According to relationship scientist Paul Eastwick, online dating is a market where there are dramatic winners and losers. “I think our modern existence happens to pull from modes of interaction that really amp up the importance of mate value,” Eastwick said. “But it does not have to be this way, and for a long time, it was not this way.”
Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life.
This is the genesis of Eastwick’s decades-long research about how people initiate and maintain close relationships. His new book “Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection” argues against evolutionary psychology’s philosophy of dating and relationships — debunking ideas like money matters most to women, looks matter most to men and everyone has an inherent objective “mate value.” In his work, the University of California Davis psychology professor offers a dating and relationships alternative in which compatibility trumps all.
Since the dawn of his career, Eastwick has had more than one bone to pick with evolutionary psychology.
The theoretical approach, which studies human behavior, cognition and emotions as products of natural selection, depicts relationship formation as sales-like, highly gendered and strategy-based. That model, which Eastwick calls the “EvoScript,” has never squared with his view of close relationships.
The researcher has long viewed the EvoScript as outdated and exaggerated if not completely incorrect. But it was only a few years ago, when online communities of so-called incels started latching onto evolutionary psychology’s story of close relationships that he began to see the EvoScript as dangerous.
“It was upon realizing that there’s this fun house mirror version of [evolutionary] psych out there that I was like, I think it’s time,” Eastwick said. “There was a wake-up call for me that, we need a scientific book out there that’s going to bring the most contemporary science to people.”
In his work, Eastwick argues that desirability is subjective and unpredictable — and that all anyone really wants is a secure attachment bond that sustains them through good and bad seasons.
The Times talked to Eastwick about how to reimagine the dating “numbers game,” tips for better dates and why men and women ultimately want the same thing.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
“Bonded by Evolution” author Paul Eastwick.
(Alison Ledgerwood)
You write in your book that “online dating can bring the worst parts of dating to the fore by exaggerating gender differences and making you feel like a clearance item at the bottom of the bin.” What are the long-term and short-term psychological effects of that on people as they go through their dating lives?
“It makes dating feel a little bit like a job, like you’re making sales pitches, and you can set your sights high, but ultimately you’re going to have to settle. It makes the whole thing feel like you’re trying to get a deal, and I just think these are bad metaphors, especially if we want to be happy in the long run. But there is a slow burn approach that feels more like finding connection, opening oneself up, spending time getting to know other people sometimes just for the sake of getting to know other people. Part of what I want to do in the book is remind people that there are other ways — and those other ways also happen to be more democratic, for lack of a better word there — that pull for more idiosyncrasy and give more people a chance to find partners that will really appeal to them.
If you’re trying to tackle the EvoScript, as you call it, what is your thesis about dating?
My thesis is that, if we want to think about the nature of human relationships, how did people evolve to form close relationships, I would describe it as a search for compatibility in small groups. What people classically have looked for and what classically makes for the best, most satisfying pairings are finding and building something compatible with another person from a pretty limited range of options.
OK, so I need to meet people in person. I need to make friend groups. Where do you go to do that now, when things are expensive and a lot of life is online?
For somebody who’s heterosexual, if you’re a woman, it’s like, “OK, where am I gonna meet guys? Where are the guys out there?” Don’t worry if the guys are going to be there, because oftentimes when people meet partners, it’s like, friends of friends of friends, right? It’s all making connections. Maybe it’s sports, maybe it’s activities, maybe it’s a cooking class, maybe it’s a dancing class. Maybe it’s just calling back up the people from your last job that you haven’t seen in a while, getting together over drinks and making it a regular thing. I get it, people are really busy, and everything online is a draw. But the importance of hanging out with people in person, those loose acquaintances, that’s where so much of the magic happens.
People talk a lot about how it’s just a numbers game: You have to go on more dates, you have to swipe on more people. What’s your response to that?
It is a numbers game, but maybe, let’s think about the numbers like this. Rather than numbers of people, it’s numbers of interactions. So you could meet 12 people one time, or you could meet three people four times. I choose the second one, right? Meet fewer people more times. We’re still talking about numbers. We’re still talking about how much time you’re out there interacting with people, figuring out whether you click. But 20-minute coffee dates really pull for a snap judgment. In a perfect world, swiping right on somebody would mean I’m going to do a coffee date with you, and then we’re going to go to some interactive class, and then we’re going to go to a concert and I’m going to spend time with you in all three settings and kind of see how that goes in total and then assess it. So it’s not that the numbers game is misguided, you do have to get out there and try different things, but we often think, “Oh, I can just sample people really briefly, and eventually I’ll get lucky.” The smaller those samples are, the more painful this whole thing gets.
Coffee dates feel like interviews to me. But from a scientific standpoint, why do you recommend an activity-based date over the classic coffee date?
The best evidence that we have for what can you do to make yourself more appealing to someone is not to share your CV and impress them with those details. Do something that reveals a little bit about who you are, how you interact, how you relate to the world, and, best of all, something a little bit vulnerable about yourself. The 36 Questions test, sometimes called the Fast Friends procedure, is truly the best tool we have. Within an hour or two of something interactive, people have gotten to the point where they’re willing to talk about things that they regret, or things that they really like about the other person that they’ve just gotten to know. And this is all in that Fast Friends procedure. So when I think about people doing activities where their attention isn’t just on interview mode, it’s like, “Oh, we’re tackling something together,” it really decreases that self-promotion instinct, which is usually misguided.
In your book, you call compatibility “curated, cultivated and constructed.” Does that mean, to you, that you can theoretically be compatible with anyone?
If you take this idea to its extreme, if you push me, ultimately I land on probably. And of all the things I say that people are going to be resistant to, I think that’s the one that people are like, “No.” Again, I go back to the people involved in small groups. They made relationships work with the limited number of options that were available, and because we are creatures who engage in motivated reasoning, it is very, very possible to be happy with who you’re with, but that does not mean that people just get to turn off all of the alternatives that exist. I think the best way to think about it is, I think a lot of pairs have compatibility potential, but I also think that the many decisions along the way matter a lot.
If the idea of romantic destiny is, as you call it in your book, “the weakest idea ever promoted by scientists,” what is your number-one dating myth you feel your personal research has debunked?
That men and women want different things out of partnerships, that they’re either pulling for different traits or look like these totally different entities, I just think the evidence for this is completely wrong. We see differences when you ask men and women, “What do you want in a partner?” But when you look at the attributes that actually matter, it’s really amazing the extent to which men and women are similar. And it’s not to say that there are no differences, like there is a difference in the strength of the sex drive thing. It’s smaller than people say, but it is there. But if you think about, what do men and women want out of a close relationship? What they really want is somebody who’s going to be supportive, is going to celebrate my successes and is going to have my back.
How do people practically apply that in their dating lives?
Refocusing on attachment, I hope that reduces some of the heteropessimism out there in the world. We have arrived at this very bleak view of relations between men and women, like we see the world differently, we’re just always at odds. And boy, when you come at relationships with this attachment frame, and you look at the things that make people happy, men and women can absolutely build beautiful things working together, and they often do. Because we are creatures who attach, there is so much potential for genuine connection over a sustained period of time.
Do you have any predictions for what the future of dating might look like?
It certainly feels like people are getting tired of the apps and that they’re looking for more ways to socialize in person. I think that’s wonderful. I worry about what AI is going to do, like, is that going to feel so real that it causes our interactional muscles to atrophy? That’s the big question mark on the horizon. I’m not here to be grandpa, but I also hope that we don’t totally lose the ability to interact with real people.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
