Muse

When you look at who gets the right swipes and who receives messages on the apps, it's the most popular people. I mean, folks have claimed that it's one of the most unequal markets in the world, but regular acquaintanceship is not nearly so dramatic. I don't think the influence of attractiveness ever goes away, right? There's always going to be an unlevel playing field to some extent. But the more that people spend time together getting to know each other, it reduces some of those market forces that give the desirable people all the advantages.

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Paul Eastwick, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. Today, we discuss the science of attraction, mate selection, and relationships, and I promise you what you are going to hear will surprise you. Paul's research has discovered that much of what you've heard about how people select partners, date, form relationships, even break up or repartner is simply wrong, at least when you look at the actual data. For example, his data show that both men and women, when given a choice, select partners that are younger than them. Yes, you heard that right. It's not just men. Men and women equally select partners that are younger than them, given the choice. His data also challenged the idea that financial status is more important to women when looking for male partners. Turns out that when men are looking for female partners, on average, financial status is as important as it is when women are looking for men. And somewhat less surprising, his work shows that indeed, dating apps select for qualities that are not the ones that research shows builds lasting partnerships, but he also offers solutions to those that are using dating apps to try and find a partner. Today's discussion is not just about finding a partner. It's also about what solidifies and maintains healthy relationships over time. Again, what the data say about that. Things like physical intimacy being among the very strongest predictors of relationship stability, as well as both partners feeling that no matter who else might be attractive to them, that their partner has unique qualities that no one else can match. So whether you are in a relationship or not, looking for a relationship or not, today's discussion gets into social bonding of all sorts. And repeatedly throughout today's episode, both as it relates to single people looking for a partner, people who are already partnered, we talk about the importance of activities that are done with other people, could be other couples or other single people, et cetera. And that this is critical for those wanting to meet a partner and it turns out to be critical for maintaining a healthy long-term relationship. And we'll talk about what the data say about that. super interesting so today is not just about the real data of how people rate attractiveness find partners and the glue that keeps people happily together it's about the real life data and the actions that anyone can take that help you build and sustain excellent romantic and other types of relationships before we begin i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Paul Eastwick. Dr. Paul Eastwick, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. A lot of theories out there, a lot of speculation about attraction, dating, romance, and relationships, which are separable things, of course. We'll talk about all of them.

But one of the semi-dominant themes in the public narrative, and indeed on many podcasts, is kind of anchoring to evolutionary theory, which to put it really coarsely, it's sort of a market-based theory. You know, people will even say I married up or, you know, and people, but quantitative measures on people, there are six, there are seven, there are 10 in this, but a four in that, you know, as a neuroscientist, I hear that and I immediately go to, and again, this is just purely theoretical. Oh, this sounds very limbic. This is very much of like the hypothalamus. This is very much like the kind of thing that you might expect under conditions of like low food availability, low mate availability, a lot of weapons and very few laws, you know, to regulate violence or something. Meaning men will harm each other in order to get access to mates. Women will be deceptive. This is the whole idea. And you step back and go, well, that's not the world we live in now. We have a forebrain. We can make choices. We can be strategic in the direction of benevolence. We can think about kindness. And so to me, it seems we need a revision or at least a better understanding of what's actually true in 2026 and forward. So if you would, what are your thoughts about what is not true based on- the data and perhaps what is true about this quote-unquote evolutionary model of dating

relationships and so on. The marketplace ideas, I think they definitely have their place and it derives from a sensible evolutionary perspective like what you're describing. I think it describes well what happens in initial attraction settings when people are really meeting for the first time. There's this class demo that I do in my undergraduate classes. A lot of people use this demo. And what you do is you have a bunch of your students put a number on their foreheads, and they sort of hold it up so that they can't see it, but other people can. And you tell the students, your goal is to pair up with the highest value person that you can. and you don't know what your number is, but I'm going to count to five and then I want you all to stroll around the room and try to make mating offers to folks. And what you see is that the people who have been randomly assigned a low number, they start to panic because what happens is that nobody will talk to them. And this is random. Yeah. Otherwise it'd be very unethical. Right, right, right. And also who would decide? But people don't like it. I mean, If you get a low number, it's not an enjoyable experience. And I think there is a parallel to what people are experiencing as they're growing up or maybe even if they're a little older and they're going to a party and they haven't met anybody there. So this is an analogy for how people internalize and, you know, act upon something that we call mate value. And it's like what you described. It's supposedly linked to traits that reflect your core desirability, like maybe your physical attractiveness, but it could be other related traits, too. It could be things like the size of your bank account or your status. What we tend to see is that when people are meeting for the first time, this is a reasonable facsimile of how people behave. But interesting things tend to happen when people get to know each other over a little bit more time. What then tends to happen is that that agreement that is required for that study to work, that study only works because you can read the numbers on people's foreheads. But if I were to blur that number, we wouldn't see as much pairing up. It wouldn't be as sad and as difficult for the people with low numbers. And in real life, that's kind of what tends to happen. We stop agreeing about who the eights are and who the fives are. And people might on average say that you're a six. But if I've gotten to know you over time, it means there's a chance I think you're a nine. There's also a chance I think you're a three.

And so that increase in idiosyncrasy and variability, I think, is a really fortunate thing. And it's the thing that's going to allow a lot of partners to find each other, even if they're not consensually the most desirable people. Consensually meaning in the eyes of others. Right, right, right, right. So even if on average people think you're kind of middling, with enough time, people are more likely to find, okay, you all think I'm a five, but she thinks I'm a 10. And then what you're kind of crossing your fingers for are these moments where I think she's a 10 too. And it's this level of sort of disagreement or the emergence of what we might call compatibility that I think it's been missing from the evolutionary narratives. But I think it plays a core part in explaining how couples get together as well.

Wow. So many things come to mind. the first thing that comes to mind is the question, you know, who and what are others looking at? Yeah. It seems like one of the more, I want to use the word immature, but let's say less evolved, not in the evolutionary biology context, but kind of like life maturation sense, like less evolved aspects of self is when we are not thinking about what we actually like and don't like, but we're paying a lot of attention to what other people like and dislike as a barometer of what we should do or not do now of course that can be very informative in healthy ways but when it really comes down to it it's a potentially very toxic aspect of human nature right so what i what i hear you saying is that at some point there's this kind of um dating romance and relational maturity that people come to where they're really able to sense what they actually like and they're able to put the blinders up to how other people are necessarily behaving like does everyone like this person do they not like this person and the words that come to mind two words are junior high like the junior high school dance for a number of reasons is kind of the first time you know most kids are starting to hit puberty or somewhere in puberty at that phase and so there's a lot of recognition of others and kind of like who is cool who's not cool who's getting attention who's not getting attention seems to surface first in junior high yeah and admittedly we're all pretty in junior high yeah exactly so has this been looked at in a structured way. For instance, are there adults who are good at ignoring what the consensus is? And are they able to find mates and set up relationships more readily than people who are paying a lot of attention to what other people like and don't like? Yes. I am sure that

there's considerable individual variability in how people react to what's going on around them. Sometimes you see this phenomenon called mate choice copying, but what that essentially means is that you kind of look to see who's attracted to somebody in my – is everybody attracted to this person? Well, there must be some signal there. I'll sort of follow that. I totally agree. It's a very junior high way of thinking about this whole process. But I think a lot of what is happening is that if people are spending time together, and I often go back to thinking about what is it like when we're hanging out in mixed gender groups if you're heterosexual? So we're spending time together, and maybe for whatever reason, I happen to spend more time with this person. We find something interesting to chat about. I see her reacting in situations that other people don't get to see. And so the particular time that I spend with her ends up being the material that I use that causes my opinion to diverge from everybody else's. So everybody else might be like, she's not all that great. And I think, but you weren't there when we were hanging out talking about, you know, some family challenges that I had. I'm trying to put myself back and like, what were the things we would have been frustrated about in high school? But, you know, talking about like problems at school or problems with other friends. Like, she was supportive and listened to me. And then I was supportive and I listened to her. And that reciprocity through a unique experience with another person, a lot of times this is where initial attraction comes from. It sounds a little squishy. It doesn't sound like the sexy form of attraction that we often think about. But what we see in our work is a lot of times this is how it happens. It takes a little while, but attraction can form when two people spend that time together sort of pulling unique things out of each other.

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impact your glucose throughout the day. I personally have used Lingo and it's been an invaluable tool for improving my metabolic health. If you would like to try Lingo, Huberman Lab listeners in the U.S. and U.K. can save 10% on a four-week plan. Just visit hellolingo.com slash Huberman for more information. Terms and conditions apply. Again, that's hellolingo.com slash Huberman. It's interesting. I'm thinking about movies. Yeah. And admittedly, I haven't seen that many romantic comedies, but there's some pretty awesome, I've seen a few of them, but there's some awesome movies about this issue. Yeah. And I'll offer some examples that will date myself. I'm ready. But that seemed to fall into at least three bins. One is you're awesome. I'm awesome. Let's get together. all right nowadays i think regardless of music taste i think the kind of uh like royally celebrated couple is not a royal couple yeah incidentally i would say it's like the taylor swift kelsey couple yeah people like people were like they're both winners they're both super attractive they're both super successful and you know whether you like the chiefs or you don't whether or not you like her music or you don't you're like you're like they're like you're like badass winners There's pairing up and it's very hard to say anything except like, wow, they totally quote unquote belong together, right? There's a sort of, so there's that pairing and you can find that in movies. And all the like 80s, like John Hughes movies centered around this, like, and then broke that model. We'll go back to that. The other one would be, yeah, the breaking of that model. The like, the, this is very 80s, but the kind of like the athlete, you know, pairs up with the nerd, right? Okay, now we, nowadays we have athlete nerds. So it doesn't work quite as well. And then the third model is the like, well, you're screwed up and I'm screwed up, but we're really good people. Like you get True Romance, the movie True Romance, which is an amazing movie, right? You know, she was a, you know, not by her own choice, apparently. Like she was, she's like, I've been a prostitute for three, call girl for three days. And he's like, well, I, you know, someone paid for you to be on this date. they fall in love, they leave their professions, right? And they go on this sort of semi-crime spree that really demonstrates their immense love and devotion to one another. And the whole notion is like, you're so cool. They both think the other person is super cool, don't care about their past and kind of enjoy the fact that they're both kind of from hardscrabble backgrounds. So then there's that and what's so different about that kind of model compared to like today where i hear because i so i don't have a lot to offer about personal experience on apps many years ago but it's been a while is this notion that like everyone you hear this everyone's competing for the same small number of people so it seems like even those those three cliche models that are presented in a number of movies they exist it's like since when did is everyone thinking that they're supposed to pair up

with the same small number of people. This is like ridiculous. That's like saying everyone's supposed to like the same top three songs, even though you might not even like that genre of music. That's insanity. Yeah.

The apps absolutely pull for this. So when you look at who gets the right swipes and who receives messages on the apps, it's the most popular people. I mean, folks have claimed that it's one of the most unequal markets in the world. I mean, it's basically a kleptocracy. The extent to which it's skewed, right? That there's like, you know, the rich, quote unquote, who have all the, you know, who get all the right swipes at the top. But regular acquaintanceship is not nearly so dramatic. So, you know, one example that I like to use is that if our job was just to evaluate whether somebody standing in front of us was hot or not, and it was somebody that we, like, interacted with briefly, and we're making just simple binary judgments, you and I are going to agree about, like, two-thirds of the time. So that's better than 50-50, but it's far from 100%. I think, actually, that would surprise a lot of people. There's a reasonable amount of disagreement there. That's already starting to set the stage for us not necessarily pursuing the most appealing person. Because if there's disagreement, that means there's a chance that, well, you're going to go for this person, I'm going to go for that person. And it levels out the playing field somewhat. I don't think the influence of attractiveness ever goes away, right? There's always going to be an unlevel playing field to some extent. But the more that people spend time together getting to know each other, it reduces some of those, you know, those markets. forces that give the desirable people all the advantages yeah the reason junior high school

seems so dreadful in my memory yeah i mean i had a good time in junior high school but it was largely at least for me the fact that people in my peer group because it was a pretty broad age range were we're still um among the guys were hitting puberty at different rates yeah so like a game of soccer that at one time was pretty even with respect to who could play well like suddenly you're playing against what felt like a grown man yeah there's actually a kid in our town who i don't want to give up his name who i think he went on to i don't ever think he became a professional soccer player but he was just he was like fully developed by the eighth grade he was like facial hair and he was fast and he had like legs like tree trunks and he could move and i mean it was just completely dangerous to have him out on the field with the rest of us right and he was respected adored admired like and it was very context dependent this was the thing i was going to say i think you and i are both scientists so coming up you spent a lot of time in labs yeah i'll never forget there was a romance in a neighboring lab um that none of us understood like none of us understood it's funny and i remember asking my friend who was in this pairing and he said the attraction for him although she was also attractive but the the the hook was her prowess at aliquoting so there's this thing you do with antibodies and labs where they come and you have to put them into the little things so that it, you know, he frees out a little bit. And apparently- It's really hard. Yeah, and it's hard to do fast. You get good at it, but apparently like he walked in one day and she had a bunch of these little tubes stuffed between her fingers and she was just aliquoting really quickly while talking. And from that moment, he was just like smitten. That's beautiful. And I'll say they both had-

I've never heard an example this good.

I was like her aliquoting process, like a prowess. And I thought to myself like, is this like tapping into something? They actually have children. He's a professor, they have children together. they seem very happy. I think anyone would say they're both attractive people, but their pairing seemed like not predictable by any other external metrics. And the fact that something so specific was the hook. Yeah. And that opened up into what turned out to be a longstanding marriage with kids is kind of wild. It is. But is this uncommon? Because what you described before is kind of like this, like there's something unique that makes it feel like there's a special attraction that indicates something that opens up to a special discussion. And then there's this kind of intimacy, right? That they share around aliquoting or that was spawned by aliquoting. I don't recommend folks run out and learn how to aliquot in order to, like, this is not a strategy. But that's the thing. Thematically, it might be. But so what are your thoughts on something like that?

Okay. This is an incredible example. And I think if we're talking about couples, I think most people would find this idea intuitive. That if, you know, I ask somebody, what is it that you love about your wife? Or what is it that you love about your husband? You know you're going to get a bunch of, if you get them talking for long enough, you'll get some idiosyncratic details. You'll get some stories. I mean, maybe if they're really forthcoming, they'll give you the in-jokes and they'll explain the moments that made them feel something special for this person. I think what I'm suggesting is that those moments, the creation of a narrative with another person, it goes back earlier than we think. And that a lot of times what we're doing when we're trying to figure out if we're into somebody, yes, we look at how they look visually and we take in all that information and it matters a lot. But we're also talking with them, forming little stories. If you have a little bit of good banter, that means when I see you at the party next week, I'm going to want to sit next to you and see if we can recreate that moment. And that's often where attraction is coming from. I think that's why the apps are so hard because it turns it into an interview where you're trying to impress other people with your traits. And again, traits are important, but it's like, it's not the life of the thing. The life of the thing is the little stories and moments that two people are sharing. And that's, I think, something that people can be doing more with.

I'd like to divide this process that we call dating romance relationships, et cetera, into some pieces that may or may not be the right way to segment it. So please change any of what I'm about to, you know, toss out. we're talking about impressions yeah that either seed or don't see desire for more time is so interest yeah and then i'll just broadly separate with compatibility over time yeah so let's spend some time on impressions that lead to desire which ones are meaningful which ones aren't which ones can be a bit misleading i think most people are probably more intuitive about those if they're really honest like what they find who they find attractive who they

Thank you.

be willing to admit they find attractive if you remove all the other social inputs yeah and so on but the compatibility over time piece is the one that is really hard if you just look at the statistics on marriage let alone the statistics on you know other relationships it's not a bleak picture but the numbers don't play out into if people get together and make the commitment most of the time it works out it unfortunately doesn't seem to be that way or maybe who knows fortunately. But so impressions leading to desire, given that many of the people listening to this will be thinking about their own history with their current partner or are seeking a partner or maybe not. What do the data say about what people are picking up on as really valid cues that drive real desire as opposed to the BS about like, well, everyone else thought they were

great or the great on paper kind of thing. The early phases especially are just naturally filled with a lot of uncertainty. And I think this is a bummer for a lot of people because it can feel like you're really into somebody like they're really into me. And then it turns on a dime. So part of that is about like searching for signals, trying to resolve the uncertainty. And the problem is that it's not like, oh, if I get sufficient evidence that you're smart, that's going to do it. Or if I get sufficient evidence that you're really good at aliquoting, that's going to do it. What people are, I think, trying to do is they're trying to figure out, like, do I feel enough of something for you that I want to continue this, that I want to keep going? Yes. But I don't want to act like, because sometimes when people think about the spark, what they think is, oh, it's got to be there right away. And I've already got to be feeling 100 for this person, right? I got to be at the top of the scale. That actually isn't what happens on average. Typically, if you look at what most relationships look like and you look back at the beginning, the typical first impression is middling. That's how we feel at first. Middling, just kind of, I don't know, middle of the scale, that seemed all right. You know, it was fine. And then we interacted again. Not bad, not over the top. Not bad, not over the top. And as we spend a little more time together oh like actually i find him pretty funny or i think he's really smart or um you know i really like how good a listener he was and i think what people are often trying to do is get enough moments that fit enough of these different trait categories that they think well you know whatever other people say about this person like with me he seems like a pretty sensitive guy. With me, he seems pretty witty. With me, you know, like I actually think he's really hot when he does X, Y, Z. And so if you accumulate enough of those, then you find yourself, you know, it's like you keep coming back. So that's how I think about it is this like slow accumulation of information. Sometimes people will encounter things like the ick where there's one moment and then they tip over the edge the other way into feeling like, I can't be with this person.

Is that typically women who feel that about men? I mean, do men describe that?

I think, yeah, men have those experiences too. It is pretty under-researched. And one of the reasons why is because this whole phase I'm talking about is remarkably hard to study. Because as researchers, we're very good at how do you feel about somebody if you're looking at a picture or if you've hung out for like four minutes. I mean, that's what a lot of the initial attraction paradigms look like. I like those paradigms. I study those paradigms myself. And then it's very easy to recruit couples and then see what happens to them. What explains why their relationships stay together and why they fall apart. But this period, and it's my favorite thing to think about, and it's also one of the most mysterious, is, yeah, but what happened from like minute 10 to, you know, day 30, where now you were really determined to be in a relationship with this person? And that's a typical amount of time. It usually doesn't happen instantaneously that people know right away, hey, no, this is it. I want to be with this person. It's that slow accumulation. And when we look at it, it's almost like you've got a window of uncertainty and it's slowly collapsing to a stable impression that people have of this person as they gather a little bit more information and a little bit more information. And what you just hope for is that as two people, you're collapsing to a fairly stable impression that is both very positive of each other. And I think a large part, that's how people get together. And hopefully accurate, too. Yeah. So the accuracy part is interesting because, I mean, you know, I'm a psychologist. social psychologist. And so social psychologists are big into, well, your perception is your reality. And boy, do you see a lot of evidence, especially in relationships, that people are biased when it comes to their romantic relationships. In what sense? It can happen in ways like, you know, everybody kind of agrees that your partner's a jerk, but you genuinely don't think they're a jerk. And when they're with you, they don't seem like a jerk. So any kind of measure I would take about your perception of, you know, your partner versus everybody else's perception, you would seem to be horribly positively biased for your partner. The question is whether you're wrong. And I land on the side of, I mean, from your perspective, you're not. To argue that it would be better to listen to the consensus that your partner is a jerk, it's sort of like you're arguing for like a sleeper effect, like there's wisdom and what other people know that you don't see. The evidence for that is actually not

great. It could be, and I'm sure it happens sometimes. But what usually happens in relationships is that people's own impressions and perceptions tend to be the major driver. Now, that can go in the other way, too, because we might all agree this person would be the most amazing partner to be with, and yet you've now gotten to the point in this relationship where you don't see it anymore, and you can't unsee the negative things you've seen. And so that relationship can be very hard to salvage.

The statement has been made by someone I know and trust about all things in life All things in life, not just relationships, but certainly including them, that if people just treated their taste in people, in music, in art, in experiences, the same way they treated their taste in food, everyone would be a lot better off. Meaning, if one has the impression that they really like something, they really like this person, then just go for it. I mean, unless there's some sort of danger they're not aware of. Right. Okay. And we'll talk about consensus, communicating danger, separate issue, but it crosses into this online dating thing based on a lot of conversations I've had with young men and women. But music, you hear it, you either like it or you don't. We don't tend to have a hard time defending our stance on those things. But when it comes to relationships, it's almost like we're many people are walking around with a little or a lot of that junior high narrative in their mind. Not necessarily be with somebody that they can't stand because everyone else thinks they're great. I think that's pretty rare. Probably happens, but it's pretty rare. But at these early stages that you study, that they're navigating that process in a way where they're not in tune with their own taste. They're integrating all this other information in a way that's not helpful. It's not protecting them. In fact, it's just clouding the signal. It's noise, right? In the signal-to-noise model, like it's noise. It's just pure noise. And as a consequence, people are wasting their time and other people's time. Yeah. And I don't believe everyone's trying to waste each other's time. It just seems that we're conditioned to do this. Yeah. And I will say it does take a pretty strong person to say, listen, I know that's what you see. i know that's what they say but like this person's great like they're right for me and when people do that in general people tend to back off yeah and of course there's shakespeare about this right but that tends to be cultural pressure of like no you two can't be together or the parents don't want or one set of parents yeah i mean some of the greatest romances have been born out of that f you to the to the elders right to the community right but this is a little different yes you know

It's a tricky thing to navigate because I think one of the best situations to end up in is where you're in a relationship and let's say it's a new relationship and your friends around you basically think, you know, we're happy for you and we're going to celebrate you and, you know, we're going to celebrate this relationship. We support you. We just wouldn't be terribly interested in this person ourselves. That's the ideal, right? Where it's not exceptionally competitive. You're not worried about your friends trying to poach your partner away. But at the same time, they're supportive of the relationship. Because that support from friends and family, it is important. Like, it certainly shapes how people feel. There's a way to navigate that that doesn't make it a, you know, like, I'm glad you like my girlfriend, but, like, don't like her too much, please. You want to kind of try to find that balance there. And that's a tricky thing. I mean, I think this is a lot of what people are trying to navigate in adolescence. They're trying to figure out, like, how can I be part of a friend group and have a romantic relationship and navigate the complexities that come with that? I mean, I vividly remember these like junior high, early high school experiences of dating somebody, but also your friends are into this person. And actually, it was a relationship where my girlfriend at the time broke up with me, starts dating my best friend. We're all friends now. It's all fine now. And it's like at this moment that I discover evolutionary psychology, that I discover this narrative. And it just felt like such a double-edged sword because how wonderful is it to think about how people have been navigating these challenges, ex-girlfriends breaking up with you for your best friend this has been happening for tens of thousands of years like i'm not alone i'm not the first person to experience this and then to also read at the same time oh my god this reflects something true about my deep underlying value this is kind of scary so those two things together weirdly were what got me hooked on this the feeling like evolutionary psychology is fascinating and really bleak at the same time yeah i agree

i was gonna say brutal i'm sorry you had to go through that although i'm glad you're all friends i think it happens it's all good probably not to everyone but i can remember similar experiences where you're just like oh man i want a gut punch and part of the maturational process is um realizing like okay they might be better suited and there'll be someone for me and honestly they were better suited for each other all right all right i have a question about the science yeah Or how to study these sorts of things. So if I set aside my science hat and I say, all right, you can study this stuff, but wait, if we're talking about a kind of unique hook, like let's just assume the person, the people are within the range of attractiveness. Again, I hate this quantitative thing, but they think the other person's attractive. They're dating because they want to find someone, right? They're not resistant to commitment. They're looking for a partner. and the number of histories that people are bringing to that is infinite or near infinite. So let's say the hook is, listen, one person had a hard past based on an abusive household. The other person is really gentle. They had a great past and the person feels very safe in that, right? We always think about the trauma bond, right? Which is an unfortunate thing that does seem to happen, but it could also be both people had difficult pasts, you know, parents with addiction issues or mental health issues and they can relate. Okay. That's one example. The other is we both value X, we both value Y. And so the unique glue is near infinite, right? So the question I have, and this isn't a challenge, it's just a genuine curiosity is how do you study this process then? Because what are the universals of what, is it what people define as some kind of like lock and key that they didn't know they were looking for that lock and key combination. And then they go, oh, this feels unique. And the reason I ask this is because I want to frame the science, but also I want to know to what extent being aware of what's critical to oneself is important in this process. Does that make sense? There's a lot of words there, but basically like how well one knows themselves can often help lead to better choices in partner choice. And so people go know like, gosh, I really, really would like someone that I could feel understood around this or feel really safe around this or make them feel really safe around that.

With any relationship, it's almost like you have to hold these two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time. One is that no two people in the history of the world have experienced what we're experiencing right now. And yet there are broad general principles that we can point to that can explain some of the dynamics of every romantic relationship that has ever existed. So when it comes to broad principles, I love the attachment framework. I mean, what's fascinating about attachment is that this is just as evolutionary as all the other evolutionary theories you've heard about online. It's just a different evolutionary theory. But this perspective suggests that we are creatures that form bonds with each other. We essentially crave closeness, intimacy, support. We thrive when we get it.

We're more likely to recover. We sleep better. We get all of these benefits from close attached relationships. But for some people or at some points in their lives, we can struggle to have those kinds of relationships. Sometimes because we become too anxious about them. We need them a little too much. We become uncomfortable in our own skin. Or we tip the other way. we become very avoidant. We become overly independent. We become convinced that we really don't need anybody else. These are broad attachment dynamics that people will go through their whole lives having to navigate. A lot of people have probably heard about like the, you can have an anxious attachment style or an avoidant attachment style. And all of that is true. But one thing we know today from studying more couples and getting better at studying couples over longer periods of time is you realize that, boy, people's attachment orientations really can change. So somebody can come into a relationship with an avoidant trauma-filled past, but with enough time with the right kind of person, again, sharing their unique bond, which maybe science will never crack, but they know all about it. That person will start to become less and less avoidant with time. They'll become more secure. They'll get more of those physiological benefits out of the relationship. They'll get more of the support-related benefits out of the relationship. And that can, in effect, turn somebody into a more secure person. So these are the attachment lessons that I often point to. And I think they're useful for at least helping me remember that tension between, like, yeah, anxiety and avoidance. two very broad processes that are always happening behind the scenes. And yet, the way it unfolds for any one particular couple, it's always going to be this weird, unique combination of stories and in-jokes and little moments that scaffold up to hopefully, you know, help somebody become more secure eventually.

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ish and just go, yeah, I don't know, like, and just ignore it and just keep going. I can say this is also true in any kind of creative endeavor or public facing life. Like it doesn't make good adaptive sense to pay too much attention, but nobody wants to be the person that like steps in it or does something really stupid. But in relationships, when, if something feels good, maybe we shouldn't be going out and getting, you know, putting our finger in the wind to get input.

So it's fascinating because I mentioned earlier that, right, the extent to which you feel at least, like the people around you have your relationships back, that's a useful thing. But I think that probably isn't happening through a process of, yeah, like pseudotherapy. I want to talk to my friends about my relationship or at least to the extent that that is happening. I bet you're right. That has some real risks. I think probably the good version of this process or the one that I would advocate for comes from research looking at like couple friends or like double date nights. So I'm not asking you for input on my relationship, but in effect, I'm asking you and maybe your partner to experience our relationship in real time by hanging out together, the four of us. And so that can often feel like validation without explicitly asking for it. And I think that can often be a very good thing. And there's research showing that, you know, generally couples who feel like they have couple friends and are embedded in networks like that, that generally tends to go well on average. So, yeah, I would think about it that way. It's like you can feel that you have the support of the people around you without directly asking for their assessment of your relationship because the reality is other people don't know. And this is hard as a judge because when I encounter couples and I have friends who are in relationships, it is so tempting to look at that relationship and think like, man, like she shouldn't have done that. Or I don't know if I were her, I wouldn't stand for this. But I'm not in that relationship. So unless you are a therapist and they're coming to you for therapy, I find it useful to try to resist that impulse. Because a relationship is this vast, deep store of information that two people have. And often we're not privy to what's really going on there.

I'm going back to junior high school again. I can remember this one game. I hope this isn't dramatic. No, no, it's not. Not at all. But we had this all-girls school in our town, Castileo School, which was a boarding school. And so their dances were the best because they'd invite people from other schools. But all the guys were really excited to go, right? Because the numbers were really like worked out really well in our favorite law. Because women and boys and girls at male school, right, would go to these dances. But that means you just have like an outsized pool of, you know, so everyone got someone to dance with at some point. This is what mattered in the seventh grade, right? But there were these people, I have to say there were these individuals who were not going through the admittedly like tense challenge of first dance, first slow dance. This was before phones and it was tense then too. And they weren't doing any of that. What were they doing? They were running around telling people about who was doing what and who was doing that. And I remember thinking at the time, I mean, I'm no psychologist then or now, but thinking like they're avoiding the whole thing. Yeah. This is like going to a soccer game. Instead of playing soccer, they're like critiquing people from the sidelines because it's a lot easier to do that than to actually get out there and risk and risk, you know, like being the goalie that lets the winning shot. Yeah. And I remember thinking like these people are really, really corrosive. One or two in particular. I don't know whatever became of them. Hopefully they're doing well in their lives. They got over this. But those people exist throughout life. Yeah. Meaning they're rarely the people that are happy in their own relationship life. Now I have to say, it's probably a Y chromosome link disorder, but I assume that my friends who are in male friends who are in relationship, if they're still in the relationship, that it's going great. That's funny. There's not a lot of feedback. Like there's not a whole lot of feedback exchange that said, if something were really like really off, I assume that they would bring it up, but probably not to me. Like there's, I do think that there's probably a sex difference here and these things are changing now, but I think that there's not a lot of sitting around talking about how well or poorly the relationship is going. It's sort of like, you know, you ask about somebody's spouse, like, how are they doing? And they go, yeah, great. Like, we did this this weekend. There's not a whole lot of, yeah, we had this one moment of exchange that was kind of sticky. Can I get your input on it? Like, that's not happening. That's just not happening, at least not in my life.

I'm glad you brought up these gender differences because I think you're hitting on one that at least, again, as a relationships researcher,

I would sit here and say, I think this is the big one. And the big one is that women generally are better at cultivating social support from all corners of their lives, not just their romantic partner. Whereas for men, it's largely their romantic partner. That's where they're getting most of their support, intimacy needs met. Probably the person who at least for a while is mostly in their corner. And this is why you see across the full range of the arc of a relationship that men are always a little bit more eager than women. Eager in what sense? Eager in all the ways I want to be in this relationship in the first place. I'm more likely to say I love you first. I'm more likely to want to be exclusive. I'm more likely to want to take things to the next level. Men are more willing to do that.

This one's counter current to all this stuff about men being noncommittal.

Yeah, right. So, like, I don't – this is what – there's, like, new review papers on this that are really compelling, and it's, like, kind of the same effect size across the board, which is how we talk about, you know, how big is the sex difference. You know, it's medium size, but it's just right there all the way through. Through breaking up, who wants – who's more likely to want to break up? It's women who are more likely to want to break up. Men are more likely to be thinking about their exes. and the the not while they're in a relationship right right now they're in a relationship right now it's over that's the meme you know it's not the meme the meme is like who's he thinking about exactly okay yeah exactly the reason put forward for this i find it very compelling is that that's because men just don't quite have their social lives put together in the same way that women do

meaning they don't have a lot of male friends or by the way i should have set up a disclaimer at In the beginning, I should have said this, to make the conversation a more fluid, we're framing everything in the context of heterosexual pairings, but I think it's fair to assume that this would also extend to homosexual pairing. I think it would, yes. In many ways, but men have friends. Yeah. I realize activity-based friendships are, you know, kind of the dominant theme. Men not getting, having connection in other things. Yeah. you know, is it, could it be that the, like the connection I feel to my male friends and coworkers is very deep. They're important to me. They're like family to me by now. We spend so much time together. So it feels connected. It's just, but it's a very different kind of, I don't ever think of the word intimacy. I think of trust. And I'm not trying to just, you know, like be, you know, put up a wall to my whatever feminine traits I have in the harbor, you know, like I, I, I'm, I'm cool with that. I'm good with the idea that I have emotions and that I have needs and stuff, but I, but I think it just makes good intuitive sense to me that if I have something that I'm really, that I want input on, that's of a more, like has a more of an emotional undercurrent that I would bring that to my romantic partner. So here's the question I would pose. I would be

clear. I'm not a therapist. I'm a scientist. But I would I would ask you this. If something went wrong, do you feel like you have a sense that there are other people in your life and not your partner, but other people that you could go to if you needed to? Definitely. See, that is the essence of social support. It's actually not literally do you take people up on it? It's do you kind of have a vague sense that people are around. And that's the part that matters. That's the part that gives us the health and well-being benefits. It's like a bank account you never have to dip into. It just gives you the sense of- No, I've had to dip into it. Yeah, right.

Right, there you go. Luckily, it's a vast account. Yeah, right. I try not to make too many withdrawals on it.

Yeah. So just the feeling that it's there is really the core component. And I think there are a lot of men, not you and not me, but a lot of men out there, that don't feel like they have that social support bank account. Like a close male friend or female friend. Yep, or female friend. That's purely platonic. Or family for that matter. I mean, you know, who's more likely to like lose touch with siblings? I'm willing to bet that that's more likely to be men too. So I think this is part of like the modern challenge of masculinity that worries me, that I point to. Like, I want to help men at least have that sense. I think they can cultivate it through all the activity-based things that you describe. And, like, I did that myself throughout my 20s and 30s. Like, I could not count the number of kickball and softball teams that I participated in. And I did that not because I wanted support. I don't think I ever got a...

emotional and cried in front of any of those guys, but I knew they were there. And that if I ever had

to go to that, I could. Yeah, I'm talking about memes and internet themes. And I have to be careful doing that because I don't want to put too much weight on the direction of those things and what they really mean. And the science is what I'm interested in. But, you know, I think most guys would probably say that that scene in that movie, The Town, where Ben Affleck walks in and says, you know, listen, we got to do something. People are going to get hurt. We got to do this. And, you know, like, and you can't talk to anybody. And his friend's only response is who's driving.

Yeah.

Is kind of like the essence of what a lot of men want and kind of idealize male friendship as. Yeah. Like, are we going to go bury a body or create one? And, and, and there's, it's just that it's the loyalty. It's the trust is a lot's encapsulated in that. It's a bad quote unquote, bad-ass scene, right? But they're about to do something real bad. I recommend that. Right. That's not the friend test you want. I know people have used that as the friend test and they paid dearly for it. Yeah, right. But the point is that friends who aren't going to ask too many questions, that they can hold in the center of their mind without any long preamble that your friend needs something and you'll do whatever it is that they need because you love them. I think that that's what's the deeper layer of it. Yes, exactly. I'm realizing there, I have this like sense that there's a big contradiction, not in the scientific literature, but in the public perception, which is this. I feel like one common narrative these days is, look, men failed. They just failed. Like they didn't step up, right? They weren't committal. You know, we have to take care of them. They live much longer in a relationship. We die much earlier yeah that's one narrative that you hear a lot about it's a scary narrative right because you also hear the narrative yeah like women are just uh very extractive they'll trade up you know how now unfortunately your friend dated your uh right then they you they they broke

up she broke up with you first right right you know a lot of the things that come into play like

the coldplay concert affair that got it went viral yeah it was about this woman and you know and a lot of it was pointed at her, him too. But, you know, it was like, a lot was made of this thing that does happen that there's this notion like, well, who would actually pair up with their, you know, their female friend, a woman pairing up with a female friend's husband or brother, there's a lot of that. And you never know how much of this is being, these narratives are being fed. So I feel like now we're at this point that seems to be resolving a little bit, but we've been at this point where there are these two camps. And I saw something on Twitter X some time ago, and it just like stopped me in my tracks, which said the way you destroy a society is to get the men and the women to hate each other. And maybe I would just underwrite distrust each other. Yeah. Right. And so we need to move through this. I'm not actually asking you to solve it. But what do the data say? For instance, if we were to look at dating apps and I ask, do you think that the dynamics on dating apps, the algorithms, which are clearly designed to make the company's money. Yeah. Do you think those are more female-driven algorithms or male-driven algorithms? Not meaning who runs the companies. Oh, interesting. We know the answer to that for the most part. The question is, do you think that the apps are trying to optimize for more women to come to them or for more men to come to them and stay there? Because the theory is always kind of launched in the opposite direction. And if that wasn't clear, I'm just wondering who's got the power?

My understanding now, again, the dating apps are hard to decipher because like these companies don't share data with us. I've worked with some matchmaking companies data. They're more interested in generally in collaborating with scientists because they've they got to make people on dates happy. They don't work on engagement. They work on happy dates. Right. So they're more interested in talking to scientists. But I think when your goal is getting users and getting engagement, what you're probably trying to do is bring more women in because my understanding is that there's more men on the apps. Is that right? Yeah, I think so. What I don't know, and I don't know if anybody knows other than the people at these companies, is like, okay, but how many of those apps are in use and how many people, you know, regular users, I'm not sure. So you got to bring more women in. But again, engagement is the goal, right? I mean, that's what the apps want. They want you spending time on it. And then they want you to get the fancier features. So is that going to be more geared toward men? It might be. But I'm kind of speculating here. I expect that when you're trying to create an app for heterosexual men and women, You're going to have to somehow marry those two challenges. And look.

One of the bigger gender differences that we see in the whole realm of sex and relationships is in swiping behavior. The fact that women will swipe yes on like 5% of the men they see, but men swipe yes at about 50-50.

But that fits the kind of evolutionary quote unquote narrative, like men being less selective, wanting to spread their DNA, this kind of thing. I mean, to my mind, that whole thing around like men want to spread their DNA. Okay. Like I believe in evolutionary biology. Sure. But there's a lot of modern features that make like accountability for offspring and things like, it's not like men can run around just having kids with anyone and afford all of that. Right. It's, I mean, you know, we were talking earlier, there's sort of like two models. There's like the, there's like the Genghis Khan ideal within this evolutionary biology model. And then there's, you know, kind of like, where are we now? I mean, I don't think anyone, with the exception of some very wealthy people who have kids with lots and lots of people and clearly can afford it, I don't think anyone's thinking they're going to go out and just have kids with as many people as they possibly can. Right.

And so what's so interesting about these gender dynamics is that, from my perspective, they tend to get the largest, the biggest gulf between men and women in the situations that are the weirdest. So, for example, and this is a real study, you recruit confederates, so that means it's somebody who's working for the experimenter, and then they go around campus and they ask people, I've noticed you around and I find you very attractive. Would you like to go to bed with me? And when you do this, you find that men are about 20 times more likely to say yes to that request than women. Very few women say yes to this request, but a reasonable number of men do. All right. But the thing about that experiment, and that experiment is very valuable and it's very influential, and I love at least that it was real, that people were actually out in the world doing something, even if it's a little wild and probably a little scary, especially for the women. But if you do this one little tweak and you say, yeah, OK, but how about like the last time that happened to you in real life, like in a context where you knew people and then you look at the gender difference? It's not 20 times more. It's two times more. What do you mean? It's like the last time somebody, you know, like among a group of friends, like ask, like, hey, do you want to go hook up? How much more likely then are men to say yes than women? And men are still more likely, but they're only twice as likely rather than 20 times as likely.

So this is not my belief, but the cynical incel types on the internet, or there's just cynical guys will say, oh, that's because women are sleeping around more than they used to when the first experiment was done. I don't believe that's true, but I can tell you that would be their reflexive response. So there's this ammo, there are these arrows that each side holds. One side holds that guys aren't stepping up. They're not managing their own lives, let alone making themselves somebody who would be attractive as a partner who could listen and help take care of somebody. There's a notion of taking care of something that we can talk about. The guys are saying, well, they're just all extractive. And there's deceptiveness there. And they'll trade up at a moment's notice. And so, I mean, I don't want to feed the flames of distrust, but the data you just provided, what is the conclusion? Like, that's the result. But in that paper, what's the authors, you know, we the authors therefore conclude that.

Right. So I would I would conclude this, that approaching strangers is especially in a romantic or sexual context, is very, very tricky, very challenging. And it is a weird modern skill because we actually evolved in environments where you didn't actually meet that many strangers. So some people are adept at that. God bless. But for most of us, we had to get to know people over time. We needed that long process to make a good impression on somebody because most of us are like not all that hot and not so appealing that people fall for us the moment we see them. And so that is what I would tell these hypothetical incels is I think part of the problem is that you're locked into a way of thinking about sex and romance that it's about a pickup line or it's about an initial impression. I think women are more interested in casual sex when it's somebody that they like kind of know and have been friendly with for a while and have had like some good banter with. And if you surround yourself with people, not just women, but also men, and you meet friends of friends. You're going to find more opportunities that way. So it's like a shift in the mindset that we have about how it is we meet people and how it is we get to know them and that hitting on strangers is like low yield, very difficult. Spending time with friends, it's time consuming, though it's enjoyable in and of itself. It's a time-consuming approach, but it's ultimately going to be better for more people, you know, on average at least.

In light of the apps, social media, this divide, I'm very grateful that you're bringing up this notion of spending time in small groups. Yeah. Probably around certain activities. Could be pickleball, could be a barbecue. Could be, I mean, that's how people used to meet. Yeah. You know, sometimes there's work adjacency. I mean, I think that one of the reasons the Coldplay thing went so viral is that the woman was head of HR. There were a number of things that were ethical violations independent of, like, they tried to kind of rescue it. Like, but they were in love and their marriages were failing and people were like, there are violations down the line on this, right? You know, in laboratories, many people coupled up in laboratories, you know, my advisors were always like really adamant that no one should do that. I listened. Oh, yeah. So they tried to lock it down. I mean, in graduate school, I worked alone in the lab. But my graduate advisor actually suggested I not even date within our graduate program. This is peer-to-peer. I was a graduate student. And for the most part, I obeyed, but I was so focused on work. And I guess it happened with like, you'd go to meetings, you meet other graduate students. So it was really peer-to-peer. In my postdoctoral laboratory, my advisor was like vocal to everyone, like no dating in the lab. And of course, there are certain married couples nowadays with kids, several of them, in fact, that met in the lab just by proximity, interest. And who knows, aliquoting prowess, who knows?

Somebody out there is an incredible aliquotter that never got to attract somebody.

To my knowledge, by the way, folks, again, this is not a way to attract a mate, unless you're a molecular biologist, perhaps. But I think that there's real value in this because unlike our earlier discussion where other people's input can be kind of toxic to the process of understanding and really getting in touch with one's sense of taste. I like this person. I don't. This feels safe. It doesn't feel safe. And I'm not using, by the way, the safe language to be politically correct. Like some people feel emotionally unsafe because it's just like, like if there were a stressful circumstance, they would dissolve into a puddle of their own tears. That's a different version of it. Right. I think we all kind of like flip to the extremes, but that's, that's another aspect. But this is a context in which you can get a read of how someone behaves, their values, their reflexive levels of kindness or lack thereof with other people. Yeah. You get a lot of data. Yeah. In a setting that you're hopefully enjoying yourself in any way. That seems very, very valuable.

So we're talking 80s movies and 90s movies already. So I'm going to throw out Say Anything. Oh, yeah. Do you remember Say Anything? Yeah, absolutely. So the John Cusack lead character asks out the Ione Skye character, but where they go on their first date is absolutely fascinating. They go to a party. So they are clearly going together, but they don't spend the whole party like attached to each other and they're not interviewing each other like they met on an app. They're actually kind of watching each other as they float through these various groups. And sometimes they're talking to other folks about the fact that they're kind of on a date right now and how is it's going. But they're also talking to each other. And it's kind of a beautiful depiction of this old kind of lost art of you're dating, but you're also with other people seeing how they behave. And one of the moments where Ione Skye sort of you can see are starting to fall for John Cusack is when he's actually looking out for some of the other folks there, like, you know, taking their keys away so they don't drive. And I think that that idea of like watching how we behave around other people can be very powerful.

So one of his unique qualities was that he's protective of other people and responsible when he put other people's safety ahead of his own desire to go out and drink that night or something. Yeah, I forgot that scene. That's a perfect segue to what I was going to say next, but I'm brought to this mildly traumatic experience in high school where I didn't go to any high school dances early in high school. I was like really in the skateboard community, just really focused on that. And then it was my junior year of high school. The now woman, then young woman, girl, whatever, asked me that it was the Sadie Hawkins dance where the girls asked the boys. This was very old fashioned, right? I was like, I've heard this. It already assumes, right? That the guy's always asked the girls. Yeah. Which was pretty much the standard. Yeah. We go. And she was a year older and extremely beautiful, super kind.

It ended up being a very long-term relationship, but I remember going and she had something back then where her hands would get really cold. She had this thing where it was a cold night. And so she went into the bathroom. She said, I'd have to like warm my hands. She was in there a really long time and I'm standing out there and people are coming up to me and I'm like, what are you doing here? Like, why are you at a dance? And I said, so-and-so invited me and no one believed me. There was like, there's no chance. And I have to say, it was the most mortifying thing. And I kept waiting for this moment where she would come out of the bathroom and like vindicate me. And they all kept like dissipating before she came back. She eventually came back. And I just remember thinking like, oh man, like nobody even, and I'm thinking like, I'm either completely outclassed, like completely outclassed, or like, this is one of the best opportunities that ever landed in my lap. And I'm going to, I'm going to pursue this with everything I've got. So I went with the second thing. And anyway, we, it was brutal. Like I had to sit there and like, you know, and like no one believed me they actually thought like i just like snuck in or something like that anyway the john cusack example is a really good one because his character in that movie is a little awkward along certain dimensions he's certainly not as um quote-unquote ambitious in the typical sense although he wants to be a great kickboxer right kickboxing sport of the future right it's a great scene between him and and her dad where he's explaining what he's going to do in life and not in any kind of fluent way. And her family clearly has other plans for her. But it gets to this thing that I had written down because I want to ask about next, which is this notion of texting in particular. So not even apps, but let's just say it's migrated off app or people meet, they exchange number and there's some texting, right? And this notion of the kind of unique advantage, at least early on, that I think can be somewhat misleading of people who are hyperverbal. Oh, interesting. And in particular among men. And so here's what, I think years ago when I was on the job market for academic science, a really fantastic neurobiologist who actually ran, let's just say a very famous school in Boston's brain science center. Okay. They never admit the name of their school anyway. said to me, he said, you know, the worst part about the job search process in neuroscience is that it selects for hyperverbal people where people can present their data, excite people about it, present their vision. And he said, and there's so many amazing scientists that just don't know how to communicate their data. And we're selecting for someone who can also teach, who can also do these things. And I realized he's absolutely right, you know, and some people can overcome this, but some of the best scientists in the world speaking isn't their forte. Yeah. Okay. So in the realm of text communication, there's a kind of a bias toward, can somebody like a good listener in a face-to-face interaction, like a guy can just sit there, listen, not

interrupt, nod, maybe reflect, maybe reflect, tell me more. Well, that must've been interesting, hard, whatever, you know, and can convey a lot of of genuine ability to communicate and bond. Over text, just listening doesn't work. In fact, if it's just like, wow, that must've been hard to like a paragraph this long, like it starts to fall flat. And this is where I think some people might be screaming, no, no, no, that's what I want. But there's a strong selection process now for people who can communicate quickly with their thumbs, be witty in writing, And so the hyperverbal thing has moved to text.

Yeah.

That's a challenge. And I do think, even though some men are very hyperverbal, there is a sex difference here that we are well aware of. So do you think that that's skewing things? Because the ability to kind of keep, to get and keep somebody's interest early on is strongly dependent on these days on texting. Right.

I think this is a really good point. You know, I was reminded of some work. This is early work in the like online interaction space that suggested that actually anxious people get a lot out of being able to communicate with a keyboard or with texting because they don't get so overwhelmed. So this is probably going to be somebody who also on a first date would be having a bit of a tough time. So it might be that actually texting for them has at least the advantage of reducing some of the anxiety because they can take a minute to think about what they want to say before they have to actually come out with it. But I also think you're right that the ability to be witty over text as opposed to the kind of like nonverbal listening that you're describing, that is going to be a special advantage for some people today. So it could very well be skewing things. things in the way that you describe. There's not great data on this either. I mean, I mentioned earlier, we don't have great data on like the arc of the relationship. But some of the people that have tackled this question, this is a great researcher named Mimi Brinberg at Ohio State. And what she does is she gets couples who are together and then says, let me see your texts and then gets the whole text thread with their permission. All the way back to when they first started texting. And what you see are some cool things like essentially their styles of communicating start to like cohere, right? It's like a pattern of mutual influence where they get a similar cadence and they start using similar words and other things as they're talking to each other. Now, of course, those are the successful cases. So what would it look like if we had the unsuccessful cases? And I think you're right. We would see that the people who can't match or can't be witty early on, that those are the text threads that never become couples. So we just have to figure out how to recruit those folks to be in our studies, give us the last 10 threads of, you know, dates that never went anywhere.

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of the stability of the relationship over time. So I wish that, you know, it's a shame that these

apps don't select for action. The only way to do that would be something where you would say, okay, if you're going to sign up for this app, you know, we're going to ask you to go on at least three dates with you know anybody that you match with and we want to see you dating in these very different circumstances where the point isn't always to just talk at each other that also you like you got to do things together i wish there were dates that were like assemble this ikea

furniture don't people still go for like a hike or go to a show yeah no that's that that's good

too because at least it's it's talking and interacting but a different kind of talking and interacting i want i want like Fit. physical challenges, get out of this escape room, stuff like that. Anyway, I'm not actually dating. See how people handle it. Yeah, right. You're right. Yeah. So you got to be witty, but also not panic. Do you suggest that as a, as a like a first date? I don't know, maybe third date. Okay. Third date sounds good for escape. I want to be clear. I've never, I've only done the escape room board games. You're just throwing people under the bus. Exactly. I see what happens. Yeah, no, no, I'm just kidding. But like, you know, events, sporting events, I mean, things that are exciting, that you're doing together, but also facilitate interaction, I think can be really good. It is very, very hard, though, to simulate the patterns of what would it be like to be in a long-term relationship with this person and the 4,000 daily responsibilities that come with that. And I think even when we are really crazy about somebody early on, we try to forecast what that's going to be like as best we can, but we really don't know. And I think the beautiful thing, but also the challenge that a lot of relationships have is, you know, what you do is, you know, like you just described, like, okay, it becomes my job to set out the coffee and it becomes your job to mow the lawn And we create this very elaborate structure that guides not just our day-to-day lives and the crap we have to do, but it also guides how we communicate, when we communicate, what we communicate about. If we create a business together, that can create a relationship that starts to feel like more transactional, that's maybe less warm, has less opportunity for connection, as opposed to creating a relationship that builds time for fun activities together, for fun experiences. Or again, I recognize like people are stressed and often work in multiple jobs. But at least when we are interacting, are we able to interact about the fun, silly things that brought us together in the first place? I think it's it's very challenging to do these things when people go to couples therapy and the couples therapy is effective. it's usually because therapists are able to help couples essentially like rewind all the bad patterns they've created and go back to when things were good uh rediscover what it was that they really appreciated about each other and like recreate their relationship from there in a new way but yes many of these things are they're just deeply deeply hard to forecast yeah and there's

always the natural desire to want to know if one's time and energy is well spent i mean it's really in some sense the most um important investment is time and energy of i mean and uh it's kind of all we have it's not it's all we have and that's very evolutionary in its core you talked before about this kind of crystal ball question or um probing for particular disclosures that people are willing or not willing to make as a, as a perhaps better indication of whether somebody is interesting or appropriate for you. I realize, however, that the notion that there's a, like a question or a set of questions that would say green light is, that's not true. This just can't be true. There's probably some answers that are red light. Everyone, you know, knows red light. Hopefully they're paying attention to that but it's the yellow it's the yellow but it's the yellow lights and not knowing what questions to ask to see if there's a sort of green light path forward uh tell me what those questions are okay like yeah phrased differently if two people are on a date and they have only a few minutes it's kind of a speed dating type situation and they need to make a good assessment as to whether or not they genuinely would like to spend more time with the person again uh what what are the questions they should ask? All right. So I like the questions that are a little

bit more offbeat. You know, what people tend to do on speed dates is they, they want to find common ground quickly. You know, if it's college students, maybe we're going to talk about their major. Do we share a major? No, like pivot. Where are you from? And they'll try to find something that they can bond over. And that can work very well. But I think the core of what we want in an initial interaction with somebody is to take away something that feels like it was at least a little different than all the other interactions that we have. And so sometimes what that means is going a touch deeper than people are comfortable with. Now, in four minutes, it's tricky. If you have a little bit longer, like a regular evening length date, I really like the 36 questions test. Like this is the, sometimes it's called the fast friends procedure, but these questions like you know what's one thing that you've never told somebody that you've always wanted to tell them and what's stopping you or people answer that yeah i mean after if you've been hanging out with somebody for 60 to 90 minutes that is a pretty good way to elicit real depth and give like both people a chance to do some reciprocal self-disclosure because that's what people want. That's what people connect over is like, I feel like I've just heard, maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but I feel like you've just told me something that you haven't told most people. And maybe you haven't told anybody. I vividly remember falling for somebody when that moment happened. It's like, you are telling me this. I don't think you've ever told anybody this before. And it is such a rush. I think like, I don't know, man, the internet, it's like convinced us all we care about is like sex and hotness. There is nothing like the rush of having somebody tell you something that they've never told anybody else. And again, this is like the stuff that gets relationships researchers excited, because this is what we see in our data, responsiveness, closeness, like building trust and all of that stuff. Now, again, four minutes is really hard. Four minutes, you just got to get a little nugget of something that you want to build off later. And maybe that is your hometown. And maybe it is like, isn't this a weird experience that we're only going to get to chat for four minutes? But whenever there are routes to go for a little bit more disclosure, I usually advise that people go for it. It will pay off on average, even if it can feel kind of awkward in the moment.

Do you think there's more excitement if one gets the sense that the other person is taking a bit of a risk in disclosing it? Yeah. Not like I've been dying to tell somebody this and there's never been opportunity. Thanks for giving me the opportunity. And, you know, I, whatever, I always, you know, wanted to come back in my second life as a guppy or something. I don't know. I'm picking a trivial example on purpose because it's not true. Much better tropical fish, a big tropical fish enthusiast. That's right. Much better. Freshwater discus, much better. Owned by me because we have a really good life. Take really good care of my freshwater discus. But in all seriousness, does that mean that people are walking around harboring, especially single people, are harboring parts of themselves that they're craving intimacy? You know, that's of the exchange things that they've never told anyone, that they wish they could tell someone, feel safe enough to tell them. Is that what you're talking about like you know creating a real moment of intimacy early on that's not physical intimacy it's i don't even know if it's emotional intimacy it's like it's a human connection right

it's like i'm a person that's had particular experiences and you're a person that's that's had particular experiences and we have these like narratives and stories about ourselves again the science historically has been so focused on traits and i get it like i and i understand the evolutionary focus on traits, but man, humans are stories, right? We're narratives and we want other people to be privy to that narrative and then maybe eventually be a part of it. So I think that that is often what can be very powerful. Now, for people who are single and they like want to be in a relationship, I do think that it can be that sense that they're lacking. A lot of people are single and are very very happy with their single lives and i also understand that a lot of people if they're single and they're dating look there's a lot of reasons to be cautious forming a relationship is a low base rate event it doesn't happen all that often and it's time costly yeah

financially costly that's right it's energetically costly exactly it's very energetic exactly like

we don't go around forming relationships with everybody but i i also happen to think that like once the ball gets rolling, the pull can be very strong. And part of that pull is this desire to have somebody kind of see me, get me, understand me. I might be talking about securely attached people on average, right? There's always going to be that avoidance pull too, like people need to self-protect to some extent. But the sort of desire to open up and have somebody like really get you it's it's so core to the relationship science worldview and i think it says a lot about like who we are as a species and like how we form mating relationships

you've said in um so many words uh before uh that men and women essentially want the same things yeah i think that's going to hit some people square in the face and they're going to say that is so not true men just want blank women just want blank i i'm like on this campaign lately to try and defang yeah the trolls yeah that seem to have like it's like if we were in high school yeah let's leave junior high school let's go to high school okay and they were like a bunch of like really awful people let's evenly distribute it between the sexes let's just do that for fairness sake yeah and they're like constantly pointing out how these people are always bad and extractive and these people are always you know uh cold and avoidant and like yeah and if those narratives were just constantly like posted on the walls and talked about over lunch and whispered in the hallways, it would be very poisonous to the whole environment. And that's kind of what the internet is. And then the traditional news, but also some podcasts, not this podcast, but we'll kind of amplify these narratives because they feel juicy, they feel, and they get clicks. And I think we all have an innate desire to avoid danger. So we want to know where this stuff is, But when you step back, you go, like most people are pretty well-meaning. Most people are looking for good partnership. Nobody's perfect, but where people make mistakes, most people are like looking to at least modify their behavior over time. Like it's all reasonably benevolent, but then there's these like kind of nasty characters out there and we give them so much credit and we give them so much power and they just plain suck. So men and women want the same things. Let's shut them up for a second and ask what the data say.

This was one of the first things I studied when I started looking at attraction like almost 20 years ago now. And in part because I found the gender differences fascinating, it was very clear for decades and decades that if you ask men and women about the qualities they want in a partner, that you'll see these differences show up pretty routinely. And they are differences that then, in the hands of nefarious characters online, get spun out into exactly the narrative that you're describing. But the basic data on what men and women say they want, it's there. Men will say they care about attractiveness in a partner more than women. And women will say they care about earning potential in a partner more than men. Now, I'm phrasing that in a particular way. And I'm saying what people say they want because I'm critiquing the experimental paradigms that were used. It usually had people rating a bunch of traits on scales. And as a psychologist, I have no problem with that. I'm very interested in people's subjective experiences and I use scales all the time. But we wondered, that's different than, or it might be different, than what happens when you're meeting people face to face and you're reacting to a set of people who might be very attractive or of middling attractiveness or not very attractive at all. And that to me seems closer to capturing what people actually want. Like if you meet 10 women, how much does their attractiveness drive your desire to date them? How much does attractiveness affect whether you want a second date with them or not. So we ran speed dating studies to try to capture exactly this phenomenon. I'll make it about earning prospects because it's really the same thing. So we have these men and they go speed dating and some of these women are very ambitious. They're going to be lawyers and doctors. Others are a little bit less ambitious. And what you'd see is that the men tended to like the women a little bit more to the extent that they were ambitious. It wasn't a huge driver of their liking, but it was definitely there and it was definitely positive. But then when we flipped it and we looked at what the women were drawn to, not what they said, but what they were drawn to, they also tended to like the ambitious men a little bit. And the magnitude of that preference was identical. And it's been 20 years of this where we've looked at ongoing relationships. We've looked at, you know, 40 something countries throughout the world. That narrative plays out every time. There's no gender differences in the extent to which these traits appeal to men and women when they're evaluating like real people they've actually met. Online is different. What people say they want is different. But real people that you've at least met face-to-face

seems to dramatically reduce the power of the gender differences and the appeal of these traits.

Fascinating. And runs countercurrent to, I think, what many people, including I, have heard

out there yeah but but i think the like i think the key lesson here is like believe your subjective experience when you're interacting with somebody and you're getting to know them and maybe that subjective experience is like she's hot but i am not feeling this and maybe that subjective experience is like you know i know that maybe to some people he looks like he doesn't have his life together, but I really see a spark there. If you trust that experience, I think that's likely to go better. And we don't have an experience to go on like that when it's online. When it's online, it's very easy to put people in boxes, put people in groups, and then make the groups fight each other. And I too am very distressed about all the heteropessimism. Heteropessimism. Yeah, right. It's not my term, but it's one of my favorite terms. Do you know who coined it? I know the year is like 2019, team, but I forget the author. Yeah, look it up. Great term. Heteropessimism. Right. It's like men and women can't get along. How could they get along? They've got different interests and different priorities. Look, in the close relationships realm, it's not true. And that's the realm I know. Men and women, they want the same things out of their relationships. Yes, there are gender differences and like the thresholds for sex. And especially early on, That can be that can be really messy. But overall, I see a lot of similarity and a lot of potential for these the bonds that men and women form to do great things for people and women and women and men and men and any gendered combination that you want to come up with. I think we're pair bonding creatures. We get a lot of joy and a lot of fulfillment out of that. And I want to see men and women find a way to make it work again.

Springboarding off of the heteropessimism term, which is great because it encapsulates so much, even though what it encapsulates is definitely not great. Yeah, yeah. The term I'm about to use is going to sound like it means something it doesn't, but is there any research on homopessimism, which is not the same as homophobia? Homopessimate, meaning I'm not aware because I happen to be heterosexual, but I have homosexual friends, men and women. I'm not hearing them talk a lot about how dating culture is much worse. now i hear this too yeah but then again uh sample size isn't that great here right right so i don't know because a lot of the same things apply in terms of like apps uh sure cultures vary yeah but there are some constants in this picture um so in any research yours or others research about um homosexual dating and couples yeah is there pessimism guys saying well guys these days and women saying yeah in uh lesbian women let's just you know for lack of a better term um saying

women these days i don't think that's out there nearly to the same extent i think some of the like interesting components that you see out there is look the apps i think did they did a lot of good in the world for people who, you know, just felt like their social networks had no options in them, but especially for people who might have been living in places that were genuinely unsafe for gays and lesbians and might have helped them to find romantic partners. So, like, I always want to be the first one to give the apps credit for that, for providing those kinds of opportunities. Classically speaking, what you tend to see is that, you know, I've talked a little bit about the time frame as people form relationships in the first place and that sometimes we get locked into this idea that it's like, oh, it's going to happen in an instant and now you're together. But the reality is it's often an elongated process. That process has tended historically to be even longer for folks who are gays and lesbians forming same gender relationships. And I think part of that is something that you might even call like a bigotry tax because if you lived in a place where it was like vaguely dangerous to admit your same-sex attractions, you've got to be really careful before you start disclosing how you feel about somebody because rejection doesn't just mean rejection. Rejection is maybe actually carries other threats and stigma and all of these other things with it. Loss of jobs. Exactly.

We've seen examples that, like, it's sort of, again, it plays on stereotypes, but I'm going to assume some of it is true. Like in Mad Men, right, there's a disclosure and then it doesn't go well. Right. Right, right, right. Yeah. It doesn't go well.

I love the movie Call Me By Your Name. I don't think I've seen it. Yeah, it's about 10 years old. It's Luca Guadagnino and he's a fabulous director. But it's about two men who get together over the course of a summer, young men who find it. It's one of Timothee Chalamet's earlier movies, and one of the things they come to regret is that, like, well, we didn't disclose our feelings sooner, but the movie was taking place in the 1980s. So you had to be really careful with whether you were going to be upfront about how you were feeling about somebody. It wasn't in a place where you can't be fully confident that you're –

have a sense of safety it could be really dangerous so that's an important difference that we see and i think the apps were really good at helping people to uh to come together

in that sense i have a question about um financial stability okay and level yeah you mentioned there aren't real big gender differences there earlier we were saying scientists are always uh doing the opposite of improv instead of yes and they always said yeah but you know what yeah but what about it's in our training income level on its own or amount of money that somebody has in my mind is somewhat informative what's more informative is having the additional data point of where they started out because people with money who didn't have to work very hard to get it it's a different picture now some people might say who cares and I will make the argument that some people some people who had to make a work very hard to make their money oftentimes are still in the working hard mode the the the twist in the in the high level of income thing like that yeah the additional question that's useful is how much free time do you have yeah because a lot of the people i know who have a lot of money they don't have a lot of free time so if people pair up with them thinking that they're gonna feel very financially secure and have a lot of stuff that might be true But how often they're going to see their partner or the co-parent of their kids is an important question. And this extends both ways.

Like so many of these attributes that in the abstract sound really good to us, but then when you actually put it in a person that also has all these other attributes and things going on, you realize like, wait a minute, their cutthroat ambition actually wasn't that great, right? Because it means that they're never around. I think for this reason, it can be very challenging, especially if you're looking at long-term relationships, to take things like a person's income level and use that to forecast, like, for example, how their partner is going to feel about them. We've done some of this work, indeed some of the work looking at gender differences, and like the reality is like a person's objective income, it has very, very small effects on how their partners feel about them. The bigger effects are things like, you know, if now we scaffold up and look at like socioeconomic status, so do you have the resources to get by as a couple? That can be very challenging for people.

I've seen numerous examples of couples where the man loses his work. And if he's not able to get stable work again reasonably soon. In most of the, this isn't a peer reviewed study, most of the examples I can think of, the couple eventually dissolved. and it wasn't necessarily for a lack of enough resources. Families were able to help, et cetera. And of course we could talk about depression. We could talk about some other thing that might've happened or many things that happened, but is there a sex difference there?

The part that I find the most intuitive about these examples is that when a man loses his job like that, and I love that there are other resources around, so we know that that's not the exact problem. My guess is that the challenges are coming more from his, like, genuine troubling, like, loss of identity, loss of self, what am I going to do with myself, and less, maybe not zero, but less about his partner thinking, oh, now he's no longer a provider. And that's just generally my bias from what I see in the science, which is when tragedies befall us, they affect our perceptions especially strongly. So this guy is going to feel this pretty hard that he's lost his job. Stepping back and looking at the broader picture of the data, it used to be true that marriages were more fragile when the woman earned more than the man in the marriage. But this stopped being true in the 90s. So that gender difference doesn't exist anymore. And I think it's easy to surmise. I don't know if the sociologists who studied this have drawn exactly this conclusion, but it's easy to posit that what's happening there is that people in general have gotten more comfortable with the gender imbalance relationships. And in the 90s, we were still getting used to this idea. um today even if the average couple the man earns more than the woman you do see that because there is a gender difference in the in income levels on average but in education it's flipped now right women at least in younger couples the woman is more likely to be educated than the man more educated or educated period more educated than the man in the relationship right so so women are earning more of the, you know,

higher degrees. So if there's a mismatch, probably the woman has more education than the guy. That's not a risk factor relative to if they were the same level, relative to if, you know, he were higher. It just doesn't really seem to be doing anything. I know we can like get really nervous about like, what does it mean for men's desirability if they're not ambitious? Like, I get that. If men are not out there, like, making things of themselves, I'm not worried about the women getting a better education than them. I think it's important for men to have a sense of purpose. I think trade schools can be awesome. But the mismatches in the level of education and in the level of income, those don't spell a problem. We just got to get, like, men feeling good about themselves again. And the data say they're not. Yeah, I mean, I think that's what you see. I mean, the data that concerned me the most are that men, and I think especially low SES men, they're the ones that feel like their social networks are gone. They don't know where to go to get any kind of companionship. So if they're really feeling that acute sense of loneliness, of lack of belonging, you know, among like real people in their lives, that's the thing I worry about. Because then that's going to affect your sense of self. That's going to affect, you know, all of your ambitions. and in really bad cases might, you know, push people to some of those nastier corners of the

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yeah and look let me say that this is i think one of the more tentative it's a big and it's a big

sample size 4,500 I'm like so and uh I'll weave a quick anecdote there's this guy at the gym that I sometimes go to he's probably in his like 70s or something and he's in like great shape he's retired he made money he's enjoying life he's got grandkids he's like he just seems like I don't know him that well but it seems like he's really got it together and he's really loving life and I always say uh what brings you here every day you know I figured it would be like I just feel so good. And he just always says the same thing. He always just says, I don't want to lose my wife to a younger guy. And I always laugh and I go, like, I know a lot about the contour of his life and maybe there's something he's not disclosing, but you know, anyone would say like, this guy has just totally got it made. And he's in and he's, you know, I get, I don't know the details of his life and I shouldn't, but I know enough about it that, you know, he's checked off all the boxes three or four times and then had the wisdom, in my opinion, to not just keep working like a maniac and just spend time with his kids and grandkids and his wife but he always answers the exact same way how's it going he goes pretty good just don't want to lose my wife to

younger guys so i'm here again today let me tell you about this study and look again i'm a scientist and sometimes the data i'm like huh you don't say i didn't see this one coming i mentioned this earlier

So we partnered up with folks who do matchmaking. So these are people who are paying for a service because they want to be in a long-term relationship. And so they will set people on dates. And they've got a whole pool that they're working with. And within that pool, the men who are searching for dates are older than the women by about four years on average, okay? So that's what they've got to work with. And they set people up on these dates. And so most of the time, the woman is going to be younger than the man, but there's a range. Sometimes the woman is much younger than the guy, and sometimes the woman is the same age as the guy, and sometimes the woman's even a little older than the guy, all right? So what you'd expect to see is that if men are looking for younger women and women are looking for older men, then when we look at how the age of the partner affects whether you want to go on a second date with this person it should be the younger folks appeal to the men more and the older folks appeal to the women more but there wasn't what we saw we saw that the younger folks appeal to the men more and by the way it's not a huge effect it's not like the gross stereotype that's out there men are a little bit more interested in the women to the extent that they're younger but it's not gigantic women are doing the same thing they're a little bit more interested in the younger guys they don't say that on paper in fact sometimes they're like don't set me up with the younger guys and then they do and they say huh that was interesting i enjoyed that i enjoyed that date

i would like to see him again all right the stated reasons um similar in any way for instance are both groups saying less uh less baggage that would be kind of cliche answer no we could place that on

Yeah, I don't know. And I would love to know. I think sometimes when women are when they downrate, like whether they care about attractiveness or something, I think sometimes they are like kidding themselves a little bit that they actually do appreciate a younger guy who's maybe is fit and in shape or they don't fully appreciate how exciting it would feel to be sitting across the table from a guy like that. I mean, this is my best my best guess. And what's so fascinating about this data set is that, look, they're trying to create these couples. But, you know, you only create a couple a fraction of the time. Much of the time, the people don't really hit it off. But in the couples that get created, the guy was four years older than the woman. And in the couples that don't get created, the guy is four years older than the woman because that was what they had in the sample to begin with. So we look around and you see that age difference. That age difference is real, and I am sure it means something important. And data like this just make me think something else is going on here. Whatever is creating this age difference, it's at least it's not, you know, age difference in how people sort. It's not happening on date one. It's not happening at the initial attraction phase. Maybe it's happening earlier. Who puts themselves in the pool? Maybe it's happening later. I don't know. She's going to date this younger guy like once or twice, but then she's going to be done with him and she'll, you know, settle down with somebody who's a little older.

Interesting you said she's done with him.

Yeah, right. Interesting.

Right, but it could go the other way too. Well, what I've heard before, because I'm 50, I have some female friends who are dating and they'll say that they do date younger guys, but then the deal breaker is if the guy says he wants kids. It's the stuff. And then. Yeah. So the agreement is to move on based on that often. This is a common, reasonably common thing. Yeah. I should hear about this more and more these days.

Yeah, and I think one thing that online dating affords is if you've got something like that that's exceptionally important to you, there are opportunities to filter on it. We haven't talked about this too much yet, but you can get into a whole line of research and studies on, you know, oh, if people are filtering for things in the abstract, does that match what's ultimately going to appeal to them when they meet face-to-face? We find that generally speaking, these things tend to be pretty uncorrelated. So what people think they want doesn't match up with what they actually end up liking once they meet somebody face to face. But you can argue that sometimes that's not a good thing. If somebody really wants kids, shouldn't it be within their power to craft a pool of partners who also want kids to give them that opportunity? Like that seems like a reasonable humanistic thing to do. And so to the extent that the apps are able to do that or the services are able to do that, I think that's ultimately a good thing.

Don't they click, like want kids or not?

Yeah, I think often. I think you can. In some apps, that might be like a special feature you have to pay for.

Or at least things get complicated.

Who knows if the news is accurate because it's not real data. It's sort of whatever the news decides to shine a light on. This idea that more young people are going to church, which is a values, plural, indicator. Like, you know, people can, most churches are open to whoever shows up. But the assumption is that people are there for certain reasons that they're either trying to build on or have certain values. Yeah. that are family, children, values, morals, adjacent, if not central, right? I think people know what I'm saying. I mean, sure, bad people can show up at church, but the idea is that somebody has taken the time to get dressed up on a Sunday morning and go and listen to someone else speak. And a lot of people are meeting that way now. Are there any data that that's a response to the kind of like wild west of online dating and, you know, social media and just the general culture of like everybody. It's kind of the culture of everybody. I mean, even in high school, there were subgroups. Some people moved between subgroups. I see what you mean. But it's, you know, the vastness of the internet and social media, even if you state your preferences about what you do and don't want to see on social media, it's like, it's a flood. I mean, I see people and things on there from way back when that, like, they're not bad people. I have no interest in what they're doing now. And then occasionally I see people, I'm like, oh, no way. Yeah. Reconnect. But it's a fire hose.

Yeah. And you need some way to reduce it to something manageable. I mean, again, we evolved in an environment where we knew, like, 50 other people. You know, that's like your group. You probably knew more than that. Maybe you know, like, 150, some nearby groups. But that's all ages and all genders and everything else. It's a small number of potential partners for you, but you had reasons to interact, structures that were going to put you in contact with each other. And to the extent that church is fulfilling a function like that, I think that's great. And in fact, I think that's exactly what's missing. And if church isn't your thing, there's like a million other things that people can do in any kind of modern urban context that are going to be helpful along those lines. I mean, you can join any kind of intramural sports team. I mean – Improv class. Exactly. Just came up on it. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the improv classes are amazing because not only is it a chance to interact in a group over a period of time where you don't get to opt out if you don't love somebody right away, but also you're like practicing being vulnerable and being responsive and things like that. So I think these things are all wonderful. Are people doing it because they're trying to limit the pools to the folks that they think will fit what they're looking for? I'll bet you some people are doing that. I'll bet that, you know, if somebody's like, I really want to be with somebody else who's active, so I'm going to join a running club. Or, yeah, I want to be with somebody who shares my value, so I'm going to join church. I think that's great. If I'm like being buzzkill scientist, I'd probably sit here and be like, it probably actually doesn't matter. Like join the church, join the running club, join all these things. Like you're probably no more or less likely to find somebody that you're going to click with. It's more about getting yourself in a small group environment. Exactly. Exactly. But I'll be the first to say like when it comes to like the base rates of these things, like if your goal was, you know, in 90 days, I want to be in a relationship. What are the things I should do that give me the best likelihood? I'm embarrassed to say my field can't answer that question. I can't tell you, you know, use two apps and use these two apps and go to church. Don't join kickball because they're a mess. I was a kickball player, so I'm allowed to say that. But you should join the running club. We can't answer questions like that. So in the absence of that kind of specificity, my answer is always just be around people on repeated occasions i'm not trying to provide pushback

here i'm not qualified to do it okay i'm gonna come from a totally different field but i feel like there's certain small group smallish group environments like church but there there could be other examples like for instance like a hiking club or rock climbing or something like that where there's kind of a um this shouldn't be the reason uh people do it and like the only reason people do but let's say um people pair up yeah as a consequence of time there yeah that the culture of that thing provides additional opportunities to uh grow the relationship with peers yeah right because there's certain things like you join an improv class exactly great like big my sister's really into drama and theater still does theater classes for her own her own enrichment but like but if you meet someone there it's not like that the the culture around it um sort of cultivates the evolution of the relationship like whereas in like church like You might even get married in that church in the context of. a hiking club like you might be out with the other couples that you meet or or single people that you meet for many years like you can sort of it's a community that yeah that can grow over time certain things here I'm showing my ignorance around improv classes yeah but certain things like a pottery class or pickleball or something like it doesn't just at face value present a sort of trajectory of like that's right I'm sounding really nerdy here but kind of like a set of maturational stages that it, that you can continue to like be in the relationship there. Does that make sense? Really stumbling for the words here. No, no, no. I totally get it. This by the way, is a great reason to not meet people at work, not meet people at work. I'm not trying to like throw a cold blanket on people who decide to meet people at work, but oftentimes it's the challenge. Oftentimes that the relationship doesn't necessarily flourish in the context of the work environment. It's not like the work environment makes the relationship grow. I've seen more things split over time. If both people work there, oftentimes they have to move to separate buildings, right. Um, just for a variety of reasons, but it's not like the culture encourages it. Whereas there are certain things that are a bit more, since you were talking for a moment there, like an evolutionary biologist, like we evolved in small villages and small groups where, you know, you had peers and elders that, that provide this positive reinforcement on relationship. You know, it's kind of an interesting thing. Like no matter how evolved we are or progressive we are. I don't know many women that ask men to marry them in 2026. I'm sure they're out there, but it's still the interesting assumption that men are going to do the asking. Yeah. Just saying. Okay. So how progressive are we really? Right. It's also true that when people get married, most of the time, they stand up in front of other people and state their vows this is not like you know uh you know under the bedsheets i promise i promise this is like a public disclosure these days it ends up on instagram you know so you know there's clearly a feedback that comes from being part of a larger structure that reinforces relationships over time

yeah and it can be a big you promised you didn't just promise to me you promised the whole world Yeah. And that can be an important source of support, too, because then it's that at least the subjective sense, like these people have our backs, right? If we run into hard times, there's a community that's going to be there and support us. And then I think you're right on the initial attraction side, having a sense that we're part of this larger collective, that there's something about that that feels good and provides structure that can help keep moving things forward. And you're right that the workplace context is particularly tricky because many workplaces don't want to encourage that kind of thing. And it's going to often happen anyway. And probably the smartest workplaces are the ones that allow for the possibility that peers are going to get together and have structures in place that will be able to keep the personal life appropriately personal and then deal with the fallout if the fallout happens.

One place I trained might've been UC Davis, all the junior faculty of which there were many of them when I first joined, there were a large fraction of couples in the department or who had spouses in other departments. I think more than 80% of those couples ended up divorced. now wow now we can't there are a lot of variables there fortunately most of them are on good terms um i can't say they ended up with other people in the department that didn't happen but you know i watched and was like whoa like this is interesting uh you know this didn't i want to say didn't end well because i think they're all happy now but there does seem to be some additional stress of that so i mean this gets to a question you've actually studied which is this notion of similarity. So maybe we should talk more about that because it's a more data-driven question, which is perceived similarity matters more than actual similarity.

What is perceived similarity? So perceived similarity is this general sense like, eh, we have a lot in common. There are a million things that we could talk about. We share the same values and attitudes and preferences about things in general. But notice the way I'm describing it. I'm not tethering it to any particular attitude or value or preference or anything else. Because it's so free-floating, I, as the perceiver, get to attach it to whatever I want. And that affords people to have a certain amount of motivated reasoning so that when they like somebody a lot, they will find the similarities there. They will really come to think that what really matters is that we love Japanese cinema and that we, you know, that we share the same politics, whereas for another couple, you know what, we have different politics. but that doesn't really matter to us.

Does anyone say that nowadays?

No, people still do. I mean, look, what you see in the political matching data is that the odds that people have diametrically opposed preferences, the odds they're going to get together in the first place are very, very low. But among the mismatches that do exist, it actually doesn't predict satisfaction all that much. And I think this is why, because you just compartmentalize it. If we match, it's important. If we don't match, who cares? Does anybody care about that, right? So much motivated reasoning. So this is why if what I wanted to do was take two people who had never met and assess everything I could about them and then figure out whether they were going to be a match or not based on whether they were similar, I really was probably going to be no better than a coin flip at figuring out whether or not they were going to click. That's actual similarity. I take things that are true about you without the ability for you to engage in motivated reasoning, and I say, okay, you're an 83% match on all the things I could assess. You two should like each other. When we've done studies like that, you basically get a coin flip every time.

Well, this is why the apps seem totally useless because if you were just pair up, well, you want this and you want this. I want that too, and I want that too. You're telling me that it's as good as chance. It's as good as chance.

And look, if there's evidence for similarity on anything, it could be in the realm of like demographics, socioeconomic status kinds of things. I've seen like unpublished data, but promising. But even then, those effects are so small. So, you know, we're going from a 50-50 coin flip to like 53-47. These are small effects across the board because we get all of this motivational latitude. When we really like somebody, we find the things we have in common, we focus on those, we convince ourselves those are the most important things in the world. And the thing is, who am I to criticize them? Because the people in the happiest relationships, that's what they're doing. They're exhibiting those kinds of biases. And it's like stupid human tricks, but it like kind of works.

You want to hear something really scary? Yeah. You probably know this already, but I was shocked. Uh, let's just say someone I know who would know, um, told me that the biggest dating app in the world by an enormous margin is it's not Tinder Instagram. Oh, and this was actually very much in parallel to the, the algorithm favoring communication by direct message. People will say like social media isn't social anymore it's not about like seeing what people are doing the real dynamics the real time spent and you'll notice how you get rewarded and what gets served up in the algorithm rewarded meaning like what what posts do better than others if there's a strong correlate to communication about that through direct message it's a dating app that's kind of cloaked for many people as a social media app but of course i use it to teach neuroscience and other things. And this will be on Instagram. So, I mean, I'm a big fan of Instagram and other social media platforms for teaching and learning. And I say that sincerely, but the majority of the time spent now is not scrolling. It's getting to communications that move to real world and then feedback to social media. So I found that interesting. So I'm imagining a question because you study questions people ask them on dates. And we used to be able to say, if you were on a deserted island, who would you want to be there with? Like, who's the one person that you could stand being with or perhaps even really enjoy being with, assuming you have all the resources? Now, I think the question should be, who's the one person that would get you to not engage with anyone else in the world? In other words, set down what you called, and I've never heard this before, the derivation of alternatives. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an interesting term. So in some ways, like committed partnership is about setting aside the idea that there might be somebody better for us. And I would argue, again, I have strong positive feelings towards Instagram. I really do. It's a fun and great platform when used in moderation. But it's the opposite of the deserted island. And a former guest on this podcast who happens to be a divorce lawyer, James Sexton, has talked about the fact that many, many, many of the divorces that he litigates, no, that he's involved in, that he helps resolve, win for his clients, started with a innocuous communication on his, starts with a like, starts with a like, starts with a conversation, starts with a, ends up in.

the corner of a grievance or a commonality that's sensed, and then the derivation of alternatives emerges, and eventually the relationship dissolves.

We think about how people handle alternative partners. If you're in a purportedly monogamous relationship, this is a challenge that relationships are going to face. And I sort of see these like twin streams happening at the same time. So what you see in general is that for people who are in relationships and especially if they are happy in that relationship, any alternative partner that you can throw at them, they will tend to think that that alternative partner is pretty weak sauce. They think that person is less desirable than any other metric you might want to come up with for how desirable that person actually is. That's what we mean by derogation of alternatives. It's like they're coming in up here, but because I'm partnered with you and I'm happy with you, I see them as less desirable than they actually are. Side note, that's why – it's one of the reasons why the marketplace metaphor starts to break down because people actually start to become bad barometers of what is quote-unquote good. You stop seeing this alternative's actual value because you're so happy with the person that you have. Okay. So this is a good thing. And this is a real defense mechanism that people have.

Is it a defense mechanism or, I mean, but it's protective of healthy monogamous relationship.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean it in the best. Yeah. So you know what? That's so funny because in our jargon, we see defense mechanism. I mean that in the best possible way. Yeah, protective mechanism. Right. Yeah. You're defending the relationship. That's so funny. I'd

like forgotten. We've had a few too many psychologists. Yeah. Right. Of course. That

has a negative connotation for some people not for me okay so it's a protective mechanism but at the same time people also do this thing that you might call like playing with fire but it's more like you know playing with what really seems to be a harmless book of matches and i just i'm just messaging these people well what's the big deal this isn't going to go anywhere huh i'm just you know we're we're chatting a little bit this isn't going to go anywhere and things escalate

Sorry to interrupt, but, and, you know, one of our former guests on this podcast, who's immensely popular in the dating relationships and romance sphere is Esther Perel. Yeah. And I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I think the perception about some of her messaging, whether accurate or not, is that there can be some value to, you know, in her first book, I think, and I haven't read it, but the excerpt that was relayed to me was this notion like, oh, like someone isn't feeling as much chemistry in their relationship. So like the woman, this wouldn't happen nowadays most likely, but goes to a bar and like flirts a bit and then like some sense of sexual confidence is restored and then her husband is then attracted to her differently again. And, you know, I've heard the more crude phrase, doesn't matter where you get your appetite as long as you eat at home. This is more of the 1950s, 60s variety. By the way, none of these statements come from me, although my mouth is saying them. These are things that you hear out there, right? Yeah. Directly in opposition to what you're saying, which is not to say that what you're saying is wrong. I just think that there was about a 20 or 30 year period there where people kind of assume that monogamy could thrive despite the inputs. And monogamy could thrive perhaps even better if people acknowledge this aspect of self that is still attracted to other people. They talk about it. What you're talking about is really a more of a protective cloak around the commitment. I do sense people are veering back toward that, what you're describing.

You know how I think about it is it's the protective cloak that that's sort of there as a baseline. But then signals will get through sometimes. Sometimes because you're messing around on Instagram. But sometimes because you went to the bar with your friends and there was this cute guy who was chatting you up. And the evidence there, too, I interpret, I think the way Astaire would interpret it and what you see in the data also suggests something like a protective mechanism. Again, it's playing with fire. But if you look in studies where they ask people, have a sexual fantasy about your partner. Now, how much sexual desire do you feel for your partner? It has gone up. Great. That's pretty straightforward. Now, please have a sexual fantasy about, I don't know, whoever's in second place. That's not your partner. Then you start having sexual feelings for that person and you start having sexual feelings for your partner at the same time. So it's exactly the metaphor that you're describing, that when we feel a sense of attraction, it can rebound onto our partner. And by the way, it doesn't happen in the reverse. Okay. so the

partner, your current partner, again, for most people in happy relationships, holds a special position, you might say, where even when there is a little bit of a threat, and I've noticed somebody, it rebounds somewhat. I don't advise that people go out and do this.

Are you saying it rebounds like it's a fuel for the relationship the way that Esther and other

people have talked about? That's a real thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. I mean, it's recent studies. I can point to one or two. They're all like within the last few years.

This is going to be very uncomfortable for some people to hear that their partner may come home immensely attracted to them because they had some sort of interaction during the day of either being attracted to someone or receiving signals of attractiveness.

Right. Where I am a thousand percent with Esther is that the danger, the problem is not that your partner was sexually attracted to somebody else. The problem is usually in the escalation. It's, yeah, but now are they like repeatedly hanging out with them and having like conversations that they feel secretive about? Or the, you know, if it's you, that you feel secretive about. Those are the warning signs. Because then what will start to happen is that the protective layer that people typically put around their partners, it will start to erode. And that's when people are at a greater risk of infidelity. It's usually a process like that. The simple fact that we can be attracted to other people, that is not a problem for the average relationship. It's the repeated follow through on that attraction that becomes a problem.

And that's something that evolved in recent years that there used to be far more transient interactions that would never resurface again. You sit next to someone on a plane, you'd have a conversation, there might be attraction, there might not be, but you develop some degree of intimacy, some people would disclose a lot on planes and then you never hear or talk to them again yeah nowadays there's almost always an opportunity for people to follow up and connect with people that's what james sexton is referring to yeah when he talks about social media being a um an uh barring other person's language here an attack vector you know on a relationship and maybe that is a good reason for people who are in committed relationships to just get off of social media period. But it's also a context where people spend, quote unquote, spend time with people

for other reasons. Yeah, it's tricky. If if I don't recommend using that sort of process to bolster your relationship, I guess if you're going to do it, you know, try to do it by watching somebody. Yeah. Who's yeah. Figure out if you're a man who's with a woman, just ask her, like, what actor does she have the hots for? And like, be kind enough to watch a movie featuring him. like maybe that's that's a way to make this work for you or the reverse yeah sure some of the um

what appear to be the strongest and happiest couples that i know i know very little about their dynamics period yeah which is kind of an interesting thing in its own right but some of the people that are in that set yeah seem to have a pretty uh relaxed rapport around oh yeah uh so and so referring to their spouse really likes that actor or actress like it's like yeah it's just kind of a thing that they understand right but it's over there right it's it's out of distance yeah it's not um it's not like a looming threat it's very different if it's about somebody that

you both like know and spend time with it's much more threatening in those cases and and i think that also is part of why that derogation process happens is because that threat feels very uncomfortable like even if it's your attraction like you kind of want to downplay it because the thought of what would it mean if I'm like with the wrong person or like what would happen if this thing spiraled out of control it's upsetting for most people I mean we take all this time to build a relationship up to be this thing that we really value that's a central part of our lives the thought that like it could disappear at a moment's notice because of a state that we would make, it can be threatening to most people. Even if we're imagining ourselves engaging in the actions that would bring things to an end. I heard a really scary story that may or may not

be informative. I think it is. And maybe you can help me understand it. Anytime someone starts a story with, I have a friend, it gets a little weird, but based on an observation I had a long time ago where I was going to a gym and I had a truly just platonic friendship with this woman. She would go to the gym too. Back then, not a lot of women worked out in gyms, if I'm honest, like it was like, not a lot of women lifted weights. It was like something that was kind of reserved for guys or for female bodybuilders, but she wasn't a bodybuilder, but she liked lifting weights and super fit. She's a super accomplished athlete now. She, one day when we were leaving, she was like really upset. I was like, what's up? And she's like, all these guys kept coming up to me. And I'm like, well, that's happening all the time. Like, you know, she's like, no, they were all really unattractive. And I said, okay, well, you're good at dealing with you. Like she was very skilled. She's very beautiful then and now. And so very skilled at like saying, thanks, but no thanks. And then she said something that was absolutely like shocking to me that I've shared with other female friends and some men. And they always go, no way. And she said, I feel like I have to go like flirt with a really attractive guy now. And it was clear that despite being incredibly attractive, incredibly accomplished and super athlete was questioning her own value. This is very evolutionary biology because the guys that were approaching her were in her mind, very, quote unquote, low value, unattractive. Yeah. It like got to her. You know, of course, my interpretation was, okay, guys, the next time a really attractive woman walks up to you and seems like she's chatting you up, you don't know that it's actually about you, you know, like just know that it may not be about you, like, like note to self. And what's wild is that years later, I observed and talked to someone in a basically same dynamic, but she's married. And she said, yeah, if a bunch of people hit, people always hit on this other woman too. She's like, if they do that, I sort of feel like I have to go kind of get a clear perception again of whether or not I could be with an attractive guy. And now, granted, she's married to a super successful, what anyone, male or female, would describe as super good looking guy. And they have a super stable family. And I thought to myself, oh my God. And I don't know that this is unique to women. I don't know, but it's kind of weird if you think about it. Now, it could be their unique insecurity, But it's like if data start coming in, let's flip it. If a lot of really attractive people of the opposite sex start talking to you, whoever's listening to this, you perhaps start to wonder if something important is going on there. There's information there. I just would like you to reflect on this. I've been perplexed by it for a long time. In some sense, it makes total sense.

But as a scientist, I've learned, yeah, but. It's just like, what's really going on here?

I think the part of the story that's the most head-scratching is that they're in relationships. So shouldn't they be—

In the second case. Yeah, in the second case. Yeah.

So shouldn't they be getting the feedback that's positive on a regular basis anyway? Let's, for the sake of argument, just assume that she was. So she was getting positive feedback at home. And yet the experience of having less appealing men come up to her, led her to feel like, oh, I need to do something to reaffirm.

Well, I think it was a question. Am I losing it? Was that was kind of the language that came out. Am I losing it? Am I losing it? Whatever it was.

One of the reasons that scientifically I am out here like questioning the usefulness of the made value construct is because I know that people of quote unquote low value can have absolutely fantastic relationships. And people of, quote, unquote, high value can have absolutely terrible relationships. Oh, I would observe that many times. There you go. Yeah. So that happens all the time. I think one of the strongest, most resonant things that made value does for us, the way that we experience it most acutely is indeed in the attention we get from strangers and or the junior high type scenarios that we talked about. So that we do have a level of attractiveness and it changes as we age. There is a consensus out there about how desirable we are. And that consensus is not going to stay exactly where it is. It's going to shift. And you might be in a relationship and be very happy with the person who unambiguously thinks you're a 10 and yet still wonder, what does everybody else think? Like, do they think I'm a 7? Do they think I'm a 4? What has happened to me? So I totally get that that experience of how am I coming across to the world, is it less than I thought it was, and that the only great information that you have is how strangers respond to you. It's sort of a funny way of flipping all of this stuff around because, again, as a relationships researcher, my bias is always your husband thinks you're a 10. You think he's a 10. You won the lottery. Like, that's it. You did it. But I acknowledge, yeah, there can be cases where we still wonder about what strangers think of us and it might matter to our sense of self-worth and sense of who we are. So I'm not going to judge it, but it is a fascinating flip. of the way I typically think about these things.

It makes me wonder whether our notions of self, and this goes back to what we were talking about before the Esther Perel thing and the attractiveness that sort of boomerangs back into the relationship. Something that's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people to hear, but at some level, all of it makes me wonder whether there's a healthy compartmentalization that we could adopt as a society, which is not to say like anyone can be attracted to anyone and therefore commitment isn't real nor is it saying like okay when you're in a committed relationship it's it's a complete black box right right because there is this thing called the internet and there's this thing called the human psyche and you study it around these issues but maybe it's if people understood that those are two different things yeah sometimes we refer to it like as the shiny object but that that's a an aspect of self or it's an aspect of wanting that's not it's not not real it's real but that maybe there's a way to compartmentalize it so that it's has the potential to be toxic to relationship yeah but acknowledging that it's real that it's part of our wiring might diffuse some of its power like i said some of these couples that are like oh yeah like what's the phrase couples have where they're like oh you get a it's like a hall pass oh yeah which is never going to happen right she's like you know so and so you know my wife gets a hall i get a hall pass with because basically it's never going to happen yeah right so it's not really a hall pass it's a it's a it's a hall pass that uh exists in this alternate universe where um the other person could actually sleep with someone be careful with the hall notion because i don't know where that could lead i'm not suggesting they need to be like really not a protocol i suggest not a protocol i suggest. But it's kind of interesting because the parallel that comes to mind is, you know, if you're in Los Angeles long enough, you get to know some people who are actors. And from time to time, you'll run into somebody, male or female, who was a spectacular actor, had an amazing run on a comedy series or movies, and they're no longer working. And it is a bimodal distribution. People who are happy and content and focusing on their life. always wondered that was the younger more attractive working funny sexy whatever and this is men and women versus the like tortured i'm not getting work the work is not as good as it used to be i mean it's like and i've seen this with people who had a fame young for other reasons in sports and things like that and they are crushed and so what you want to say is like just realize that you have this awesome aspect of self that doesn't live in you right now anymore but it's still you like you got that yeah you know i think there's a similarity here like if people would just be like i've got everything i need and i'm good because yeah that other stuff exists and

i feel good about it not like i'm going to pretend it doesn't exist seems like that could be a very functional way to move through life for people who have this insecurity i totally agree and in fact

i'll even go a step further which is to say i try i don't always succeed but i try to think this way about relationships that have come and gone too because i think there's a real tendency i mean i was going to say in our culture but it might be a lot of cultures to see like past relationships that have ended and I'll even put divorces in this category to look back and say I failed and I think people reinforce this even unintentionally you know you you go through a breakup a dating breakup and people say I'm so sorry I know what that's like come over and have some ice cream you go through a divorce and people say well what happened because they're trying to make sure that it doesn't happen to them because they're interpreting it as a failure and boy I I think if we give each other a little bit of grace and see it all as, yeah, that was the thing that happened. It was real. It mattered in that moment. Things happened along the way. It didn't work out. I changed. You changed. Like being able to accept that like all of those things are real and have or had value. You know, I'd love to try to encourage people to do that. I know like there's so many people out there right now who are like, yeah, but my ex is a dick. And I'm with you. I totally get that. And to the extent that there's any ability to hold these two thoughts in mind simultaneously, I think it's good.

My girlfriend and I have a rule. We don't have many rules. One of the rules is we don't talk negatively about anyone else that we've ever been with. Yeah, this is good. We're very comfortable with the fact that we've had previous relationships because early on, we realized that like in the end, Like, that's all about our choices. So it's kind of a crazy argument. Right. What does it say about you? And she said something beautiful. She said, like, I'm grateful to all the good and bad things that you've had to experience, regardless of, you know. And I said the same to her because the relationship is great and we bring that. And I do think it was built on the trials and tribulations and great things, you know. Now, I'm careful to not ask too many questions. She's careful to not ask too many questions. We actually have selective ignorance around certain, we just like, I don't care. Like I genuinely don't go down certain lines of inquiry and she doesn't either. And I think it's great. I think it's great. I think it's, it sets up like, we're here now. This is time moving from now forward and where it goes, we determine that. But histories are real. And I have always admired, I have a few friends that paired up very early And they went through all these developmental milestones together, first jobs, some even graduate college as couples, kids, you know, all this stuff. And there's something really beautiful about people that you have a long developmental trajectory, big milestones that they reach together. Nowadays, people are pairing up later. They're getting divorced and remarrying. It's harder to build a common narrative. Right. Is there any data about common narrative, good or bad? Like we went through a lot. Yeah. Can be building as well. Is time together a factor? Like when you control for everything else, is duration of relationship an indicator of sort of quality and satisfaction of relationship?

So if we're looking strictly at relationship duration, honestly, on average, it tends to be a bad sign. In other words. Wait a second. Staying together is bad? No, it just means that, like, that over time people were the happiest early on in their relationship than they are today. Oh, no. Today, right? It's actually kind of a bummer. Can you just break up and get back together a bunch? Yeah, right. Okay. We don't study that. We should. Okay. That might have some problems. I'm not volunteering. Yeah. But let me say this. The narrative, right, the idea that we experienced a lot, that we grew, that we faced all these obstacles, that is huge. So literal time is not the best metric to capture, I think, the essence of what you're getting at. It's a sense that, like, we were in this together and that we had a shared story. This is also why breakups are so hard because not only are you often losing a source of support, perhaps for men, it might be more likely to be their only source of support. Not only do you have to face the possibility of getting back out there, but you're also losing the continuity with yourself. You're losing the stories and the narratives that you've built with this other person and all of those memories and all of those components.

Well, I think that's why it can feel like a failure because there's this understandable and I think very desirable wish that it's like a novel. It's going to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the end is death. Like, we're going to, till death do us part. That is written into the script, right? And so I think if it ends early, I think a lot of people don't know how to integrate it into their life story. The evolutionary biology part, which seems very real to me, is that all we have is time and energy. And when we invest, time is running. There's no do-over. Right. You know, there's no do-over. So I think that people carry a lot of resent about the time lost.

Yeah, and the energy and the investments that you put into it. But I think it's useful to think about those investments as being about, like, self and story. And that to the extent that you can use it as an opportunity to, like, whether it's, like, reinvent or recreate or, you know, you preserve some of the parts of yourself from the prior relationship. but maybe not all the prior parts of yourself. There are some things that you'd rather let go. To the extent that you can hold on to the good parts of the story, the parts that you want to remember, that you want to keep, it would be so painful when you're going through the breakup in the first place that I think a lot of times people just want to take all of it, put it in a box, and get rid of it. Definitely throw away the photos at some point. Yeah. Although now everything's in the cloud.

It's very, very challenging. Hypothalamus versus forebrain. does the good primitive stuff, meaning sexual attractiveness outweigh the ability to think about how great someone is? Ideally there's both, but the good lover beats stated preferences model. Yeah. It's something that you've talked about before. other words, is the real glue in a long-term relationship some form of physical intimacy that, or put differently, can we think and talk our way, perhaps to ourselves, forward through a relationship that doesn't have that physical intimacy?

Usually you will see that things like sexual satisfaction or sexual desire for your partner are going to be pretty tightly related to how you feel about the relationship in general. It's an important component. I wouldn't say it's an essential component or even the central component for many people. But for other people, it certainly can be. And again, I do believe in the Church of Esther Perel, Which is that there are ways of recultivating sexual feelings about somebody that actually are sexual feelings about somebody. It's not like a switch where it's just on or it's off. And we know just when we look at them that sometimes it's about the things we're talking about, the time we spend together or the time that we spend apart and that that can be rekindling in various ways. So I think the key thing for me is not to engage in fatalism about the sexual desire component. That when the passion fades in a relationship, that doesn't mean that it's gone forever. It might not be something that you feel like every day at 7 p.m. anymore. It might be the kind of thing that comes to the fore in certain circumstances. or when you're not totally exhausted, I think that's okay. And a lot of relationships can absolutely thrive under those circumstances. And you can push it to extremes too, where it's like, my partner hasn't been sexually attracted to me in, you know, years and years. Like, that's going to be tough. And part of the reason that's tough is because you don't have the sexual intimacy. But also part of the reason that's tough is because it's making me feel terrible about myself. So these things all like cascade in various negative ways, but I think they can also be helped in ways too that engage some of these more – the parts of our brains that at least we're more aware of and have some agency over.

so is it true that sexual attractiveness that rating the person's uh a person rating their partner as a quote-unquote good lover is among the strongest predictors yeah of how positively they feel about the partner exactly okay because that's yeah i i really appreciate your answer but i i want to make sure that if that's true that comes it comes through because what i'm hearing is yes it can those feelings can uh wax and wane and yes life circumstances and raising kids and job and stress it yes yes and yes i think uh everyone including me acknowledges that but this idea that it's not important after a certain stage or that a really healthy romantic relationship can exist without that what i'm hearing is the data point in the other direction no that is absolutely

correct the subjective sense that and that's exactly the wording that we use the subjective sense that like this person that I am with or this person that in that study, we have people who are in relationships, but we also have people who are reporting on like just folks that they're initially attracted to. But in both, it actually doesn't really matter. In both cases, feeling like this person is a good lover or likely to be a good lover in the case of the attraction scenarios is a very, very good sign for how positively you feel about the relationship in general and whether you want the relationship to continue. But again, it's that it's that subjective sense. And that's that's kind of where I'm getting to this component of like, if if I start to feel like you're not a great lover, like that's going to rebound so that then you don't feel desirable and it's going to sort of cascade in all of these

negative ways. All seems to converge on. It's an important feature of romantic relationships to cultivate, protect from, you know, and you described some, to me, surprising, you know, I think for some reason it makes total sense. And yet it's surprising that this kind of energy from the outside can provide positive support to the relationship. But Esther said it, Esther, excuse me, has said it and others have said it. So very interesting. Final question. Sounds like a game show. Okay. Final question. Your course on this topic and related topics is incredibly popular for obvious reasons. It's a super interesting topic. I mean, at the end of the day, like our species evolved through these dynamics. You know, it wasn't all like, you know, club the lion, you know, gather food, make babies. There was a lot.

of dynamics i always chuckle when people say like you know stress is a holdover from when we were being hunted by saber-toothed no that's complete like nonsense it was also there for when your spouse went hunting for the day yeah or gathering and you didn't know if they were going to come back or they came back after sundown when normally they're there at sundown it's for when your baby was sick like this notion that like stress was only about predation it's just so stupid i'd like to have words with whoever came up with that. It's so dumb. It's not true. What are the questions that students are asking most often nowadays? Because I realized that as a 50-year-old male, I suffer from a number of different delusions about relationships as it is for people in their 20s, 30s now. And maybe for everybody, because we're all in our own experience. But I think Even though the college classroom is not a perfect sample by any stretch, presumably there are a lot of different people in there. Yeah. Men, women, right? Some are, most are probably straight. Some are gay on average 2%. Like you're going to get a lot of questions. What are the big questions that people seem to want answered that you're just hearing over and over again that are both in the direction of like, this is a challenge, but also like what's going right out there?

Is anything going right? I think most of the questions are about – like, there is often an assumption that, like, yeah, but these days it's so screwed up.

That's what they're saying.

Yeah. Like, I mean, you just have this undercurrent. It's almost like – and I worry about this sometimes – that when I teach the science on these topics, there's a general sense of, okay, but this is science from the before times. Like today, when the apps have controlled everything and, like, nobody goes out anymore, like, what are we supposed to do? And sometimes I fall back on the, well, look, like, these groups and things, like we were talking about, these clubs, they're still out there. You can still get out there and meet people. Activities. Yeah, activities. Like, through these avenues, they tend to work pretty well. And at the same time, I have to acknowledge that the generations are going to change and these folks experiences will be different than the experiences that my generation had. So I think in many ways, this ends up being the challenge to like to convey the science to folks, but also do it in a way that shows that you're being responsive and aware of the fact that any generation feels like, but things have changed now. And sometimes it takes a while to know, like, what has really changed? I do think that these students go out less often. I think they drink less often. I think they aren't spending time socializing in the same way, and they're interfacing more with technology. That's probably helping some people, and it's probably really making it hard for some other people. And so, you know, I try to like live the example of, hey, like I spent time hanging out with people in groups and it was hard and I got rejected and, you know, my high school girlfriend dumped me, but I ended up doing okay. And I hope that other people can like resonate with that message in my classes.

Love it. And I'm also hearing, perhaps don't just sign up for something, but be the person who organizes it. Yeah. Yeah.

I love this.

I love this. Yeah. You can throw a picnic or a party. And when I was a graduate student at Davis, I often didn't make it because I was in lab. But every Friday, there was a pickup beach volleyball game. Oh, that's fantastic. And then people would go to, there was a Thai restaurant that was also a bar. That night sometimes ended the next morning. Yeah. There was a tattoo shop right across the street that closed called American Graffiti. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Some people got tattoos. Yeah. Okay. do not recommend and definitely don't get tattooed drunk probably don't even get yeah do what you want but um but but it was every friday yeah and there was only one rule which is that you had to at least attempt to do the kind of like bump set approach to beach volleyball you couldn't just hit it across the net and it didn't matter how bad you were you know you had to do the three part yeah it's really hard Thai food some people would have drinks if they drank some we would have a lot of drinks they definitely drank it's just a really cool thing anyone could come yeah things like that happened a lot and it took like zero planning it was an email that basically just went out and no one person was in charge it was just kind of in the collective yeah they did uh like cooking competition things where you'd meet at someone's house and everyone would have to bring like a particular dish and then everyone would try them and that. i had no time in graduate school i was working all the time i would make time for these things occasionally and they were a lot of fun yeah these things are super easy to do yeah you don't have to have any real athletic ability or cooking ability trust me um it i just feel like there's so much opportunity for that but the barrier must be really there for people if they're not doing

these things because i think it was just reflexive technology has a pull um and we can say it's the phones. But we could also say that it's whatever is on your TV. I mean, there's lots of reasons these days for people to stay in that just weren't there 20 to 30 years ago. I'd hope that the message would resonate like, you know, gang, like these, whether it's the entertainment companies or the apps, they're trying to keep you away from real socialization. Young people, don't you like rebelling and stuff rebel against this you know exactly like form these groups go out and meet people again in person I think it's coming back I really do I think the pandemic I think it's like it was like a long pandemic hangover where we we just kind of forgot this part of our social architecture but but it's coming back it didn't go anywhere we're still social creatures and we also have these great frontal lobes and even if you don't feel like going out and interacting with people, you can kind of nudge yourself to do it. And I think that's pretty fantastic.

Thank you so much for the work you do. It's very brave. It's very brave because it runs right up against some longstanding theories of which I still think very highly of a good fraction of the evolutionary biology and psychology literature. I now have to filter it through these new findings, but you've created your own new field basically, which is of course why your book, which we'll provide a link to, and your work is so popular. And I love the optimism that it shines into every interaction. I'm sure people picked up on that, that you're not a doom and gloom guy. You're a solutions guy. Really appreciate your time here. Many people will thank you both those in relationship you learn some things to you know armor your relationship understand your relationship better yourself and uh and for those who are who are seeking partners or who are just observing the world around them and are content where they're at um they're going to benefit so thank you so much really appreciate you thank you so much for having me thank you for joining me for today's discussion with dr paul eastwick to learn more about his work and to find a link to his book, Bonded by Evolution, The New Science of Love and Connection, please see the links in the show note caption. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. that's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep, to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am HubermanLab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries,

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