Modern Wisdom - #1056 - Dr Paul Eastwick - Did Evolutionary Psychology Get Dating All Wrong?

Episode Date: February 7, 2026

Dr Paul Eastwick is a psychologist, professor, and a researcher. Much of what we think we know about relationships comes from an evolutionary psychology lens, but what if that framework is flawed? In his groundbreaking new research, Dr Paul Eastwock challenges long-held assumptions, turning evolutionary psychology on its head. So where did it go wrong, and what new models replace it? Expect to learn where the Evo Psych community may have been wrong about mating and relationships, the biggest problem with the term “mating market”, how accurate people’s opinions are and ideas at their “type” or mate preferences, what men find appealing in women and visa versa, what Paul’s definition of attachment in adulthood via safe haven (support in adversity) and secure base (support in growth) is, why masculinity needs reimagining and much more… Sponsors: Get my free Valentine’s Review with 75 deep questions to ask your partner: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/valentines⁠⁠ See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get up to 20% off the leading longevity and cellular health supplement at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Valentine's Day is coming up and whether you want to more deeply connect with your partner or work out whether or not you should break up. I've got the fix for you. I have put together a list of 50 of the most viral and science-backed ways to connect with your partner more deeply and 25 questions that will help you work out whether or not you should break up. And they're all available right now at the Modern Wisdom Valentine's review. It is completely free. You can get it by going to chriswillex.com slash valentines. That's chriswillx.com slash valentines. we were talking before we got started many of the past guests that have been on my show and much of my education I think into the world of mating dynamics, understanding relationship science has been informed by an evolutionary perspective.

I think it's fair to say that your new book takes somewhat of an opposing perspective to much of the evolutionary psychology position. Is that a fair assessment? I think that's fair. I am not using the standard, like this is not a standard nature nurture thing. That's not where I'm coming from. I'm coming from a place of actually there's a different way of talking about human nature,

a different way of talking about the way that humans evolve to form relationships that I think is kind of missing out there. And that's more or less why I wrote the book. What's your background? Because most people when we talk about relationship science in the modern world are going to be coming out of some kind of EP, mating research lab. What are you? Yeah. So I would say I'm a scholar

of close relationships. There's a whole field that we call ourselves Relationship Science. We're largely in the social and personality, psychological tradition, but there are threads

that connect to things like clinical psychology, family studies, things like that. So we are informed by an evolutionary perspective too, it's just a different one. So, for example, we talk about attachment perspectives a lot. And attachment has very deep evolutionary roots going back to Bulby and so forth. But it's just a

little different from the standard evolutionary psychological perspective. That's interesting. Okay, so what is your problem with the sort of classic Evo script as you see it? Yeah, I think it overestimates a few things. It exaggerates some features of human mating. And it's only in a few cases where I'm like, oh, it's totally off the mark. But I think there's a big emphasis on things like mate value, the idea that some people are more desirable than others. There's an emphasis on gender differences, right? Like men and women are really, really different in the mating realm. I also think there's this emphasis on like the short term versus long term mating distinction and like some people are good at one or the other.

I think these ideas, we've got a lot of misconceptions to put it mildly about those three things. And I think once we kind of pick those things apart, we can put the pieces back together in a way that fits what I'd call the relationship science view, which is more about attachment, compatibility, and forming relationships through small networks. Okay. Yeah. I think a lot of conversations that I would have would be about short-term versus long-term. A lot would be related to sex differences, preferences. I think the world of EP a lot of the time is talking about this, sex differences, especially in terms of preferences for life, not just preferences in another partner. Yeah, I think that's fair. I guess right, right,

up top, the words mating market, probably one of the most ubiquitously used in all of the world of evolutionary psychology mating research. Exactly right. What is your problem with the term mating market? I think the mating market, it's a way of thinking about how humans form relationships, like it's a competition, right? And the competition follows from the idea that some people are really desirable. They've got lots of attributes that will make.

make them very popular and they'll be great partners if you can get in a relationship with them. I think this idea, it is true to some extent, but I think it's true in a more limited way than we realize. And specifically, I think it describes initial attraction markets among strangers pretty well. So that's a context where we can think about mating markets, like you're meeting people at a bar, you're going to a party and meeting people for the first time. And in those contexts, people are going to agree about who the other desirable people are. And it's going to feel competitive. It's going to feel like the tens get all the attention and the twos just kind of, you know, hang out over in the corner. But what we find through a lot of our research is that that period of time,

that segment of what it's like to form a relationship is actually kind of short-lived, especially if people are getting to know other people in groups over time. It's like become a little bit of a lost art. But when we conduct studies like that, we find that even though people tend to agree pretty strongly, who are the tens and who are the twos when they're first meeting, that tendency to agree actually fades over time. And that has really big implications for whether meeting feels competitive, whether it feels like a market. When you say it fades over time, what do you mean?

Yeah. So let's think about it this way. If you're meeting people for the first time, and let's just make this really simple, I'm going to, you and me and we're going to evaluate a woman. And the question is, hot or not, we're just going to make simple binary judgments. we probably agree like 70, 75% of the time, okay, as opposed to 50-50 chance. That's pretty good, okay? That is where the sense comes from, that when people are meeting each other or I'm being evaluated, I mean, maybe people are just looking at my photo online and swiping left or right.

That's where that sense comes from that there are tens and twos. But a funny thing starts to happen as people meet each other multiple times. and we've shown this in a variety of studies. If you have us do that task again, after a little while, the agreement would go down to 65%. And then 60%. And if I do these studies among like friends and acquaintances who've known each other for months or years, they're agreeing like 53% of the time about who's hot and who's not, about who you'd want to date and who you wouldn't want to date,

it's sort of shocking, but it makes sense when you realize a couple things. Once we get to know people over time, what happens is that some people seem more appealing to us as we get to know them. Maybe we learn like, oh, I didn't think much of them at first. Then I realized they have a great sense of humor. So everything about them becomes more appealing. But with other people, it's going to go the other way. And the issue is that different perceivers sort of go along. along those tracks differently for the same target. So you might find that somebody gets more appealing.

I find that they get less appealing. That leads us to diverge more over time. I think it is really, really lucky that people do this because what this means is that, okay, I'm a six. I'm not going to date a ten. Ah, but I might get to date somebody who I think is a ten. And maybe he'll, you know, she might be a six too, but she thinks I'm a ten. And 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 because they think they won the lottery, even if other people don't agree. Okay. So it seems like the word consensus is pretty important here that if you were to take a hundred people in a room and get everybody to do that,

and I'm going to guess you've done this, hot or not, is that your criteria? Yeah. I mean, it's easiest when we're discussing it like this to talk about hot or not. We're always doing it on scales. It's like variants shared. But what do you tend to do? You tend to get people to rank order out of 10? Or do you tend to get people to rate out of 10? What is the metric?

Yeah, like rate out of 10 is usually how it would be. Okay. So the first thing that comes to mind is in order for us to get past, let's say, the front door of attraction or the front door of potential attachment in your language, you need to have the hot button press. typically. Like if the not button gets pressed at the front door, the likelihood of you getting to date, even to date one, you've already either in person or virtually the equivalent of swiked left. Yep. So in order for you to get to your particular perspective, which is these

consensus diverge over time because people's compatibility and how they find the other person to be attractive alluring, beguiling in a manner that means that they see the beauty in them that wasn't immediately sort of presented. In order for you to get to that, you need to kind of tick yes on the very first thing. So presumably this doesn't mean that someone's immediately presentable broad shoulders on a guy, waist to hip ratio on a woman, long hair, good teeth, good skin. These things still matter because they are the selection criteria. by which you get through the door to the party to actually be able to do your second stage of assessment?

In the form of dating, absolutely, in the form of dating where you have those cutoffs that you just described. So online dating is a perfect example. But even if we're in the mindset of the way I date is I approach strangers, parties, bars on the street, I mean, God bless, however people want to do it. Yes. but historically we have found other ways. There are many, many contexts where we interact with other people and like you don't have a choice whether to opt out or not, you're going to be interacting with them again next week. And then the week after that and then the week after that.

I mean, school and work are kind of obvious examples where we need the same people over time and we get to know them. We end up chatting with them. but we're not like selecting into it in the same way. And, you know, online dating is very popular these days, but these other methods of meeting partners have been around for a very long time, and they're still out there.

So what I'm usually inclined to say is that, look, for people who do not initially present as a nine or a 10, don't forget the other ways of meeting people. I mean, I don't know, like join a sports league, Intermural Sports League, you know, take a couple of dance classes or a couple of cooking classes, things where you would get to meet people over time. These things pull for that idiosyncrasy and gives more people opportunities. And I think that's the thing that we've kind of lost a bit in our like, you know, online dating deluge. Well, I think what is it,

60% of relationships or more now begin online in one form or another? That sounds high. I've, I mean, I've seen like 30 something. I haven't seen 60. It's at least 40, but I think when you account for social media, I think it's online dating, which is 40, but I think when you account for social media as well, it wouldn't surprise me if it was above 50. So anyway, it's a significant portion. And then, okay, add on to that, bars, and even introductions from friends, the repeat

exposure that you're talking about doesn't necessarily have chance to blossom. Now, I get what you mean. If we're looking at this from a strictly sort of evolutionary perspective, we would have been in our pod of 30 from our Dunbar number of 150. And you're seeing this person every morning as you get up and you go and refill the bucket. So I understand what you're talking about there. But I do think that that certainly is mismatched with what our current mating environment looks like. Another perspective, I'm going to guess you've never heard of this. It's called an office plus two. So an office, an office plus two is. It was used by me and a bunch of my friends. It's a term in the UK that describes someone that you work with regularly who might be a six out of ten, but because they're in the office and you see them every day for a couple of months, they seem to be an eight. So it's called the Office Plus Two.

That's absolutely right. And the only thing I'm adding to that is that, sorry to make it more complicated, because that's really perfect. But you also have got a lot of Office minus twos. You probably aren't talking about them, but they're out there too. And I don't know if you're at that company for 10 years, now you're going to have some office plus threes and plus fours. That is, the spread will increase. But that's exactly right.

And I think that the problem with the modern dating environment is that if we expect people to knock us out right away, if we're expecting to be absolutely swept off our feet at moment one, that just doesn't. cater to a lot of people's strengths. But, and again, I sound like an old man, but like the old ways used to allow for this. When we got to meet people through, you know, organically through everyday life, it gave more people a chance. And that's kind of the thing I want to remind people of. I understand. Unfortunately, saying that the modern environment is not conducive to a more egalitarian type of mating. I know. Yeah. Doesn't necessarily stop the issue from happening. Like I totally get it. If you're somebody who doesn't immediately present in the manner that would be successful in online dating or in a bar or at a one-off meetup, that does put you on a back foot in a manner that maybe it wouldn't have done 50 years ago. But, you know, coming along for the ride with that are all of these stories.

Like, you know, granddad said that he went to the dance hall every Friday for three months until grandma finally said yes. I am really trying not to be that guy. But you know what I mean? Like we've got these sort of complex challenges. Okay. So that's, but let's one quick thing, which is that even when people meet for the first time, okay, and this I'm getting from speed dating, the power of consensus is about as strong, if anything, a little weaker than the power of compatibility. So even if we're meeting, okay, if we're at least meeting face to face. So things like speed dating, things like parties, there's a lot of compatibility there.

And it's going to be way better than dating online. So even if we're trapped in these modern urban environments where there are a lot of people around and a lot of competition, at least start by meeting people face to face rather than just the swiping. I would just add that. Okay. So is it your perspective then that the evolutionary approach sees mating as a hierarchy of romantic inequality? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so. And I think, you know, like we're talking about, I do think online dating exists. exacerbates that inequality. But I think that now if we're talking about like theory, what's the story of human mating? The story, I mean, as I've understood it since the 90s, was really about like, well, you sort of do the best you can. And, you know, maybe things go well for you and you improve your attributes.

And so you might be able to like trade up eventually. And this is why people give advice things like. like, well, if you're a six, you should really try to get with somebody else who's a six. Because otherwise, like, if you don't trade up on them, like, they're going to trade up on you. And so it sure would be ideal, you know, the most stable relationships come from a match and mate value. We look at that kind of stuff. We can look at close relationships over time and how match people are in mate value. You get matches, you get mismatches.

None of it matters. On average, I certainly agree. who you click on doesn't necessarily correlate with who you click with. We're not necessarily great judges of our own type. And everybody that's ever fallen for someone who they wouldn't have picked at first knows that. However, is it not the case that assortative mating for IQ, for education level, for height, for income, for attractiveness level, and these include things that aren't just objective, but stuff that's subjectively consensus? that if you were to pick that, like on average sevens get with sevens, and those sevens that look like sevens will gravitate towards sevens,

and that occurs over time. And if you were to look at them in five years' time, people would say, yeah, that there has to be a bulge in the compatibility, because the likelihood of 10 with two can't simply be the same as 8 with 8. sort of kinda. Let me try to unpack this. I mean, this is great. I mean, I love talking about this stuff. I like to put these two attributes in two buckets because a lot of the things you mentioned, whether it's like income education and stuff, a lot of that is just like who people

are meeting in the first place. So there's like sorting on demographics. A lot of that is about proximity and who people are meeting in the first place. But let's talk about the stuff that's that is less sorted like attractiveness, for example. So, yes, it is more likely that you'll see a seven paired with a seven. Again, if you had two people in front of you, here's a useful thought experiment. You got a guy and two women, and you're trying to guess which one is his partner. If you pick the woman that is closer to him in an attractiveness, you're going to be right about 70% of the time. Okay.

So that's about how powerful that effect is, notably higher than 50-50. A lot of that effect can be explained by some of this competition and mating market stuff that we're talking about, right? People initially meeting, getting to know each other, when relationships form out of that milieu, out of parties, out of online dating, that's where the matching comes from. What we also see is that if you want to explain the mismatched couples, look at how long. they knew each other before they got together. Quite commonly, what we see in some of our work is that those were people who knew each other for a long time before they formed a relationship. Again, that gave them time for those idiosyncrasies to form. But here's the key thing. I've got a set of matched couples and a set of mismatched couples. The matched couples for... What is mismatched is their mate value on the attractiveness scale is not close. Yeah, and eight and a five.

Right. Okay. Something like that. Okay. So I got a seven and a seven. I got an eight and a five, okay? There is no indication whatsoever that the eight and the five are going to break up sooner, be more miserable, be more likely to cheat relative to the seven and the seven. It doesn't predict a thing. A quick aside, do you remember learning about the mighty mitochondria back in grade school? Here's a quick refresher. It's the tiny engine inside of your cells that powers everything you do. But here's what they didn't teach you.

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And best of all, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. So right now you can get a free sample or get up to 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom. That's timeline.com slash. modern wisdom. That's interesting because I've definitely seen some data. One of Buses' best lines is mates once gained must be retained. And I think that that's true, which is if you are in a relationship with a very high profile guy, let's say, a guy whose mate value due to his level of status or fame, or a woman who is incredibly beautiful and very obvious and visible, that is going to create a degree of increased mate guarding because you're simply going to be aware that their other options are

greater. Like there is some small data that suggests attractive people have slightly less satisfaction inside of relationships because they see that they could be always trading. This is from Mac and Murphy that optionality to attractive people is greater and there is a small effect that suggests attractive people have less satisfaction in their relationships. Also, if you've got this big delta in mate value between one person and another, you are almost certainly going to see some degree of anxiety, uncertainty in the person who is less obvious in their attractiveness, even if it's because their partner sees them as a nine. Their partner sees them as a nine, but the rest of the world doesn't. The rest of the world is going up to their partner at the bar,

at the meeting at work, on the online social media profile. they are going to continue to accumulate that front end of the funnel traffic in a manner that the one whose values are more subtle and get revealed over time is not going to. Yeah. So with respect to the attractiveness satisfaction data in the long run, that is not what I have seen. And we've done meta analyses of exactly that, using objective measures of attractiveness. to predict long-term relationship satisfaction. In men and women, it just doesn't do much of anything. Hot people can be great partners.

Hot people can be terrible partners. On average. If there's new data out there, I'd love to see that. But that's what we've seen for a long time there. But on the mismatch, I think the way that I can help this land for people is to remind them that when a relationship has actually formed, these two people are in it. This eight and this five are genuinely in a relationship together. What ends up happening is that in order to sustain any kind of relationship,

a whole bunch of motivated biases have to come online. If they don't come online, the relationship is not going to last. But this always needs to happen. Those biases include things like, what the hell do these other people know about our relationship? I yeah like okay you're not as attractive as my last boyfriend you know what he was you know terrible in all these ways but I can tell you I love you for reasons X Y Z okay now are these reasons real are they not real it doesn't matter if the person believes it like that's the nature of motivated reasoning um so a lot of that has to do with how we defend against alternatives as well so people seem to be able to defend against those kinds of threats, the things you're describing, regardless of the level of mate value mismatch. I get it. Like, if somebody's in eight and they're paired with a five, it seems like they've probably

got more people coming up to them, more people thinking that they might be eager to trade up. But I've never seen any data to suggest that that poses a unique problem, right? Everybody's got to deal with threats. Everybody's got to deal with temptations. Would that not be an additional problem, whether it's unique or not? Right. Well, no, but just the idea that a mismatch might have more of those like interloper threats. I have not seen that data. But what we do see time and time again is that if people have those biases activated, if they think their partner is more wonderful than everybody else, regardless of what everybody else thinks, those are the relationships that are more likely to last. Okay. In the first few lines of the book, you sort of push back against this nerd improve thyself advice that your friend gave you, basically, maybe you were single at the time and we're looking to find a partner and your friend said, well, you need to go to the gym and you need to sort your clothes out and God, your hair sucks and we need to do these things, become more funny or whatever it is. I understand that using your current conception, the mating market plays into that. that there is a kind of value number above your head. And as you do things, you're able to accumulate experience points

and that number is going to increase. And the people around you are going to be, they're going to be able to detect the work that you put into yourself as your mate value goes up. Is that a fair sort of way? Okay. Exactly. It's very gamified.

Right. But are you saying then that it is not possible or advisable to work on yourself to become more attractive on the front end? I think there is some limited amount of that that's a good idea, right? There's like some really basic stuff, right? I mean, working out's a really good idea. Eating healthy is a really good idea,

not just because it's going to make you desirable, but because it's going to make you happier about yourself, your life in general. So these things are a good idea. I just think we get locked into those solutions, locked into these self-improvement solutions, as opposed to the social network-related solutions. That maybe what would be good for me is like, okay, yes, I should go to the gym more.

Yes, it would help if I stopped, you know, eating dominoes at 11 p.m. But I also need to remember to like actually hang out with people in person and maybe try out some new hobbies and meet some new people if my current social networks aren't really doing it for me. So I just want to turn down the emphasis on the self-improvement stuff because my suspicion is that though it helps some people a lot, either it only helps, you know, somewhat for other people. And when those solutions stop changing people's fortunes, they get frustrated. So I really just want to remind people that there's another avenue out here. Let's say that you're, I guess, are you suggesting that you compete by taking yourself out? Because you are still, there only one person, presuming that we're in a monogamous society, only one person can be with one person. And if that's the case, by taking yourself out of one mating strategy, let's say it's online, and instead using friend referral networks or going to church or starting a hobby and meeting people there, there is still a degree of competition, even if you're not.

you're competing from one bucket to another bucket, right? You have taken yourself out of a red ocean and put yourself into a blue one. Yeah. Yeah, right. I mean, that's an apt metaphor there. But I think that's right. But keeping in mind that, look, improving your attributes is going to have some value. But remember, it's going to have actually less value in a context where people are getting to know you over time. I mean, this is going back to some of the mate value consensus stuff we were talking about earlier. There's a funny implication of all of this, which is that if you're exceptionally hot, okay, if everybody can see your good qualities right there on the surface, you're actually best served by hopping from bar to bar party to party. Because the only thing that's going to happen is people

get to know you is that some subset of folks are going to think you're less appealing. Okay. So if we're talking about church, for example, yes, it can help to improve your attributes a little bit, but remember, that's going to start to matter less after you've been going for a month or three months or six months or a year. I don't know whether I... It might be worth you restating sort of your position

against the thing that keeps coming to mind for me, which is the front end of your funnel is wider, the further up the objective consensus-driven, obvious front window attractiveness, you go. If you are 10, there are more people that you're going to have the opportunity to, and that means over time that you are going to be able to have your hopefully wonderful personality flourish and blossom and go through and that you turn into a 12 or something like that. But not if the other sevens in your midst don't get to opt out of hanging out with the fives.

If they don't get to opt out of hanging out with the fives, some of those fives are going to increase in their appeal to the sevens, and your appeal might go down. So you are thinking about it exactly correctly in an environment where, you know, imagine like dating somebody sequentially and you drop off after they seem sufficiently unappealing. Yes, exactly. But if we're, you know, forced, for lack of a better word, to interact with people, which happens in a lot of contacts, then again, there's going to be some amount of increase in opportunity, but it's not so dramatic. Well, it certainly did ancestrally, right? You were forced because where are you going to go? You live in this valley and this is a group of people that are around you.

And trying to take an evolutionary perspective to what you're suggesting here, it would make sense that. are bonding and attachment systems would be market-specific in that way, that certain people would have certain preferences and other people would have other preferences because that allows as much mating to occur as possible in a mixed group. Is that a fair way to look at it? Exactly. That is perfect. It's like we over-indexed on like, oh,

Mating success was getting with the most desirable people. Instead, we could think about mating success was about forming an interdependent relationship that was effective at raising these extremely costly offspring. So it's not really about getting somebody with the best traits. It's about forming the best relationship that allows us to work together over time doing this, like, impossibly difficult task of raising children. Let's look at something else then that isn't just a. attractiveness that might be a little bit more kind of evolutionarily apt, something like resources in men, resource provisioning, the ability for a man to be able to provide for you and your potential

future offspring, that would be, regardless of how nice or not nice he is, that would be a long-term payoff that would benefit both you and your kids, no? Yes, it's complicated by the fact that a lot of hunter-gatherer groups, the spoils that these men would be able to provide are shared widely. So in some ways, like, again, all of these things get very mushy because what you're actually getting, if you get with like a great hunter, for example, is you're getting some prestige from the community. You're also getting a little bit of assurance that if something happens, the rest of the community is going to be looking out for you. Right. Exactly. Stuff like that.

but there can be other forms of provisioning that matter too. So this guy, let's say he's not the best hunter in the world, but you know what he does? He knows where the honey's at, okay? I'm talking about like literal honey. And he goes and finds the honey and brings that back for you. But we're still talking about another sort of competence or resource provisioning thing here, right? You're picking a different bucket, but it's still the same overall level of competence in a partner. And I think if we were to look at something like competence as a good example of this, you could use whatever proxy you want for this, agency, conscientiousness, industriousness, maybe IQ. Like, if someone, a male, let's just say that, again, resource provisioning, ancestral environment, yeah, yeah, women can earn for themselves now. If we have that, if you have a guy who is able to be an eight out of ten provider, provisioner, resource acquirer, with the status and the renown of the

group and people like him and he's pro-social. And then you have somebody else who does not have those traits but is equal. Like that is just a raw, even though that might not be to do with compatibility, their humor, their commitment, all the rest of this stuff, one just brings more to the table. Does that not suggest that there is a kind of objective market when it comes to mate value because of usefulness, how you can, the utility of trading this in? I think there's some, But I think, again, what that sidelines is the fact that a lot of what these guys would have been needed for is, are things surrounding like protection of like my offspring. Like, why was it in the first place that a couple of million years ago women seemed to start wanting men to be around? I mean, they started selecting for the men that were less aggressive around kids, right?

that they could trust around their own kids. And this is why we start to see, like we don't have the sharp canines anymore. We men, human men are pretty docile compared to, you know, what you see in our closest ape relatives. And that's because we were being selected to be good caregivers as well. I mean, it's weird to think about today. We don't think about that as being a particularly manly activity.

But it is, in fact, one of the primary things that we were, selected to do by the women to be able to be around young children to teach them things, to show them the skills of hunting, provisioning, and everything else. And a lot of that was going to depend on the compatibility of that relationship. So we just have to imagine these things existing in tandem. Yes, there are going to be some men in ancestral contexts who were better providers and were more well respected by the group. At least at a given moment in time, a lot of those things were fluid and shifted and changed as well. But yes, there's going to be some amount of hierarchy there, but that is complemented by both sort of having a sense of belonging to a group,

contributing to a group, and having a compatible relationship where two people can function well in interdependent way, you know, not only that dyad relative to the rest of the group, but that diet and how they raise offspring, et cetera. Okay. So your perspective that's an alternative to seeing mating as a marketplace is compatibility drone bonding. Yes, exactly. Right. Right. The attachment bonds that human mating partners form, this is not some weird new phenomenon, that this is also absolutely key to understanding human evolution. And in fact, if we want to focus on the particulars of the way humans evolved, that's where I would point. Again, as I mentioned earlier, this idea that

human males got smaller, gentler, we lost the sharp canines, dimorphism decreased because we were being selected to be gentle and kind, especially around offspring. Right, because male parental investment went up. Yes. MPI went up because kids were more neotenous and blobby. Exactly. Okay. Well, you know, there are other sides of this too. You would get more allot-parenting. I would imagine that you would see, I don't know if this is the case, but I'm going to guess that in other close primates that have more competent, capable infants that are less useless, you would see less alloparenting and less male parental investment because the demand for child rearing doesn't require a supply of grandmother and local cousin to help the baby, which isn't the case

when it comes to human females. Okay. What is wrong with the gender differences point? Okay, this is fun. Before we continue, I am a massive fan of reducing your alcohol intake, but historically, non-alcoholic brews tastes like ass. You don't need to be doing some big reset. Maybe you just want to crack a cold one without feeling like garbage the next morning,

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That's athleticbrewing.com slash modern wisdom. Gender differences are exciting. And look, evolutionary psychology was born in explaining a lot of these gender differences. I get it. I get their importance. But once again, I think we have overestimated some of them. let's talk about the mate preferences first. And, you know, I know you're familiar with the concepts of stated and revealed preferences, right?

There's a distinction between what people say they want in a partner and what they actually want a partner. Their preferences as they are revealed through interactions with real people. And this was one of the first things we studied 20 years ago. We knew that the men in our sample would say they cared about attractiveness more than women. And we knew that the women in our sample would say they cared about ambition more than men. But when we sent them speed dating, what you saw was like, oh, ambition is a mild aphrodisiac. They like the ambitious guys more than the non-ambitious guys. But the men like the ambitious women a little bit more than the unambitious women.

And there was no gender differences. And that was the first thing that clued us in that like, whoa, maybe when men say they want these things, they're misunderstanding their own preferences in some ways. And same thing for women, too. Okay. What has your lab discovered that people find as attractive that an evolutionary lens doesn't typically notice when it comes to gender differences that are either proven or disproven? I would say that probably the thing that has stood out the most is, you know, what I just mentioned. So ambition, earning potential. These are, you know, they inspire romantic. desire a little bit. People are like a little bit happier in their ongoing relationships if they

think their partner is ambitious and successful, for example. But that's really one where we've seen there's no gender difference in that overall effect. People find this a little shocking, like, well, what about the findings where, oh, like relationships were more likely to break up when the woman earned more? A lot of those things haven't held up to various confound. So even if you look in the macro trends, you basically see this as well, that like the mismatched pairings, you know, mismatch from a gendered perspective. So women earning more than their partners, there's really no costs to that, at least, you know, that we see in the contemporary data. So I think all of this. I mean, I've seen, as I'm sure you have too, when a man loses his job, the likelihood

of divorce goes up by, I think, 30% or maybe even 50%. When a woman loses her job, the likelihood of divorce doesn't go up at all. I confess, the divorce data are kind of thorny because a lot of times, yeah, they're not predicting divorce. They're like asking people to reflect back on a divorce and asking them why it ended. So I am familiar with those data that you're talking about. But generally speaking, these gender differences are very, very small. And we can get into like the contemporary education stuff too because that's also interesting along these lines.

Yeah. Hit me. Yeah. Well, so now we see, right, that women are earning more degrees than men. Okay. And I think some people are really worried that this is a contributor to the rise in singleddom. I think this is a red herring. From the data that I have seen, there aren't there aren't costs to women being more. educated than men. That nowadays, when couples who are mismatch in education form, it's more common

that the woman has more education than the man. And there's, again, there's no risk to these relationships. These relationships are not at any greater risk than if they had been matched in education or if the man was more educated. So I do think there is a rise in singles. And I do think that, you know, there are challenges there. But I don't think it has to do with, you know, the men's education level. I think that is unlikely to be the explanation. Explain to me then. Yeah. What you think women mean, modern women, when they say men need to up their game. There's a million ways that I can put it, improve their standards, pick themselves up by their bootstraps, sort themselves out. Men need to up their game, which I think is what a lot of the

young female, like if I look at mid-20s, classic dating advice from whatever the female equivalent of the manosphere is, like dating commentators that are female in their 20s, much of the advice, much of the justification given is we're not putting up with men who don't meet our standards anymore. Yeah. What do you think they mean by that? I think what they mean is that what they're seeing online is disappointing. Online dating? Yeah. I think that they're probably not actually meeting many of these guys.

And that could be on the guys. That could be because some men have retreated from traditional modes of social interaction. Do you know if they've done that more than women? That I don't know. It's plausible. I mean, you know, it's happening at all ages. That I can tell you. I mean, we're often very eager to blame this on like Gen Z.

We want to like blame the kids these days. I know that the American Time Use survey recently found out that the average female pet owners spends more time with her pet than all humans combined. Oh, wow. That's not Lord. But look, I do think spending time that, you know, phones, screens, I mean, whatever it is that's not out there interacting with real people in the world. So I haven't seen the data, but I would certainly buy the idea that that's happened to men more than women.

That, I would suggest, very well could be the problem. So if we engaged as a society in a large, like, loneliness intervention that got men off the couch and out into the world again, meeting these women, I think things are going to go a lot better. I'm not saying that women aren't going to be disappointed in these guys from time to time. I hope that if they're not as educated, that they've developed some other attributes instead. I hope they're dynamite in the kitchen. But I think the real problem is people not meeting. I mean, I almost always go back to that.

You think that a guy who has a high school diploma trying to date a woman who has a master's, if he can make a good rigatoni, that would offset his... the delta? Yeah, I mean, maybe like fix the sink. Like, you know, there's lots of useful things that people can do to make themselves appealing. Education is just one among many. But the problem is that if you're dating online and you're swiping, it's all being used as a screening criterion. So you're not even getting to the first date, much less interacting with somebody. Does this not play into the mating market justification though? No, no, I know it does. No, but this is the problem. This is why online dating makes it all worse, right? Online dating means like, oh, not only

are the 10s going to do way better than the sevens who are going to do way better than the fours, but I don't even need to bother interacting with you in the first place if you don't check all the boxes. And to me, that's a bummer because what I know and what I've seen time and time again is that the boxes that you think are so important. And again, gender doesn't matter who it's on this. Men do this too. The boxes that you think are so important, I can tell you, they go right out the window once you meet face to face,

for good or for ill. Yeah, okay. I mean, this was our first conversation from a couple of years ago. People should go back and watch that. I think the research that you did looking at stated and revealed preferences and how that sort of percolates was really fascinating. do me a 30,000 foot view. What is it that men and women think that they're going to find appealing in the opposite sex?

And what is it that actually matters? I think, look, in broad strokes, they do get some of these things right. I mean, they think they want somebody that they find intelligent and somebody that they think has got a good sense of humor and somebody who's going to be loyal to them. And indeed, like, these are qualities that matter. It's really important that we feel that our partners have. these things. If anything, both men and women underestimate how much attractiveness is important. And here, what I'm really talking about is the feeling you have that somebody else is attractive. I think sometimes both women and even men to some extent think it's a little shallow if I put

attractiveness at the top of my must have attributes. But it is important to think that your partner is sexy. It's especially important to think your partner is a good lover. I mean, we found that that was number one in terms of what actually mattered in terms of predicting how happy people were in their relationships. If you ask people to rate that on a scale, it's not quite so high. So those are a few of the examples. But I think in large part, what makes people happy in relationships is, yeah, you want to think your partner has all those things. But let's also don't forget about the diatic stuff. It's like, if I had a crappy day, do I feel like I can talk to you about it? And you're going to listen to what went wrong with my day.

You're going to try to, try to, you know, bolster me back up. If something good happened to me, are you more excited about it than I am? Right. So what are we talking about their patience, attentiveness to detail? It's supportiveness, but it gets to a, it's like supportiveness, but supportive in a way, that isn't like, oh, like you're a supportive friend, like, oh, you're the kind of person everybody goes to when something's gone wrong. I want you as a partner to be exceptionally attuned to like my goals, my dreams. I mean, this is kind of what we've done to marriage recently.

We expect our partner to do all these things. But indeed, people tend to be much happier in their relationships if they feel like their partner has their back and is like supporting them as they pursue the things that they want to pursue. It can be a tall order, but these generally tend to be the things that matter the most for people. If you were to give people advice and you were to say,

here are a couple of traits that you can usually detect within the first few dates or maybe even online, what are the ones that you wish you could advise people to dispense with and put in the bin? What are people overestimating on

and what are people underestimating on. That's a good question. I think they underestimate the importance of vulnerability, their own vulnerability and the other persons.

And again, like you're describing it like a trait, but that isn't totally how I think about it. It's not like, I want to find a vulnerable person. I want to find somebody who's willing to be vulnerable

with me, who's willing to disclose things to me. I mean, I don't know if you've ever had this experience of like getting to know somebody, but the first time they tell you something deeply personal about themselves, you get the sense they haven't told this to many people, that's kind of an aphrodisiac in and of itself. It's like this person is really opening up to me. They must really trust me. You feel chosen and special. Yeah. Exactly. So there's something at the intersection of vulnerability that I think people don't quite get. I think when people think about dating, they think about self-promotion. They think about putting the best version of themselves out there. But a lot of times, coming across, again, this is going to shock a lot of people, but there really is research on this. Like coming across as a little bit vulnerable, a little bit like you kind of are, like, needy is too strong.

But like just a touch of openness to having somebody else do things for you to learning from another person. That's maybe a good way of thinking about it. You know what it makes me think of. It makes me think of kind of like emotional, reciprocal. altruism in that way. I'm going to give you a little thing. And in the giving of that, what's that psychological study where people prefer you to ask them for a favor than to do a favor for them? Because inherent in that is this reciprocal. At some point in future, you think that maybe I could do this back to you and I feel helpful. An interesting wrinkle in that, I guess, would be I'd love to have this

broken down by age, I get the sense that younger people are going to be, they're going to find in a tougher time to work out what the emotional complexity of this person means. Does this vulnerability signal a lack of resilience and resource provisioning at 22, when at 32, you actually realize, wow, this person's been very brave in order to get themselves to the stage where they can open up. I'm looking for different sorts of things. I understand this in the broader context. And the reason that I say this is I know all of my single friends in their 30s,

if they post something that is like a dog photo or them holding a nephew or them talking in a kind of mindful way, those sorts of posts get way more engagement from women. than they would have done in their 20s. And also they get way more engagement from women than posting their car or their Rolex or their new deadlift. Like the bottom line is I think a lot of the like alpha posturing stuff that guys think is attractive to women

might be in kind of like an ancillary way, but it also says a lot about what you value and what would be a better place to start. controversial fucking take if you post pro family stuff as a guy

who's trying to get a partner I think that you are swimming immediately into a blue ocean whereas if you try and post a Lamborghini photo

it's not even a red ocean you haven't even jumped in I don't think that girls care um like I I may be wrong there may be floods of women in the comments

who are saying I love seeing it when guys post their new car on their Instagram. Like it makes me so attracted to them. Something tells me that's not going to be the case. No, but I love this idea. I think the age idea is interesting, or at least the idea that as people age and, you know, they have more experience dating, that they kind of learn from their past experiences and grow and change. I think there's something to be said for that sort of maturation. Sorry, I need to interrupt. Think about, so you've got your idea of over time the compatibility driven bonding,

and that is within an interaction with a single individual, you work out that you like them more, therefore you rate them more highly. That's kind of the way that it works. I think that you have this longitudinally across someone's dating career. Oh, that's cool. you know, does that make sense? You understand what I'm getting it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I'm quite sure that study has never been done. Because it's very, very hard to track people across their dating career. I could kind of one hand. What did you used to like? What did you like five years ago? What do you like now? How are you optimizing on the front end for different things? And this would explain our little theory about why vulnerability perhaps in your 30s

means something different than vulnerability in your 20s. That maybe the 22-year-old that's got the lambie. is different to the 39-year-old who's posting the Lambo. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's a tricky thing, too, about dating over time, which is that, like, what people are trying to do as they date. And this even goes, you know, in your 30s, you get a divorce or two. Like, this is all part of the process, is that each next relationship is, like, a little

different than the one that came before, but it's also going to have some similarities. It's actually very challenging to know how can I be a new person in this relationship that's going to make this one work and not fall into the same pitfalls of the prior relationship. It's a tricky dance because there are some things that you were doing in that prior relationship that actually worked well and you should do those again. And there are other things that you should totally scrap and go in a different direction. And of course, all of this ends up being a diatic give and take with another person. We are really at the vanguard right now. Like, research doesn't study things as well as the conversation we're having. This episode is brought to you by Whoop.

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or heading to join.wop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.com slash modern wisdom. I think that's a cool idea, dude. Even if it can never be studied, I think that looking at the increasing dexterity with which you're able to discern your preferences over time and how they move, learning yourself and learning other people, I think is fucking fascinating.

And I think that's really cool. And I don't think, you know, I'm very much kind of the token idiot representative for the evolutionary world here, at least on this side of the fence. But I would argue that I think that perspective is going to be something that would be difficult for evolutionary psychology to do the research into, but maybe something that relationship science might be better out. So I guess the question that comes to mind is, how much of attraction is just a matter of taste and timing then?

What's the role of taste and timing when it comes to attraction? I think it's a lot of it. If we look at people who are meeting for the first time, I alluded to this earlier, but if you look at that consensus component, it's totally there, but compatibility, what we might call taste and timing. I mean, it's sort of wrapped up in the term compatibility, but that's going to be a little bigger. And it ends up growing more over time.

Now, the tricky thing about taste and timing is that it is remarkably hard to predict. Because you might think, like, well, I can sort of make use of this whole compatibility component by, I don't know, like, if I really want to be. be with somebody who's tall, for example. If I, just like, you know, okay, let's line up the tall guys. And I can, you know, I'm more likely to find somebody who's going to especially appeal to me. And this is just another one of those challenges. It doesn't quite work that way. Like, we know compatibility is important, but it's remarkably hard to predict. And a lot of it comes through conversation, but it's often like the random like side tracks that we get on to in conversations where two people find that oh like whoa we you know had the same like you know elementary school teacher three years apart or something like that right you find those little nuggets those little moments of serendipity while you're talking with somebody else that's where a lot of the magic comes from but it's just remarkably hard to predict that stuff okay what about short term versus long term

distinctions. Is it Alpha Chads versus beta dads or sort of hookup material versus relationship material? Are these things true? Not exactly. What is true is, as we've talked about, some people are better in the initial attraction realm. And so what that means is that if you're somebody that's a 10, you're going to have more hookup opportunities. You're going to have more sex partners over the course of your life. You know, these sorts of short-term successes, you'll have. You'll have, have more of those. The issue is that, and this is, again, this is like, wait, what? These guys, they actually aren't, and girls, there's no real long-term cost to that. In other words, the attributes that make somebody desirable in the short term, they're just irrelevant to a person's

long-term desirability. Attractiveness makes people- No, truly, the correlation of zero with how good their partners will ultimately rate them. In fact, if anything, some of this stuff goes in the opposite direction. Okay. A question on that. If over time a husband or a wife was to gain a lot of weight, which is probably a reliable way to decrease your attractiveness, most people would rather be of a healthy rate than not. Very few people, look good, better fat than look better at a fit body weight. Yep. Are you saying that that would have no predictive power over whether or not their partner would still be attracted to them? I'm, you know, all the data I've seen, all the attractiveness data I've seen, I mean,

you're describing a trend over time and I'm pretty sure that study hasn't been done. But just straight up, what is the attractiveness level of these people? And I'm going to correlate that with the romantic satisfaction of their partners, how happy they are, or do I want to continue this relationship in the future? Correlation is near zero. It just doesn't predict much of anything. I understand what the data may suggest, even though we don't have data around this specifically, but I think we can all use intuition, and that can be sufficiently powerful here,

that if your husband gains 50 pounds over the space of three years, the likelihood that you see him in the exact same way, or take it to a reductio ad absurdum, 150 pounds. Like you're talking about attractiveness can't be zero. It simply can't be zero. Yeah, yeah. Look, I totally get it. And people will have experiences like what you're talking about and be like, well, then I don't buy the data. And I absolutely get it.

I'm just like, I got to work with what's in front of me. I will note this. It is true that like as people go through changes and as they age, Like we can look at things like age. What does that do over time? As people age, especially like into middle age and all of the things that come with that, there is an overall decrease in people's satisfaction. Right. So and and look, some of that is related to the fact that challenges emerge as you have kids like jobs are often really hard when you get into your 40s and 50s. So you do and probably people get more out of shape. shape to it. So I totally buy that that can be part of that broader age-related trend. So I do think there is something to that. But if we're thinking about, like, you know, differences between people and a lot of the way these studies are done, it's like I get some attributes on you at baseline. And then I use that to predict how your partner feels about you,

you know, three months later, six months later, you know, we're not talking about the kinds of time frames that in your example. But with those kinds of studies, the attributes that make somebody more desirable, the confident guys and women, the attractive men and women, when you use that to predict long-term relationship success, it just doesn't do all that much. And actually this is, yeah. Going back to the short-term versus long-term distinction. Yeah. You're talking about some people signal in the way that they look a alpha or maybe easy or kind of tarty, flirty, energy from the female side

that suggests I am up for short-term mating and that people then bucket them into categories. What you're suggesting is that this doesn't necessarily seem to be true. Is it not the case, though, that people's behavior, like if you give up sex on the first date, does that not suggest something different? different about your motivations? Is there not an implication in the same way as if I turn up to the first date wearing joggers

as opposed to wearing a two-piece suit, that suggests something about my character. If I give up sex or if I push for sex on the first date as a man, does that not also suggest something about my personality? I think it does suggest things about your personality. And I'm certainly not going to suggest that it's necessarily a good idea. idea, or at least certainly not a good idea in all context. But I think that the easiest step for people to make is to think of short-term, long-term, it's not a single dimension. Let's talk about it as two dimensions, okay? So some people are, you know, willing to have sex on the first date,

and some people are not. And maybe those people will be good long-term partners, or maybe they won't be. Do you see what I mean? Like, think about it as independent ways of measuring differences between people rather than as a single dimension that we're putting people on. It actually gets more complicated than that, but we can sort of start there with the idea that, like, somebody, like the notches that somebody has on their bedpost, it just ultimately doesn't predict that much about how happy they'll be in their relationships. Like, you know, you'll see. You'll see people, you get this in like the family studies community sometimes. We'll talk about like, oh, like having premarital sex is like bad for your marriage. Like barely. Those correlations are

absolutely tiny. I would not worry about that at all. So it's stuff like that. It is not the case that people who are more likely to have sex or eager to have sex early ultimately have worse relationships. I don't think that they would have worse relationships. What I think is the what that tells the other person, whether it's accurate or not, whether it's correct that this person who gives up sex on the first date or doesn't is going to be a different sort of a partner, your interpretation of them is what matters. Like, this is your entire point, right? Your entire point is that the objective metrics, the kind of truth doesn't necessarily matter. What matters is compatibility-driven pair bonding, which also means if part of my compatibility, which I would say

for a lot of women is if this guy takes me out on five dates and treats me really nicely and only then asks for a kiss, I would consider him to be sort of sexually disciplined. I would consider him to be quite withheld. It seems like he's really treating me nicely. That would be a different sort of interpretation, right or wrong. And because your interpretation is all that matters, which is the entirety of your thesis, if you do that, whether it's true in the data about, what that means for long-term relationship satisfaction if you were to stick with them or not. The fact that you have had your perspective of this person changed by their behavior means that it's true. Is that a fair conception? I love it. I absolutely love it. And so what you'd want,

if you're trying to date effectively in this world, is you'd want to know, like, as I'm going on the first date with you, what exactly would it mean if I, you know, made it clear I wanted to have sex with you tonight versus on date three versus on date five. And to kind of play into the script that that person was wanting or expecting, again, also kind of depending on what it is that you want, you know, maybe you're only like this person enough to want to have sex with them. You're not really interested in something. But that's a perfect example there. That is exactly what I think the signal is. That is one of them is, is this person serious? Do they see me as a really like investment opportunity.

And that's one more talking, I think, about the female side. But on the male side, it's what's this woman's level of chastity like? Scarcity, for better or for worse, whether it shows up in the data as an accurate representation or not, scarcity is seen as a store of value. Something which is rarer is often seen as more valuable, whether it's true or not. and I can tell you if you were to go and survey a hundred men

that are in long-term relationships and then another hundred men that are in marriages and then another hundred men that were single and to the guys that were in relationships you were to say with your partner what was the amount of time that it took from the first date until you had sex

and with the guys that were single or in fact you could just do it across all of the guys that are partnered in previous with previous women who you didn't end up in a relationship with, what was the amount of time? I would be very surprised if you don't see a longer duration from first date until they got physically intimate in the relationships that they are currently in now or the one that they stay in for the rest of their life compared with the ones that did not graduate. It didn't go anywhere. Correct. I get this

intuition. We have some data that can speak to this. And what I can tell you is that when you look at the trajectory of relationships that will become short-term or long-term. And I think this is how I like to think about short-term long-term. Short-term is, I liked you enough to hook up, but that was kind of it. Versus long-term is like, I like you enough to hook up. And like, also like, please stay for breakfast because you're great and I love hanging out with you. So when you line those things up, the first like, you know, several events that happen. I meet you, I talk, maybe I meet your friends, we hang out one on one, even through like the first like hookup, make out, even first sexual experience, boy, did those trajectories look similar.

People don't necessarily know where this thing is going. And what we actually find, this doesn't get to your, your timeframe hypothesis exactly. But what we do see is that if you look at first sex, the first sexual experience, people rate as far more positively in relationships that become long-term than relationships that become short-term, as if the good sex catapults relationships even higher, catapults them into the long-term. The short-term relationships are the ones that are kind of like, eh. There wasn't compatibility there. Yeah, like, this is okay.

Well, I would say, I would say that sexual compatibility being judged early or not early is unsurprising. Like, it's just another one of the levels at which it's a gate that you need to get through and you either did or didn't get through that gate. What would be, and you can't do this, you would, I would love to run it back and have somebody who did have good sex, but it was two dates in, and somebody who did have good sex, but it was five dates in, and then the same couple and see what happened over time. Because that's really what we're getting at. What we're getting at is what is the impact of the duration of the duration of waiting. And I think this is easier to me to talk about than objective metrics of like alpha

presentation. Does the guy have a high shoulder to waist ratio? Does the woman wear revealing clothing? But I mean, that would be something you could do too. Like how much skin is on display in the first few dates? And what does that signal? Because that does signal more availability, high as sociosexuality. Has she got a choker necklace on? Is he wearing a low cut top? Did he sort of touch your arm? as you got, all of these different elements, I think can be reliable cues into how good of a long-term prospect is this person and how much are they invested in me and how much are they thinking about this way out into the future versus just for now. Yes.

Now, what I love about all of this is that like it or not, through this conversation, I think I've got you thinking like a relationship scientist, not that you have dropped your evolutionary bona fides. But you're thinking about, okay, I want to see these two people meeting and interacting on multiple occasions and seeing how these different behaviors and these different features affect what happens. That is how a relationship psychologist thinks. Show me these two people together. Let's try to follow them over time and we'll see what happens. But I can tell you that these kinds of studies, especially at the time frame that we're talking about, people initially meeting, are we going to have sex or not? There are so few studies that look at this because this is hard work to do.

And really only the close relationships folks are doing it. This is not how things are done in the EvSyke scientific literature. But we agree these would be the best data. Yeah, that would be cool. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the United States. They are the driving force behind Jimshark, Skims, Allo, and Newtonic. which is why I partnered with them, because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce

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That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. Well, look, to counterbalance my evolutionary psychology bona fides, I started off an episode maybe with Tai Tashiro, maybe with somebody else. And I was explaining, oh, no, it was Gay Hendrix, actually. So I do this episode, and I basically started off explaining my journey. And I think that this is what a lot of guys, mindful guys that try to understand human mating will go through. I started off and I said, I want to understand human nature. So I went to evolutionary psychology.

and I began to understand adaptive explanations for behavior, proximate and ultimate, male parental uncertainty, et cetera, et cetera. And then I thought, okay, but that doesn't necessarily explain what's happening now. So then I'm going to look at the mismatch in the modern world. And that was the next stage. So it's, okay, how do these predispositions come into contact with the real world at the moment? And that's when you start to learn about sort of tall girl problem and Manosphere and Redpill dating and a sex ratio hypothesis on campuses and so on and so forth.

But that still isn't how we experience relationships. The way that we experience relationships is through our nervous system one-on-one with another person. And sure, there are objective metrics, this person is this tall, this person earns this much, this woman's, this is her age. But ultimately, the experience of our relationships occurs in union with, another person and it's just how do we feel when we're around them? Ultimately it all comes down to that. So I've said for a good while, I think that the evolutionary psychology world, as fantastic as it is and as much as it's unearthed, lots of cool, interesting insights, what it doesn't

do is actually explain what the experience of being in a relationship is like. And I'm not convinced that this is even the realm of relationship science either. This is much closer to the realm of philosophy and psychotherapy. Yeah. No, it is, I think, an astute observation that people go through those stages that you're describing. And I would say that one thing that I try to do in the book is make the case that a lot of the human connection, right, how we feel about somebody else, it gets away from a lot of the, you know, tens will beat the twos kind of material pretty early on. One of the things that people can do in an initial interaction, that will shock you how much this can build closeness, how much this can get somebody to like you, is ask a deeper question than you think. Something like, what is something you're worried about

that you've never told anybody? And if you're willing to disclose that back, like, that is magic right there. I mean, that is the best experimental manipulation we have ever come up with in our science for getting people to like each other. It's disclose more than you naturally would by getting, you know, in getting to know somebody over the course of an hour.

So all of this stuff is important and you don't have to wait until date 10 to get into this stuff. You can do it earlier than you think. What's your definition of attachment in adulthood then? Like what is it that they're providing? I think a lot of it is around support. A lot of what attachment is is feeling like I need to be around this person. if not literally, at least in your mind, at least through, you know, various forms of communication, but being in touch, 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 really the critical things that people need to feel. A lot of that ends up getting wrapped up. You know, if you're in a relationship, it gets wrapped up in like your daily goals and like, how do I support you with the things you want to do, but are my needs being met? These things get very complicated, very, very quickly. but the essence of attachment is essentially this sense like, I am here for you. I trust that you're here for me. And like, I'm kind of willing to do everything in my power, you know, within reason

to support you. Right. So it's support in adversity and supporting growth. Yeah, exactly. Thinking about it in those sort of twin forms of support is very, very helpful. Okay. Why are breakups so psychologically destabilizing with this perspective then? Yeah. I mean, breakups are tough. because not only have you lost something valuable to you, lost something that you cared about, you have also probably lost the person that you would normally go to in the cases where you had lost something that you cared about.

So it's like this double whammy of stress. And this is why, like when people go through breakups, they can't sleep, they don't eat maybe at all. They certainly aren't eating well. their immune systems are kind of a mess. Like your body goes into fight or flight, but there's nothing to fight or flee. And so, you know, people end up, you know,

you kind of get sick. So it's really a mess for people. And that is tied to these attachment processes because people don't have the sense to the same extent that there's somebody who's got their back, they kind of fall apart. And this is why I'm always tempted to tell people,

like if you've got friends going through a breakup, and they're going to want to go through the story with you five, ten times. Like, you don't really want to hear it again, but it sure is kind to listen to them an extra time. Because remember, it's not just that they've had a bad thing happen. They've also lost their support structure that would have helped them with other bad things. Have you looked at the evidence of how people can recover from breakups more or less effectively? Yeah, I mean, there are a few things people can do. One thing is to form another relationship.

It's kind of cliche, but like this one's kind of true. Like when people form relationships, they kind of get over the prior one. I'm not commenting on the wisdom of repeatedly forming relationships without taking any time off for yourself. In fact, there is evidence that the longer time people have between relationships, the happier the next one will be. These are small effects, but they're real. Another thing that really matters for people, though, is having support and other people and forming a coherent story about what happened. And it really just matters that that story is coherent. Maybe that story is your ex is a jackass.

Maybe that story is like you're going to do better next time. But you got to have a coherent tale for how things went wrong. Otherwise, it's very hard for people to get over. Okay. So you need to construct a narrow. that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that that's really key. And like, in part, that's why people keep wanting to rehash the story, right? That's why they want friends around to tell the story to over and over and over again. I mean, this can be really hard in cases where there's deception involved. And it's like you feel like you got to like sift through the pieces, right? Because you really need the story of what actually happened. Why do you need the story? Well, it's really, you need a story. And I think it's, I think in part the reason why is that, I mean, in general, narratives are very helpful for people. I mean, whether it's a narrative about like of the course of my life or what I'm doing with myself this year. People love narratives. But it's especially true in breakups too. I think because people need to feel like, okay, I've gone through the challenge part of this story and now I'm

coming out the other side and there's reason for hope because I have learned something, I won't make that mistake again, or I have grown, I have, you know, new skills and abilities that are going to help me next time. So when you feel those things, you have some sense of optimism for the future and things just don't totally feel chaotic. How much of this do you think is sort of an open, loop, closed loop thing as well? Like a relationship based Zygonic effect type. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I think that probably is part of it, that like you need to feel like the prior thing

has closed down before you can move on to the next thing. And that can be too why like getting in a new relationship helps because if you're spending all your time thinking about this new person, then you're not thinking about the old one. I suppose the problem that you encounter there is if you move on and you are, you have, you haven't closed the loops in the previous one, the ghosts of those previous relationships are bleeding in as you're trying to form a new bond.

You're like, well, the previous one isn't severed, really. Like that loop is still open to me. Yeah, right, exactly. There is, okay, so I think I've told you this before, but I've got this movie podcast with Eli Finkel where we talk, it's called Love Factually, and we talk about movies. And we just covered my best friend's wedding. and that's an incredible example of this because I think like the main guy

that the two women are fighting over in that movie he's not quite over the Julia Roberts character and he keeps trying to like bring aspects of that relationship into his new one that's a disaster like people don't want to feel like you are retreading your old relationship

with them now that you've started a new relationship they want to feel like this relationship is new and special and we're carving something out together. You can't just like borrow the pieces from the old relationship. That is a disastrous idea. So, you know, yeah. The interesting thing about relationships in general, Fisa Camberasamy's got this idea where he says a relationship is a microculture. And it is. You and your partner have this weird, like, subculture that only you two know what things that you expect to do.

do before you get into bed, the words that you use to refer to that building over there, the in-joke that nobody else would get, the clothing that you wear when you go to breakfast on a Sunday, like all of these things are this unique culture of two. And then if the relationship breaks down, it's not just the loss of the person, it's the loss of this microculture also. And that means that you can't, every time that you see that lip salve that you used to wear on an evening time or that squirrel that was the joke about the squirrel that you used to make, or those items of clothing that somebody else wears, which is similar to the thing that you guys used to wear when you went for breakfast.

Yep. I mean, these micropultures, they're beautiful things to behold. We've only recently started studying how these cultures work, how they're formed, why they matter. One thing is clear is that people who experience their little unique microculture, with their partners on a more regular basis tend to be happier in their relationships, whether that's like sharing. And we ask people like,

what are these things? And they give us like pet names that make no sense. They give us, you know, names of rituals and stories that are absolutely bizarre, like secret squirrel root. What does that mean? I don't know,

but it's really meaningful to these two people. So this is in many, these are in many ways like, you know, the things that make relationships have life for people. And yeah, when they're gone, it feels absolutely devastating to have lost that. This is in large part, like, why compatibility is also tied to history. Like, the history you have with another person is just a huge part of why we end up, you know,

loving this person rather than somebody else. Like, in some ways, that's not that romantic. It's like, what, I just could have loved anybody if they'd been near, by like yeah kind of but also isn't it beautiful that people create these things together over time and that this can really be something the goofy and jokes whatever that that really sustains them what are the pro relationship biases at play then yeah so luckily we've got all of these wonderful pro relationship biases that help us to maintain relationships over time i would say probably the main one is that people tend to derogate alternative

partners. This is important. I mean, it gets back to our earlier discussion. How can an eight be with a five? Well, when there are attractive partners coming up to that eight, those attractive alternative partners are already operating at a disadvantage because if their eights, two, she sees them as sixes. It's like an automatic bias that's built in right off the top that downgrades anybody else who's going to come along. At least this is what the average person does in a relationship. This is an important defense mechanism. It means that, you know, when the person in the cubicle next to me is kind of flirting with me,

I like literally don't notice. I don't encode it as flirting. And I certainly wouldn't care if they were because they seem less appealing to me than they would if I were single. It's this really critical bias that people have. Yeah, the idealization thing, the perceived superiority of your partner is really fascinating. I mean, that's, you know, that's an evolutionary theory, too. The fact that your attachment to one person kind of makes you blind to other potential partners. Exactly. And look, I often talk about this like it's a good thing, okay? That we need that to sustain our relationships, because relationships are hard and there often are temptations out there. And so if we didn't have these biases, it would be the horror show of always feeling. like you're trading up. But luckily, we got these biases that tend to keep relationships moving. Okay. But at the same time, sometimes relationships are actually toxic. They're actually bad for people.

And this also explains why it can be really hard for people to snap out of this. Why it can be really hard for people to see that they should probably get out of this relationship and look for something better because they've got these biases in place. So it really does cut both ways. It's, really important that we have these biases for sustaining our relationships, but sometimes they make relationships like last longer than they should. What is the relationship science perspective on humans set point mating system? Are we monogamous? Are we serially monogamous? Are we monogamish? Are we polygynous? What do you think? Yeah, it's a good question. I think we're definitely we're creatures that attach, right? Like, I'm very careful in the book not to talk about monogamous.

me, right? Having one sex partner, because I don't, I think that's, it's like a little bit of a distraction. So we're creatures who are attached and we form attachment bonds. Okay. When it comes to sex specifically, I describe us as serial monogamous in the sense that we often move from partner to partner. I think you can design a system that allows for attachments between people and also allows sex with multiple people, right? I think you can look at contemporary polyamorous communities and make a case that like, hey, here's a situation where I'm attached to you and I have sex with you

and I'm also attached to this person and I have sex with this person and these relationships don't threaten each other. Humans are, some humans are cake. It's a fucking rab breed, dude. No, no, no. I totally get it because a lot of times when you're attached to somebody, you want to feel special. And many times feeling special means they want to have sex with me and they only want to have sex with me.

But yes, I do think of humans as creatures. We form serial relationships over time. If we want to sort of put ourselves in the serial monogamy bucket, that makes sense. But I really think attachment is the key thing. Like, we have to have attachments in our lives, whether they're romantic or not, or we just completely fall apart. So it would suggest that some of these pro-relationship biases have a life cycle to them and they sort of build and then weighing over time. Yeah. I mean, that is the sad truth of most relationships is that people, on average, feel worse about their partners 10 years in than they did at five years than they did at one year in. I mean, just people kind of sour a little bit over time.

But it's not true for everybody. In fact, you know, probably a good chunk, maybe even the majority of relationships, people start high and stay high over time. But relationships, they're not all built to last forever. And building one that lasts forever is really, really hard. Like my perspective on relationships, you know, I talk about these fuzzy topics, right?

Relationship biases, attachments, you know, loving and support, blah, blah, blah. I believe in all this stuff, but I don't mean to make it sound easy. Like, it's really hard and it's really easy for people to screw up too. And when you do, the heartbreak is really, really tough. So maybe markets are tough, maintaining relationships are tough. It's all tough. But there are, I think, helpful ways in thinking about us as creatures who search for compatibility. We care about attachment.

When you come out of that way, you realize there are other avenues. And I think that can be helpful for people who are struck. one. I actually got the studies sent through about attractiveness and relationship longevity, so I'm going to read these for you. So this is Christine McCallum's February 2017 study. Across four studies, we examined the relational repercussions of physical attractiveness. I do know this study. Okay. I think I was a reviewer on it. I don't know what to say other than this is the only study of its kind that shows this. I don't know how to explain it. There data are a little unusual.

It's like the attractiveness of yearbook photos predicting whether these folks ultimately get divorced. I just, I'm glad it's out there. I'm glad it's published. I would love to see a pre-registered replication of this because all the data I've seen are not this. But yes, I am familiar with this. To me, this one's an outlier. All right. Okay. Interesting.

Yeah. Cool. Look, dude, I think it's an interesting. alternative perspective to this stuff. That's all I wanted. Look, I hope I've done the evolutionary side of the fence and also maybe sharpened your eye in a little bit as well. I love it.

I love it. It's been great. I've really, really enjoyed it. And it's cool to have a good nature challenge. That's a different sort of perspective because there certainly is, there is a dearth of alternative perspectives when it comes to relationships. And I'm not saying, I actually think that people should be using more of an evolutionary explanation for a lot of things. But for the most part, it's like pop psychology pulled it out of my ass explanations. That's what's coming out in most of the mainstream

press. So if you've got stuff that's data driven on your side and data driven on the other side, I appreciate you, where should people go to check out everything you've got going on? You can buy the book. The book comes out in February right around Valentine's Day. The book's called Bonded by Evolution. You get it wherever you buy books. And find me. talking about movies with Eli Finkel on the Love Factually podcast. We release an episode every couple weeks. We cover all sorts of movies, and we talk about these topics. Heck yeah. I appreciate you, man. Until next time. All right. Thanks so much for having me.