we fall apart.
Pro-relationship biases build then wane: on average, people feel worse about partners at 10 years than at 5 or 1 year; satisfaction sours over time. But not for everyone—many start high and stay high. Not all relationships are built to last forever; building one that does is really hard. Mating markets and maintaining relationships are tough, easy to screw up, and heartbreak is tough. Thinking of humans as searching for compatibility and caring about attachment reveals other avenues for those struggling.
Christine McCallum's February 2017 study (across four studies) examined relational repercussions of physical attractiveness, using yearbook photos to predict divorce. This is an outlier; other data don't show this. A pre-registered replication would be welcome.
The book Bonded by Evolution comes out in February around Valentine's Day, available wherever books are sold. Check the Love Factually podcast with Eli Finkele, releasing episodes every couple weeks on movies and these topics.
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