Science of Attraction, Compatibility & Romance | Dr. Paul Eastwick
In a Nutshell
The core message is that real-world relationship formation succeeds through repeated in-person interaction in small groups, which reduces consensus-based inequality and allows idiosyncratic compatibility to emerge, whereas dating apps amplify marketplace dynamics that favor the most conventionally attractive people. Key takeaways include that men and women want essentially the same things in partners when evaluating real people face-to-face, that shared activities and deep self-disclosure build attraction more effectively than surface-level traits or text, and that men are actually more eager for commitment across relationship stages while both genders benefit from protecting relationships from excessive external input.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
When examining who receives right swipes and messages on dating apps, the most popular people dominate. The apps create one of the most unequal markets in the world, functioning essentially as a kleptocracy where the top individuals capture the vast majority of positive attention. Regular acquaintance settings show far less dramatic inequality. The influence of attractiveness never fully disappears and there remains an unlevel playing field to some extent, but increased time spent together getting to know each other reduces the market forces that give the most desirable people all the advantages.
Andrew Huberman introduces Dr. Paul Eastwick, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. The discussion covers the science of attraction, mate selection, and relationships, with findings that challenge common assumptions. Eastwick's research shows that both men and women, when given a choice, select partners younger than themselves. Financial status proves equally important to men seeking female partners as it is to women seeking male partners. Dating apps select for qualities that do not align with what research shows builds lasting partnerships.
Physical intimacy ranks among the strongest predictors of relationship stability. Both partners feeling that their partner possesses unique qualities that no one else can match also supports stability. Activities done with other people, whether other couples or other single people, prove critical both for meeting a partner and for maintaining healthy long-term relationships.
Marketplace ideas derive from a sensible evolutionary perspective describing what happens in initial attraction settings when people meet for the first time. The theory suggests conditions of low food availability, low mate availability, weapons, and few laws regulating violence would produce men harming each other to access mates and women engaging in deception. Modern environments with forebrains allow strategic choices toward benevolence and kindness, suggesting the need for better understanding of what holds true in contemporary contexts.
A common class demonstration assigns students random numbers on their foreheads that others can see but they cannot. Students are instructed to pair up with the highest-value person possible. People assigned low numbers experience panic because others avoid them. The demonstration parallels how people internalize and act upon mate value linked to traits like physical attractiveness, bank account size, or status. This accurately models behavior when people meet for the first time.
The demonstration requires visible numbers for the market dynamics to function. When numbers become blurred through increased acquaintance, agreement about who constitutes an eight versus a five decreases. People might on average rate someone a six, but after getting to know them over time, individuals may rate that person a nine or a three. This increase in idiosyncrasy and variability allows partners to find each other even when they are not consensually the most desirable people in the eyes of others.
Considerable individual variability exists in how people react to social consensus about attractiveness. Mate choice copying describes the tendency to observe who others find attractive and follow that signal. This represents a junior-high level of thinking about the process. When people spend time together in mixed-gender groups, unique experiences create opportunities for opinions to diverge from the consensus.
Initial attraction often emerges when two people spend time together pulling unique things out of each other through conversation about personal challenges, family issues, school problems, or friend difficulties. Reciprocity through unique shared experiences creates support and listening that others do not witness. This process takes time but produces attraction through distinctive interpersonal moments rather than purely visual or trait-based evaluation.
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Three cinematic pairing models exist: two highly successful, attractive individuals pairing together; pairings that break status hierarchies such as athlete with nerd; and pairings of two imperfect individuals who recognize each other's unique value. Modern dating apps create the perception that everyone competes for the same small number of people, which contradicts the varied pairing models observed in real life and media.
When making simple binary hot-or-not judgments about people encountered briefly, agreement occurs approximately two-thirds of the time. This level of disagreement already creates opportunities for different people to pursue different partners, leveling the playing field. The apps amplify inequality by design, while regular acquaintance produces less dramatic disparities.
Physical development timing during junior high creates uneven social dynamics, with some individuals maturing faster and gaining disproportionate attention. Laboratory settings produce unexpected pairings based on highly specific competencies. One documented case involved attraction sparked by a partner's exceptional skill at aliquoting antibodies, demonstrated by handling multiple tubes simultaneously while performing the technique rapidly. This unique, context-specific observation led to a lasting marriage with children despite the pairing appearing unpredictable by external metrics.
When people explain what they love about their long-term partners, extended responses reveal idiosyncratic details, personal stories, inside jokes, and specific moments that created special feelings. These narrative elements begin forming earlier than commonly assumed. Visual attractiveness information matters significantly, but concurrent conversation and story formation also drive initial interest. Good banter creates anticipation for future interactions where those moments can be recreated.
The dating process can be segmented into impressions that either seed or fail to seed desire for additional time together, and compatibility that develops over extended interaction. Impressions leading to desire involve both visual evaluation and the formation of small shared stories during initial conversations.
People tend to be more intuitive about what they personally find attractive when social inputs are removed. The compatibility piece over time is much harder to assess. Statistics on marriage and other relationships do not show that most commitments work out successfully.
The early phases of relationships are filled with uncertainty. People search for signals to resolve uncertainty, but it is not about gathering sufficient evidence of specific traits like intelligence. Instead, people are trying to determine whether they feel enough of something to want to continue the relationship.
The spark does not need to be at 100 immediately. Most relationships begin with a middling first impression that feels fine but not exceptional. As people spend more time together, they accumulate moments that fit different trait categories, such as finding someone funny, smart, or a good listener.
People keep coming back when they accumulate enough positive moments. Sometimes a single moment creates the ick, tipping someone into feeling they cannot be with the person. Men experience this too, though it is under-researched.
The period from roughly minute 10 to day 30 is difficult to study. Researchers excel at studying initial impressions from photos or four-minute interactions and at studying established couples, but the intermediate phase where someone becomes determined to be in a relationship remains mysterious.
Relationships typically form through slow accumulation rather than instantaneous certainty. A window of uncertainty slowly collapses into a stable impression as more information is gathered. The hope is that both people collapse to a fairly stable and very positive impression of each other.
Social psychologists note that people are often positively biased about their romantic partners, seeing them more favorably than others do. However, the evidence does not strongly support the idea that the consensus view held by others contains wisdom that the individual is missing. People's own impressions tend to be the major driver in relationships.
It is also possible to reach a point where negative perceptions cannot be unseen, making a relationship difficult to salvage even when others view the partner positively.
One perspective suggests treating taste in people the same way people treat taste in food, music, or art: if something feels right, go for it unless there is clear danger. In relationships, people often integrate external information that clouds their own signal rather than protecting them.
It takes a strong person to say that despite what others think, a partner is right for them. When people do this, others often back off. Cultural pressure can discourage relationships, though some of history's greatest romances have defied such pressure.
The ideal situation is when friends support a relationship without being exceptionally interested in the partner themselves. This provides support without creating competition or worry about poaching.
Adolescents must navigate being part of a friend group while having a romantic relationship. Personal stories of junior high and early high school relationships, including experiences of a partner leaving for a best friend, illustrate these complexities. Discovering evolutionary psychology provided both comfort in recognizing these patterns as ancient and discomfort in seeing them as reflections of personal value.
Each relationship has near-infinite unique combinations of histories and values that create a lock-and-key fit. Examples include one partner providing safety after an abusive past, or both partners bonding over shared difficult family backgrounds involving addiction or mental health issues.
Every relationship contains two seemingly contradictory truths: no two people have ever experienced exactly what this couple is experiencing, yet broad general principles explain dynamics across all relationships.
The attachment framework explains that humans crave closeness, intimacy, and support. People thrive when they receive these, showing better recovery, sleep, and other benefits. Some people struggle due to anxious attachment, needing closeness too much, or avoidant attachment, becoming overly independent and convinced they need no one.
Attachment orientations can change. Someone entering a relationship with avoidant tendencies from a trauma-filled past can become less avoidant and more secure with enough time and the right partner, gaining physiological and support-related benefits.
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Barring safety issues, limiting conversations about the relationship with people other than a trained therapist may protect the relationship. External assessments carry risks, including unhelpful positive comments that normalize dysfunction or envious input.
The good version of external validation comes from couple friends and double date nights, where others experience the relationship in real time without explicit requests for assessment. Research shows couples embedded in such networks tend to fare better on average.
Other people lack access to the vast store of private information within a relationship, making external judgments unreliable unless one is serving as a therapist.
Women generally cultivate social support from multiple sources beyond their romantic partner. Men tend to derive most support and intimacy needs from their romantic partner. Men are less likely to discuss relationship difficulties in detail with friends, often responding that things are great when asked how their spouse is doing.
Men tend to be more eager than women across the arc of a relationship. This includes being more likely to say "I love you" first, wanting to be exclusive, and wanting to take the relationship to the next level. This pattern runs counter to common narratives about men being non-committal. The effect size is medium but consistent across multiple behaviors.
Women are more likely to want to break up, while men are more likely to be thinking about their exes after a relationship ends.
Men often lack the same level of social support infrastructure that women typically maintain. Male friendships tend to be activity-based rather than focused on emotional intimacy. Men may feel deep trust and connection with male friends but rarely use the word "intimacy" to describe these relationships.
Men are more likely to bring emotionally charged issues to romantic partners rather than male friends. Many men lack a sense that they have a "social support bank account"—the feeling that people are available if needed, even if never actually accessed. This perception alone provides health and well-being benefits.
Men are also more likely to lose touch with siblings compared to women.
Activity-based friendships, such as kickball and softball teams, can help men develop a sense that support is available even without explicit emotional sharing. The ideal of male friendship often centers on loyalty and trust without needing extensive explanation—captured in scenes like the one from The Town where a friend responds "Who's driving" to a request for help.
Two opposing narratives circulate in public discourse: one suggesting men have failed to step up and be committal, and another suggesting women are extractive and quick to trade up. These narratives can foster distrust between men and women. Dating app algorithms are designed primarily to maximize engagement and revenue. With more men than women typically on the apps, the goal is often to attract and retain more women users.
Women swipe yes on approximately 5% of men they see on dating apps, while men swipe yes roughly 50% of the time. This aligns with broader patterns of men being less selective in initial evaluations.
A classic study using confederates asking strangers "Would you like to go to bed with me?" found men were about 20 times more likely to say yes than women. However, when the same question is asked within existing social networks among people who know each other, the gender difference shrinks dramatically to approximately 2 times more likely.
Approaching strangers in romantic or sexual contexts is particularly challenging because humans evolved in environments with fewer strangers. Most people are not so immediately appealing that others fall for them instantly. Women tend to be more interested in casual sex with someone they already know and have had friendly banter with over time.
Spending time in friend groups and meeting friends of friends provides more opportunities than attempting to connect with strangers. This approach is time-consuming but ultimately higher yield for most people.
Historical patterns of meeting romantic partners involved small groups organized around activities such as pickleball or barbecues, or through work adjacency. Laboratory and graduate program settings have historically been sites where people meet through proximity and shared interests, though many advisors discourage dating within these environments.
Observing how someone behaves with others in a group setting provides valuable data about their values, kindness, and character. This includes seeing how they treat friends, handle responsibility, and respond in natural social situations.
In the film Say Anything, the first date occurs at a party where the characters observe each other interacting with others rather than conducting a direct interview. One character demonstrates care by taking keys from people who have been drinking, which contributes to the other character's attraction.
A personal account describes attending a Sadie Hawkins dance in junior year of high school after being invited by an older, attractive, and kind classmate. The experience involved significant social skepticism from peers who did not believe the invitation was genuine, creating a mortifying situation while waiting outside a bathroom.
Text-based communication creates a selection pressure favoring hyperverbal individuals who can communicate quickly and wittily with their thumbs. This differs from face-to-face interactions where nonverbal listening, nodding, and reflective responses can convey genuine connection.
Hyperverbal ability in text may create a misleading advantage early in relationship formation. Anxious individuals may benefit from texting because it allows time to formulate responses and reduces immediate social pressure, though this does not eliminate the broader bias toward written wit.
There is a recognized sex difference in verbal fluency that may further skew outcomes in text-heavy courtship environments.
Mimi Binberg at Ohio State has studied couples by obtaining permission to review their entire text message history from the beginning of their relationship. In successful relationships, communication styles begin to cohere through a pattern of mutual influence, with partners developing similar cadence and word usage over time. The unsuccessful cases, which are harder to study, would likely show people who cannot match communication styles or demonstrate wit early on, resulting in text threads that never develop into couples.
When people describe what makes their relationship strong, they often focus on what their partner does rather than what they say. Examples include one partner making the bed while the other is in the bathroom, or setting out coffee without being asked. These small, consistent actions represent relationship glue more than eloquent speech or verbal descriptions of feelings. This reveals a contrast between the exploration and courting phase, where actions arguably matter more than words, and the long-term maintenance of stability and consistency over time.
Dating apps currently select primarily for conversation rather than observable action. One proposed solution would require users to go on at least three dates with matches in varied circumstances that involve doing activities together rather than only talking. Suggested date formats include assembling IKEA furniture, escape rooms, or physical challenges that require both interaction and problem-solving under pressure. While activities like hikes or attending shows allow for different kinds of interaction, the goal is to better simulate the patterns of long-term relationship responsibilities.
It is extremely difficult to simulate what daily life with another person would actually be like, including the thousands of daily responsibilities that come with a long-term relationship. Even when people feel strongly attracted early on, they attempt to forecast long-term compatibility but lack sufficient information. Over time, couples naturally develop elaborate structures around who handles which tasks, which then shapes how, when, and what they communicate about. Creating a business together can make a relationship feel transactional and reduce warmth and connection opportunities, whereas prioritizing fun activities and shared experiences helps maintain the elements that originally brought partners together.
When couples therapy is effective, therapists typically help couples identify and rewind dysfunctional patterns they have created. The goal is to return to when things were good, rediscover what they originally appreciated about each other, and rebuild the relationship from that foundation in a new way. Many aspects of long-term compatibility remain deeply difficult to forecast accurately.
The crystal ball question and targeted probing for disclosures can serve as better indicators of whether someone is interesting or appropriate than surface-level conversation. While no single question or set of questions guarantees a green light outcome, certain answers function as clear red lights. The challenge lies in identifying questions that illuminate yellow lights and potential paths forward.
In speed dating or short interactions, people typically seek common ground quickly by discussing majors, hometowns, or other surface topics. However, the goal should be to take away something that feels distinct from other interactions. Going slightly deeper than people are normally comfortable with can create this differentiation. The 36 questions, also known as the fast friends procedure, are recommended for dates lasting 60 to 90 minutes. Examples include asking what one thing someone has never told anyone that they have always wanted to tell them, and what is stopping them. These questions create opportunities for reciprocal self-disclosure, allowing both people to feel heard and to share something meaningful.
When someone shares something they have never told anyone else, it creates a powerful rush and sense of connection. This experience is central to relationship research findings on responsiveness, closeness, and trust-building. In four-minute speed dating contexts, the goal is simply to obtain a small nugget worth building on later. When opportunities for deeper disclosure arise, people are generally advised to pursue them despite potential awkwardness, as this tends to pay off on average.
The excitement of disclosure often stems from sensing that the other person is taking a risk by sharing something personal. Many single people harbor parts of themselves they crave sharing with someone who feels safe. Creating real moments of human connection early on, distinct from physical or purely emotional intimacy, involves recognizing that both people have particular experiences and personal narratives. Humans are fundamentally stories and narratives, and people want others to become privy to and eventually part of that narrative. This desire to be seen, understood, and gotten by another person is core to relationship science and reflects fundamental aspects of how humans form mating relationships.
Men and women essentially want the same things in relationships. When people rate traits on scales in abstract surveys, men report caring more about attractiveness and women report caring more about earning potential. However, when people evaluate real individuals they have met face-to-face, these gender differences largely disappear. Speed dating studies show that men like ambitious women to the same degree that women like ambitious men. This pattern has held across 20 years of research and across approximately 40 countries. Online environments and stated preferences differ from real face-to-face evaluations, where gender differences in trait appeal are dramatically reduced.
When interacting with someone and getting to know them, trusting subjective experience is likely to lead to better outcomes than relying on abstract preferences. This might mean recognizing that someone is conventionally attractive but feeling no connection, or seeing potential in someone whose life appears disorganized to others. Online dating removes this subjective experience, making it easier to categorize people into groups and create conflict between those groups. Heteropessimism, the belief that men and women cannot get along due to fundamentally different interests and priorities, does not hold in close relationships research. Men and women want the same things from relationships, though thresholds for sex, especially early on, can create complications.
Research on same-gender dating shows less widespread pessimism compared to heterosexual dating discourse. Dating apps have provided significant benefits for people whose social networks offered limited options, particularly those living in areas where being openly gay or lesbian was unsafe. Historically, the process of forming same-gender relationships has taken longer than heterosexual relationships. This extended timeline partly reflects a bigotry tax, where individuals had to exercise extreme caution before disclosing same-sex attractions because rejection could carry additional threats including stigma, job loss, and other dangers beyond typical romantic rejection.
Income level on its own is somewhat informative, but having the additional data point of where someone started out is more informative. People with money who did not have to work very hard to get it present a different picture than those who had to work very hard to earn their money. People who had to work very hard to make their money are often still in the working hard mode.
The additional useful question is how much free time someone has. A lot of people who have a lot of money do not have a lot of free time. If people pair up with them thinking they are going to feel very financially secure and have a lot of stuff, that might be true, but how often they are going to see their partner or the co-parent of their kids is an important question.
Many attributes that sound really good in the abstract become problematic when combined with other attributes. Cutthroat ambition can mean someone is never around. It can be very challenging to use a person's income level to forecast how their partner is going to feel about them, especially in long-term relationships.
A person's objective income has very small effects on how their partners feel about them. The bigger effects come from socioeconomic status and whether a couple has the resources to get by together. Numerous examples exist of couples where the man loses his work and if he is not able to get stable work again reasonably soon, the couple eventually dissolves. This is not necessarily for a lack of enough resources, as families were able to help.
The most intuitive challenge when a man loses his job is his genuine troubling loss of identity and loss of self rather than his partner thinking he is no longer a provider. When tragedies befall us, they affect our perceptions especially strongly.
It used to be true that marriages were more fragile when the woman earned more than the man, but this stopped being true in the 1990s. People in general have gotten more comfortable with gender imbalanced relationships. Today the average couple still has the man earning more than the woman, but in education the pattern is flipped. In younger couples, the woman is more likely to be educated than the man.
Mismatches in the level of education and in the level of income do not spell a problem. The concern is getting men feeling good about themselves again. Men, especially low SES men, feel like their social networks are gone. They do not know where to go to get any kind of companionship, which creates an acute sense of loneliness and lack of belonging that affects sense of self and ambitions.
In the classic stereotypical narrative, men who were slightly older had more resources. The myth that women desire older men and men desire younger women is not supported by the data. There is no gender difference in attraction to younger partners.
A study with a sample size of 4000 partnered with a matchmaking service where people are paying for help finding long-term relationships. Within that pool, the men searching for dates are older than the women by about four years on average. When looking at how the age of the partner affects whether someone wants to go on a second date, younger partners appeal to men more, but it is not a huge effect. Women do the same thing. They are a little bit more interested in the younger guys, even though they do not say that on paper.
In the couples that get created, the guy was four years older than the woman. In the couples that do not get created, the guy is four years older than the woman because that was what the sample had to begin with. The age difference observed in real life is not happening at the initial attraction phase on date one. It is either happening earlier in who puts themselves in the pool, or happening later.
People who date younger guys often find the deal breaker is if the guy says he wants kids. Online dating affords the opportunity to filter on exceptionally important criteria like wanting kids. What people think they want does not match up with what they actually end up liking once they meet somebody face to face. However, if somebody really wants kids, they should have the power to craft a pool of partners who also want kids.
More young people are going to church as a values indicator. People go to church for certain reasons and values that are family and children adjacent if not central. There are no data showing whether this is a response to the wild west of online dating and social media.
We evolved in an environment where we knew about 50 to 150 other people. Church fulfills a function of putting people in contact with each other in small group environments. If church is not the thing, there are many other options including intramural sports teams and improv classes.
Improv classes provide a chance to interact in a group over a period of time where you do not get to opt out if you do not love somebody right away, while also practicing being vulnerable and responsive. Running clubs and churches allow people to join based on wanting to be with somebody active or somebody who shares their values.
The field cannot answer the question of what specific activities give the best likelihood of being in a relationship in 90 days. The general answer is to be around people on repeated occasions. Certain small group environments like church, hiking clubs, or rock climbing provide additional opportunities to grow relationships with peers because the culture around them cultivates the evolution of the relationship over time.
Workplace environments are particularly tricky for relationship formation. The work environment does not necessarily make the relationship grow, and many workplaces do not want to encourage romantic relationships. When couples form at work, they often have to move to separate buildings. Workplaces that allow for the possibility of peers getting together need structures in place to keep personal life appropriately personal and deal with fallout if it happens.
Perceived similarity is this general sense that we have a lot in common, there are a million things that we could talk about, and we share the same values and attitudes and preferences about things in general. It is not tethered to any particular attitude, value, or preference.
When people like somebody a lot, they engage in motivated reasoning where they attach importance to whatever similarities they want to find. Someone might decide that shared love of Japanese cinema or politics is what really matters in their relationship. For another couple, differing politics may not matter at all because they compartmentalize it. When matches occur on important dimensions, people emphasize those similarities. When mismatches exist, people decide those differences do not matter.
Data on political matching shows that people with diametrically opposed preferences have very low odds of getting together initially. However, among the mismatches that do exist, political differences do not predict relationship satisfaction to a significant degree. People engage in so much motivated reasoning that they convince themselves their similarities are the most important things in the world.
When researchers assess actual similarity by measuring traits and preferences objectively without allowing for motivated reasoning, they find that similarity predicts romantic outcomes at essentially chance levels. Studies pairing people based on 83% matches across all assessable dimensions produce results equivalent to a coin flip. Dating apps that pair people based on stated preferences perform similarly to random matching because actual similarity effects are minimal.
Some evidence suggests similarity effects may exist in the realm of demographics and socioeconomic status, though these effects are small. Unpublished data shows modest improvements over chance, moving from a 50/50 outcome to approximately 53/47. The small effect sizes occur because people have motivational latitude to find commonalities when they like someone and focus on those shared elements.
Instagram functions as the largest dating app by an enormous margin, operating in parallel with its algorithm that favors direct message communication. The real dynamics involve time spent moving communications toward real-world meetings that then feed back into social media. Posts that correlate with direct message communication receive algorithmic rewards.
Committed partnership involves setting aside the idea that there might be somebody better. In happy relationships, people engage in derogation of alternatives, perceiving alternative partners as less desirable than objective metrics would suggest. This protective mechanism causes people to become poor barometers of what constitutes a good partner because they stop seeing alternatives' actual value.
People in relationships sometimes engage in seemingly harmless messaging with others that can escalate. Recent studies show that having a sexual fantasy about one's partner increases sexual desire for that partner. However, having a sexual fantasy about a non-partner causes increased sexual feelings toward both that person and one's partner simultaneously. The attraction can rebound onto the current partner rather than replacing feelings for them.
The danger in relationships is not that a partner experiences sexual attraction to somebody else. The problem emerges through repeated follow-through on that attraction through ongoing contact, secretive conversations, or interactions that erode the protective layer around the primary relationship. Transient interactions historically ended without follow-up opportunities, but social media now provides attack vectors for relationships by enabling continued connection.
A gym-goer reported feeling she needed to flirt with an attractive man after receiving attention only from unattractive men, suggesting her self-worth was affected by the perceived value of those approaching her. A married woman reported similar feelings when less appealing men approached her, despite having a highly desirable spouse. These experiences reflect how people use stranger attention as information about their own desirability.
People of low mate value can have fantastic relationships, and people of high mate value can have terrible relationships. The mate value construct shows its strongest effects in attention received from strangers and in junior high-style social scenarios. Attractiveness consensus exists and shifts with age, causing people in happy relationships to still wonder what strangers think of their desirability.
A healthy compartmentalization may exist where people acknowledge that attraction to others is real and part of human wiring without allowing it to become toxic to relationships. Some couples maintain relaxed rapport around attractions to actors or public figures, treating these as distant, non-threatening phenomena. This differs significantly from attractions to people both partners know and spend time with, which feel more threatening.
There exists a cultural tendency to view ended relationships and divorces as failures. People respond to breakups with sympathy and to divorces with questions about what went wrong. A more constructive approach involves seeing past relationships as real experiences that mattered in their moment, even if they did not work out due to changes in either person.
Many people carry negative feelings about former partners, but it is possible to hold two thoughts simultaneously. One couple established a rule of not speaking negatively about anyone from previous relationships. They were comfortable acknowledging prior relationships because those experiences ultimately reflected their own choices. One partner expressed gratitude for all the good and bad experiences the other had gone through, recognizing that those shaped who they are today. The relationship benefited from those trials, tribulations, and positive experiences.
They practice selective ignorance by not asking too many questions about each other's pasts. This approach creates a forward-looking mindset where the focus is on the present and future rather than dwelling on history. Histories remain real, but the emphasis is on determining where the relationship goes from this point forward.
Some couples pair up early and experience major life milestones together, including first jobs, college graduation, and raising children. This creates a shared developmental trajectory that builds a common narrative. Modern patterns of pairing up later, along with divorce and remarriage, make it harder to construct such shared stories.
When controlling for other factors, relationship duration tends to be a negative indicator of satisfaction. People report being happiest early in relationships, and satisfaction often declines over time. The narrative of shared growth, facing obstacles together, and building a joint story matters more than literal time spent together. Breakups are difficult partly because they sever this continuity of self and the stories built with another person.
All people have is time and energy. When invested in a relationship that ends, there is no do-over. People often feel resentment about lost time, energy, and emotional investment. These investments relate to both self and story. After a breakup, individuals can choose to reinvent themselves, recreate aspects of their identity, preserve beneficial parts from the prior relationship, and let go of parts they no longer want. Holding onto the good parts of the story reduces pain. At some point, it may be necessary to discard photos and other physical reminders, though digital storage in the cloud makes this more difficult.
The question arises whether primitive sexual attractiveness outweighs the ability to intellectually appreciate someone's qualities. Ideally, both elements coexist. The subjective sense that a partner is a good lover is among the strongest predictors of positive feelings about the relationship overall and the desire for it to continue. This holds true both for people already in relationships and for initial attraction scenarios.
Sexual satisfaction and desire are tightly related to overall relationship feelings and represent an important component, though not necessarily the essential or central component for everyone. It is possible to recultivate sexual feelings through time spent together, time spent apart, and other circumstances. Passion may not feel the same every day at 7:00 p.m., especially when exhausted or raising children, but it can reappear under the right conditions. Relationships can thrive even when sexual desire is not constant.
However, extended periods without sexual attraction from a partner create difficulty both from the absence of intimacy and from the negative self-perception it generates. These effects cascade negatively. The data indicate that rating a partner as a good lover remains a strong predictor of relationship positivity. Healthy romantic relationships benefit from actively cultivating and protecting physical intimacy rather than assuming it becomes unimportant after a certain stage.
Dr. Eastwick's course on attraction, compatibility, and romance is highly popular. Students frequently express the belief that modern dating is fundamentally broken due to dating apps controlling interactions and reduced in-person socializing. They question whether older research still applies.
Dr. Eastwick acknowledges generational differences. Current students go out less, drink less, and socialize differently, interfacing more with technology that helps some people while creating barriers for others. He emphasizes that groups, clubs, and activities remain available and continue to work well for meeting people. Any generation feels that things have changed, and it takes time to determine what has genuinely shifted.
One effective approach is not merely signing up for activities but organizing them. Examples include throwing picnics or parties. During graduate school at Davis, a recurring Friday pickup beach volleyball game drew participants who would then go to a Thai restaurant and bar afterward. The only rule was attempting proper bump-set volleyball technique rather than simply hitting the ball over the net. Anyone could join regardless of skill level. These gatherings required minimal planning, often just an email, and operated without any single person in charge.
Other examples included cooking competitions where participants brought specific dishes to someone's house. These low-barrier activities created regular opportunities for in-person connection. The pull of technology, entertainment, and apps keeps people indoors in ways that did not exist twenty to thirty years ago.
Dr. Eastwick believes in-person socializing is returning after a pandemic-related pause. Humans remain social creatures with frontal lobes that allow self-nudging toward interaction even when it feels unappealing. He encourages young people to rebel against entertainment companies and apps that discourage real socialization by forming groups and meeting in person.
Dr. Eastwick's work challenges aspects of longstanding evolutionary psychology theories while maintaining respect for portions of that literature. His research has created a new field examining how actual relationship dynamics unfold. His approach conveys optimism and focuses on solutions rather than doom-and-gloom narratives. The discussion benefits people currently in relationships who want to strengthen them, those seeking partners, and those observing relationship patterns around them.
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