You can also find this episode on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. It’s also available on YouTube.

I loved Paul Eastwick’s book, Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection. And I had so much fun talking to him about so many things. Paul is a professor of psychology at UC Davis, where he’s the head of the Social-Personality Psychology program and the director of the Attraction and Relationships Research Laboratory.

A lot of his work reveals these enduring myths that are engrained in our culture and our minds about attraction, compatibility, gender differences, and relationships. These are largely myths that have been somewhat mistakenly connected to evolutionary psychology.

The way Paul debunks these myths is so helpful, and also very entertaining, I think, whether you are single, dating, or in a relationship. Paul has some great hot takes on the apps… the significance—or not—of first impressions… what actually makes two people compatible… how same-sex friends work… infidelity risk factors… and much more.

MORE FROM PAUL EASTWICK:

His Book: Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection

His Podcast: “Love Factually”

His Website

Follow Paul on Instagram

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

Well, I feel like I could have a whole conversation with you just on the introduction, but I know people want to hear about compatibility and it’s ephemeral nature and some hot dating tips from you.

PAUL:

I’m

ELISE:

Sure we will get to that.

PAUL:

Yep. I’m delighted. I’m out here to help and I hope it’s helpful. I’m getting good feedback, but you never really know.

ELISE:

Yeah, no I thought it was fascinating and it hit a lot of my favorite topics. I mean, I’ve been married for a minute as I think you have been married for a minute too and mid-book I looked up, my husband loves these types of questions, but I was like, “Why do you think we’re compatible?” Nice. Okay,

PAUL:

What’d he say?

ELISE:

He said, “What?” And I said, “It’s not a trick question. I’m really trying to understand it too. Why are we so compatible?” And he had to think about it and I don’t know that we landed the plane, but that’s sort of the point, right? It’s just very hard to pin down. It really is. We’re so convinced we have algorithms to determine it.

PAUL:

Yeah. And if you had come up with a coherent explanation, the two of you together about why you’re so compatible, I and I think many others would have believed it in the sense that we’re pretty good at constructing narratives and stories and rituals and telling ourselves this is why we work, and that those stories and narratives have real meaning and power for us.

The question is, what do you do if you’re trying to predict whether that thing will emerge, especially if what you’ve got in front of you are a bunch of people who’ve never met each other. That is the much harder lift that I think if the dating apps are telling you they figured that out, I’m doubtful.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and I’m not going to turn into this an exposition of my early dating life in New York City in the early 2000s, but to the moral of your story, there were the qualities that I thought I needed and there were certainly people who thought that I was their cup of tea too on paper and I went out with every trustafarian, every corporate lawyer, every hedge fund manager in Manhattan and I was that weird, quirky Conde Nast editor that everyone thought they wanted to shock their grandma with and flog. But I went to St. Paul’s in Yale, but I’m from Montana and I’m kind of weird, Paul. And then the truth is that my husband, and we can talk about mate value and attraction because that’s fascinating. He’s very cute, which was not on my list.

PAUL:

Interesting.

ELISE:

And if anything, I was an anti-lookist and he was at the time an interior designer. I mean, nothing about it made any sense to anyone. I am a massive reader. He is a massive design book peruser. I pretended to like hockey, but it just works. So anyway,

PAUL:

There we

ELISE:

Are. What you say you like and what you like are very different.

PAUL:

Yes. And they align more so when you’re perusing the apps. When you’re looking at effect simile of a person, it’s much easier to swipe right on the folks that look like this template that you have in your head. But when we meet people face to face, many of these ideas about what we’re looking for go out the window and what we end up doing is right, that we bond over some things and then in other domains you pretend to like hockey and it all kind of works.

ELISE:

Yeah. And another fascinating part of your book, I can’t remember the exact statistic and maybe it was 80%, is that most people end up together after a series of encounters. That was my story too. The first time I met my husband through a mutual friend, I was like, “This guy’s a player. He looks like a serial killer, no thank you. “ His boring. And it wasn’t-

PAUL:

Bec’s attractive. He

ELISE:

Looks like a

PAUL:

Serial kid.

ELISE:

So early 2000s. I love this. Yeah. And I was like, no way. He is on the prowl. And anyway, and then we ran into each other after meeting each other four, five times on Valentine’s Day and started talking and we’re like, “Oh, I like you. “ So anyway, to your point, it’s hard to nail it on a first date and most of us don’t.

PAUL:

It really is. And this is something that I’m finding a lot in talking to people is that we are really locked in to this idea that the way that you get a romantic partner is you impress them at moment one. You impress them on the first date. And look, I mean, this idea has obviously been around for a very long time, but I think the apps have accentuated it because, okay, I’ve swiped right on you, you swiped right on me, we’re going to meet for coffee. So I get 20 minutes to blow you away essentially and try to earn that second date. Historically, that is not what people have had to do to find romantic partners. There were many opportunities for people to grow on each other gradually. It makes me very sad and very distressed if we start to forget this because I think for a lot of people, it’s hard to be impressive in 20 minutes, but there are lots of opportunities that’ll emerge if you’re around people and you get to grow on them over time.

ELISE:

Of course. And intuitively it makes so much sense as you outline the person at first encounter where you’re like, “That person’s so attractive,” you might think they’re disgusting on the third time you see them versus the person that you’re trying to push on your friend because you’re like, “This person is so compelling.” And they’re like, “They’re not cute.” And you’re like, “No, they’re so compelling. Trust me. “ But this idea of mate value, which has really taken young people in part in particular, I want to talk a lot about culture and what’s happened to evolutionary psychology and this anxiety that we have or this deep misunderstanding of these box checks having so much weight and who ends up in relationships or happy relationships. Can you talk a bit about that?

PAUL:

Yeah. So this is an idea that’s been part of the science for as long as I’ve been researching these topics and it’s the idea that look, some people have the traits or the attributes that make them especially desirable as romantic partners and other people aren’t so fortunate to have those same traits. And so you can imagine like a distribution of valuableness as a romantic partner or as a sexual partner. And so in the science we call it mate value, but this idea has gotten picked up in the popular culture too and there’s no shortage of people talking about these ideas on the internet. It is certainly true that in first impression contexts, people really zero in on the traits that make some people more desirable than others. I mean, a physical attractiveness as coded and rated by a bunch of people who don’t know you, that those ratings of physical attractiveness will certainly predict things like how likely it is that people are going to want to go on a second date with you if they meet you at a speed dating event, for example.

But I think the thing that we overestimate is the power of those traits, especially as people are getting to know each other over time. And like you’ve implied, what you commonly see is that when groups are getting to know each other, the initial power of those traits, it tends to fade. It doesn’t go away completely, but it means that like if you come in and you’re super hot and the room turns towards you when people are first meeting you, well, it doesn’t happen the fifth time you enter the room or the 10th time you enter the room. Again, on average What that also means is that maybe somebody who doesn’t turn heads in quite the same way, well, they’ll start appealing to some folks as they get to know each other over time. And historically, especially if we go back tens of thousands of years or millions of years, these were the contexts where people tended to form relationships, people you would’ve gotten to know over extended periods of time, the small groups we lived in the ancestral environment, it really bore very little resemblance to the modern day marketplace with all these strangers interacting.

So I think the modern context filled with strangers is kind of warped our ideas about what we think relationship initiation is supposed to look like.

ELISE:

Yeah. And it’s taken on sort of force by other quote unquote social scientists or psychologists. You write a fair amount about Jordan Peterson, for example, or these pillars in the manosphere who talk about the dominance of a certain segment of men. And

PAUL:

That’s

ELISE:

The reason that nobody is having sex is because these men are having all the sex,

PAUL:

Which

ELISE:

Just doesn’t actually bear out

PAUL:

In the

ELISE:

Science.

PAUL:

Not at all. It’s not remotely close to true. And if there’s a problem, it’s probably because people aren’t socializing the way that they used to. That is a problem. It worries me that folks aren’t getting out there just hanging out with friends, seeing where the night takes them in the way that we used to. But this isn’t some secret cabal of super dominant men with all the value hoarding all the sex. It doesn’t happen like that and it certainly doesn’t happen like that in groups where people get to know each other over time. It’s not a perfectly level playing field, but it’s far more level than if we’re talking about strangers and certainly if we’re talking about whatever is happening online with swiping.

ELISE:

Yeah. So can you talk a bit about the implications of that as you see it when you’re talking about how evolutionary psychology has been maligned and weaponized and misunderstood. And I know this is a huge conversation about essentialism and determinism, but this idea that women, which goes to the tradwife themes and the red pills and this raification of gender that’s happening where it suggests that biologically and essentially and deterministically big, valiant, protective, wage-earning men who are also strapped are the ideal versus the submissive probably blonde bread baking, lactating, butter churning, but it’s really intense right now and it’s ridiculous, but it has roots in this, right? This idea of evolutionary psychology that’s been taken off the rails

PAUL:

And off the rails is a good description of the thing because if you look at the history of work in evolutionary psychology, there is precision about where the gender differences should and shouldn’t be. I think they missed a bunch of things because in the early days of evolutionary psychology, they tended to focus a lot on things like what people say they want in a partner. There were troves of studies going back, I mean, nearly a century that just asked people, “Oh, how much do you care about this quality in a partner? How much do you care about that quality in a partner?” And you see all sorts of gender differences. When you do that, you see that men say they care about attractiveness more than women do. Women say they care about ambition and earning potential more than men do. I’m sure if butter churning was an example, then the men would say like, “I really, really want to…can they churn butter? Turn that butter.” Anyway, you see lots of gender differences when you ask questions like these. But what we started doing in the oughts, speed dating was getting big and we thought, well, this is an interesting way of capturing people’s initial impressions. I mean, I sort of sit here and malign first impressions, but the reality is 20 years ago we weren’t even studying that all that well. So we wanted to see what makes people initially appealing, what makes a first impression go well versus go badly. And we would look at things like attractiveness, like ambition. And what we saw was that, yeah, these folks would come in telling us the women would say we care about ambition in a partner more than men. But when you look at what actually appealed to folks on these dates, the ambitious women were desired. They were desired a little bit more than the women without ambition, but there was no gender difference in the power of ambition to shape attraction.

And that was really our first clue that we’re seeing a lot of gender differences over here when we ask people their ideas about what they want, but not when we look at what actually appeals to them. And now what has happened since is that a lot of those older ideas where we saw the gender differences and what people say they’re looking for, those are the things that the manosphere picked up and ran with. But I’m just trying to remind people, hey, we’ve also studied what actually attracts people to each other and you see far fewer gender differences in that space.

ELISE:

Yeah. You write about how women who claim to deprioritize attractiveness are actually attracted to attractiveness and men who theoretically deprioritize ambition and wage earning in women are just as attracted to ambitious wage earning women and that these are small, that it just doesn’t track, which I find fascinating. I mean, there’s tons of science about what we say we want and then what we actually-

PAUL:

Right. And there’s behavioral economic studies too and there’s many different ways of breaking these ideas down. One of the components I find the most fascinating has to do with the supposed marriage trade off. And again, this is one of these ideas when sociologists were studying this in like the 1960s, they weren’t even looking at how hot the guys were. They weren’t even looking at how much money the women earned. They didn’t even bother to assess it. All they saw was that hotter women tend to pair up with richer men and they said, “Look, we found this like deep, essential, real gender difference.” And the modern sociologists came in and they said, “Wait a minute, we got to assess all the variables about everybody. And we got to account for the fact that rich people tend to meet each other and marry each other more often.” And when you do all that, there’s no gender difference in the trade off.

Yes, sometimes attractive women marry rich men and sometimes attractive guys marry rich women and Jane Austin knew this and that’s all I have to say about that.

ELISE:

No, 100%. I mean, the reality is very different than the idea, which is fed to us, which then you talk about it becomes this, it’s a whole nother conversation when we think about who we were ancestrally and who we are now and I write a lot about the way that we’re socialized to perform our gender, perform our goodness as women, perform our power as men and how insidious that is or how it’s so it’s does culture drive biology, does biology drive culture and it’s a stew, but you write essentially about how the primary thing, the truth that emerges out of so much of the studies is that people just really like effort, right? They’re choosing a partner who is going to exert themselves on behalf of the family unit.

PAUL:

Yeah. I want to be with somebody who’s going to be present and is going to be contributing and not just to me and our immediate family, but also to the group in general. I mean, there is a certain importance to group cohesion being a valuable contributor that would have been especially important as we were evolving in these small groups. I think it’s maybe a little easier from a modern lens to understand how that might apply to men, but that’s going to apply to women too. You can’t be like pissing off everybody else in the group with your antics that’s going to end up getting you stranded somewhere and that was the number one way to bite the dust if we were living 100,000, 500,000 years ago. So we got to be good contributors and we got to show that we care for the people around us.

The bonds that we form with our close others, this I think is the core to an evolutionary understanding of human relationships that we form these bonds and sometimes they’re kind of arbitrary who we end up bonding with, but they end up being absolutely central to our health, to our wellbeing and to the sense that we’re capable in the world.

ELISE:

Yeah. And you write about it as these, I mean a secure base like the Ainsworth Boldby and M. Scott Peck writes about it in the context of couples back in the 80s, you need someone who’s manning the base camp with you, right? Yeah, exactly. And you can’t just be out climbing the whole time. You take turns and you provision each other with time, energy, resources so that you can each aspire to the peak of whatever it is that you’re after. So it was a secure pace in the safe haven. Is that

PAUL:

How you- Yeah, safe haven. Yeah. And the way I think about it, sort of like a circle, I’m making motions with my hands here, which is not helpful in an audio format, but the safe haven is when you need to go in for some protection, some reassurance to recover and the secure base is when you’re going out again into the world trying something new, trying something ambitious, trying something risky. And the point is that an attachment figure, somebody that you’re bonded to can serve in both of those roles. They are there when you’re hurting, but they’re also there to celebrate you and encourage you when you’re ready to strike out again and that this sort of circle of security is especially important. It’s what parents often do for kids and that’s why relationships researchers in the 80s started applying the Bolby Ainsworth ideas to adult romantic relationships because we started seeing the same processes.

Oh, wait a minute. We just kind of do that thing that our parents did for us where we all start doing it for each other as we get older. That’s what friendships are and that’s very commonly what romantic relationships are too.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, it makes so much sense. And you’re not parenting your partner, but you are ... It’s a different version, right?

PAUL:

Yeah. It’s hopefully not the patronizing version of the thing.

ELISE:

It’s not the popsicle and bandaid version.

PAUL:

Right, right. But it’s okay if it feels like that for every now and again, it’s okay to feel like, “Hey, this person’s got me.” Not like I need them and I’d be totally helpless without them, although breakups are hard because it often feels like that. I think that we can know at one level with our 21st century intellect and all the things we’re exposed to like I’ll be okay without this person. I’m a fully competent being in the world and yet that sense of, I really need and value this person, I appreciate them and I want to do things so that they will appreciate me. I think this is all very good and very healthy.

ELISE:

And so when you get to this, when you’re diagnosing modern relationships, when you’re teaching this to your students, and essentially it’s like mate value

Seems to matter on a swipe and we can talk maybe in a bit more about online dating because I know that’s the reality for so many people and it’s not very effective, but the dial on that goes way down, precipitously down, right? And you get into things like compatibility and the ephemeral nature of why people click. Can we talk and was there a third mixture?

PAUL:

Well, yeah, so if you think about the things that go into the attraction cocktails, how do I talk about it? I mean, it’s a funny thing. And again, now this is how research psychologists talk, but when we talk about attraction, it’s not one thing, it’s actually three things. Three separate things go into that mix. One is, are you a selective or an unselective person? Some people experience attraction for everybody, right? They’re willing to date everybody. It’s not great, but you know what? That’s some people. Popularity is a second component, which is akin to nate value, right? The idea that we all agree, this person has all the hot traits. Okay.

Then the third component is compatibility. And what we generally see is that when people are first meeting the amount of that attraction judgment that is due to the target’s popularity, it’s there. It’s pretty substantial and it’s about as powerful as the compatibility component. I think even that surprises people that made value’s there, but you also get a sense in just a few minutes of, “Ooh, are we clicking here or we’re not really clicking here.”That’s also very much there. But the important thing is that Second impression, third impression, you start spending time with people that made value component that makes up attraction, it starts declining in importance. And what replaces it is the compatibility component. So I have unique experiences with you that are hopefully uniquely good that leads me to feel more positively about you than the other people do in the room. In part, it’s because I’m getting to see a side of you that nobody else gets to see.

In part, it’s because we’re having experiences that other people aren’t having with you. In other ways, it’s the weird ephemeral stuff that’s like, I really like the way that this person laughs or this person tells jokes. Other people don’t seem to get it. I’m sorry for them. But I think there’s something particularly special about this person. Time gives us more of those opportunities and yeah, there’s really no way around it other than finding groups where you can continually interact with people.

ELISE:

Yeah. I mean, that’s ultimately the main piece of advice, right? Including in the apps, which is you’re overestimating the qualities that you think you want or need. So widen the aperture and then narrow the actual encounter, limit the actual encounters. Am I getting that right?

PAUL:

Yeah, I think so. It would be like, in the way you described up top, rather than dating the finance bros over and over and over again, let’s mix it up with a few artists. Let’s broaden the aperture in that sense. And then, and this is the tricky part if you’re using the apps, because I understand time is limited and also you don’t want to leave people on. I get all of this. But if I could control how people date, I would say rather than going on a 20 minute date with five different people, I would rather you dated that person five times. Maybe more realistically give everybody three chances. I think that might be optimal because after three impressions of somebody, again, it doesn’t have to be three evening length dates, but after three impressions, our opinions start to stabilize a bit. And so that would be a reasonable time to bail if you’re not feeling it by that point.

But I would love to see people move in that direction where they’re giving folks a little, if they’re using the apps, give an individual person a little bit more of a chance and try to sample from a wider pool rather than just selecting the finance bros over and over again.

ELISE:

And then I guess the biggest takeaway is try to socialize with people face to face as much as possible and friends of friends, because that’s still a majority, that’s the on path, right?

PAUL:

I think so. People you meet

ELISE:

Through friends.

PAUL:

Yeah. It’s still a common way. I know we’ve all seen the graph of online dating going up and up and up and meeting through friends coming down. This is true. I always feel compelled to point out a couple things about this. One is that meeting through friends is still a thing that people commonly do. Another important point is that you can actually meet people online and then still get to know them as friends for a little while before you start dating. These things aren’t totally mutually exclusive.

And I think that actually helps to explain why the majority of cases today when people form a relationship, they will say, “I was friends with that person before we started dating.” Sometimes what that means is that we met online or we met through a friend who connected us online or something like that. Maybe we met through some social media app or something like that and we got to know each other a bit and the feelings emerged gradually. It is not the most common experience to meet somebody and from moment one be absolutely head over heels for that person. It happens. It can be great, but I wouldn’t hang around waiting for that to happen. It is much, much more common that people develop feelings for each other gradually, but you got to put yourself in situations where that’s going to happen, where you’re going to get a chance to repeatedly interact with folks who can’t bail after a lackluster impression.

ELISE:

Yeah. I remember I took inspiration from, this is again a while ago, but a friend of mine who’s slightly older and I feel like maybe the stigma has subsided where you’re not a Spencer at 28 the way that you felt like you were

PAUL:

20

ELISE:

Years ago.

PAUL:

28. Oh my gosh.

ELISE:

I don’t know. I felt a lot of pressure. Well, and I think that a lot of people, I felt this way where it was hard and I think I’m a pretty selective person. I’m pretty happy being by myself. So I also throughout my dating life was like, I don’t really care. I mean, I care and I don’t really care. I’m not going to ride this thing that is unhappy because I’m so desperate to be partnered. I’m comfortable by myself. But you start feeling like everyone’s having these side conversations. “What do you think is wrong with her? What is she doing? “Which I don’t know, maybe that’s just an internal experience that we all have, but this older friend of mine had gotten to that point before me and she, I thought that was brilliant, that made a promise to herself or made a vow. This is before Shonda Rhimes’ year of yes where she decided she had to say yes to every single invitation to dinner parties, someone’s work event, whatever.

I think she gave herself three months where she was like, “ I’m bound to this and met her husband at something. I don’t think it wasn’t a setup, but it was that mixing it up. I met my husband through a friend that, and I know some people who are listening who are single are probably like, “Yeah, thanks Captain Obvious.” And there maybe just aren’t as many social engagements now. I think that’s true, right? People just

PAUL:

Aren’t

ELISE:

Going out.

PAUL:

Yes. The dramatic thing, and this has been a consistent trend and Putnam wrote about this decades ago, that we aren’t socializing getting out of the house to the same extent. And I think that the appeal of the internet and the draw of all of the various digital things we could be doing, they’re all contributing in small ways. So it’s the phones, but it’s not just the phones. It’s kind of everything. And it means that there’s a higher bar for going out and socializing, especially if it’s a bunch of random people and like, “Oh, who’s going to be there?” And it’s just a little bit harder to motivate yourself to go out and do those things. And the issue is that’s oftentimes when the magic happens. So I think this is the biggest shift that we’ve seen in recent years. I suspect that COVID didn’t help because it got us very used to spending time on our own.

And also as people age, as people get older, it can be harder to find those mixed groups of folks where there’s a few friends but a few acquaintances. Those things don’t happen as naturally as people couple up and they have kids, then they started hanging out with the parents of their kids’ friends and it’s a little bit less conducive. So it’s hard to plan out and create those social opportunities and you kind of have to have some intentionality about it.

ELISE:

These are these two small moments in your book, but I thought that they were, one, I think is a fantastic product idea for Bumble or an e-harmony. And the other, I was like, this needs to be a social concept, and maybe I think it does exist, but one, you meet someone, you go on a date and you’re like, “I’m going to bring you to this date swap,” where people bring their failed, “We don’t know, we don’t have it, but you seem great.” And they set people up. So one, that needs to happen at scale and two, when you think about the context in which you encounter, and particularly friends of friends, right, particularly for women and you write about this a lot in the context of not wanting to have casual sex with strangers, duh, both for like the social stigma and the personal safety concerns.

To be clear, it’s nothing to do with sexual appetite, but this idea that when you meet someone through friends, there’s a built-in referral network and you’re getting context clues about this person. They’re safe, they’re a good friend, they’re funny, you get all these reference checks. Why isn’t that part of online dating? Why aren’t people getting friends to create reference check videos?

PAUL:

Yeah. I think. Does someone do this? No, with the second one, I think there was a push and the apps fought back and won essentially. I think they really didn’t want the legal liability for this, but I agree there’s got to be a niche for this, people who want this, this sort of referral process. But on the first point, on the wingman point, like how about an app for wing men? I mean, for heterosexuals, what you do is you set them up with mixed gender wingmen. I mean, that just sounds fun. I mean, that just sounds like that would be a good time and then it’s like you get to know each other, but what success on the app means is look at these five people I’ve set up. I’m the wingman you want, but this is just a great way to get people meeting and interacting and spending time together and the romantic component, it’s sort of pushed to the side a little bit.

It’s not quite as focal. I don’t know. I

ELISE:

Think that’s a great idea. I don’t know how much money you’re making as a professor, but maybe you and Eli think will need to create a wingman, date my friend app.

PAUL:

Love it. If anybody wants to create it, reach out. Happy to help.

ELISE:

Well, let’s talk about this idea of same sex friends. And you talked a lot about how hetero people have a lot to learn from the LGBTQIA+ community in terms of being able to maintain friendships, not blow up friend groups and obviously be great friends, intimate friends with people who they don’t want to have sex with. So spoken as someone who’s always had, my best friends have always been men, boys and men since I was a child and I am so grateful for all those friendships. And no, I don’t think that we wanted to hook up, but this is another part of this, you call it the evo script that gets into this mate value, which is that that doesn’t exist and men want to have sex with everyone and there’s always latent sexual desire driving relationships.

PAUL:

Yeah, right. So there’s not always latent sexual desire. It’s very possible for heterosexual men and women to be friends and to derive all the things from friendships, if not more things from friendships than what we get out of same gender friendships. What we see in the data, especially if you look at heterosexual men is that if you’re trying to get a beat on whether this guy is misogynistic or not, you can look at his network of friends. If he has more women friends in his network, he’s les likely to endorse sexist beliefs. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s just less likely on average. And what we also see again for heterosexuals is that the more that they have those mixed gender networks, the more likely it is that in the subsequent months, nine months in the future, that they will end up in a romantic relationship.

And importantly, it’s not because you end up dating those friends necessarily, you might, but it’s this network thing of, yeah, but they’re going to introduce you to friends and then friends of friends, and that’s where you hit it off with somebody. So the networks are the things that do the work, but having the mixed gender networks, those seem to be particularly powerful. And I think it’s probably happening because of that light referral process that you’re recommending. Not that your mixed gender friends are going to account for you up and down in all ways, but it’s like a little bit more of a safety cue, which means other folks are a little bit more likely to want to chat with you, get to know you, and invite you to whatever the next event is.

ELISE:

Yeah. I also always found that I got valuable advice from my guy friends. I mean, they would see my stuff and be like, “What are you doing?” Or I could take things to them and they’d be like, “That guy sucks. No, emphatically move on. I will take away your phone.” So I felt like they were brotherly protectors and able to say the truth to me in ways that sometimes my girlfriends would be like, “Well, yeah.”

PAUL:

Yeah, a little bit better with the hard truths. I totally get that too. And my women friends throughout college and in the post-college years, they were just good at assessing like, “She’s not into you. She’s not into you.”

ELISE:

That too.

PAUL:

If she were into you, she would’ve done this and would’ve done this. She’s not doing that. But have you noticed what’s going on over here? Have you looked 90 degrees to the right and what’s happening over there? Let’s go in that direction.

ELISE:

Yeah. My dad would give me those hard truths too. Trust me, when I was into someone, that person knew I was into them. I did not forget to call them. That doesn’t happen when someone likes you. The other thing around the idea of, and I feel like maybe the temperature has come down on this a little bit, the male and female friends thing. But when you think about it as having an endurable couplehood in life and wanting, of course I want all my friends to love spending time with my husband and that there’s this not necessarily this ... And I think it goes to this mate value, the way this is overplayed that because on paper your spouse might be check all these boxes, that that invariably means people are going to come for him and that’s a myth. I mean, obviously it happens, but not that often.

PAUL:

That’s right. I think we have over indexed on ... Okay, what are the risk factors for infidelity? Infidelity happens. It can be devastating for folks, but what are the things that are more likely to produce it? And I think we’ve over indexed on, well, if your partner’s super hot, then they’re going to be a flight risk, especially if you are not, if you don’t have all the traits. Okay, that’s a complete myth. Mate value matching the extent to which you and your partner’s desirable traits are similar has really no predictive value at all about whether your relationship’s going to last or how happy you are or whether your partner’s likely to cheat on you or any of that. Okay. What is more likely is how are things going in your relationship? That’s certainly a risk factor whether you’re repeatedly around other potential desirable partners and I would add probably interacting with those folks on repeat occasions.

I mean, this is why when people are in large gender diverse workplaces, that’s the context where infidelity is most likely to happen because well, you’re getting to meet those folks over time and maybe two people are especially likely to hit it off. So there are risk factors, but the risk factors are these relational things. It is much less likely to be found in something that’s trait-like. I always feel compelled to point out as well, it’s handy that in a relationship where two people are very committed and very happy together, they do this thing called derogation of alternatives, which means simply that they see the potential competing partners as less desirable than they actually are. So you might be an eight and there’s a guy that’s hitting on you and he’s also an eight, but the thing is you think he’s a six and you think your partner’s a 10.

So that guy who’s competing for your attention, he’s got quite a hill to climb there to successfully lure you away from your current relationship.

ELISE:

Right. No, that makes total sense.

You write about how if you’re in a, let’s say you’re in a relationship or you have a secure pace and a safe haven and you have an ongoing collaborative bond that you’re also telegraphing to people, I am not open for business.

PAUL:

Right, right. Exactly. And that the risk factor is that we are creatures who can form bonds with multiple people. So I think a lot of times the way infidelity happens is you start also bonding with somebody else and that’s like for people who wish to maintain a monogamous relationship, you should be careful of that. That’s the thing that can be risky. Well,

ELISE:

It’s so interesting because we think that within the conversation around infidelity and obviously there’s the physical transgression, which I think from so many of us is an airport encounter or whatever it is. But as you say, it’s more often that you fall in love with Marcia or Steve after 18 board meetings or 25 encounters at the…

PAUL:

Right now there’s a board somewhere that has a Marsha and a Steve on it and everybody’s looking around at each other being like, “Wait a minute, is she talking about us?”

ELISE:

What’s going on? And then that being theoretically a greater threat. But it also, it speaks to this idea of emotional cheating, right? Which I think for many feels more egregious.

PAUL:

Yeah. I mean, it can be more upsetting for people. Generally speaking, if you ask men and women in the abstract, which form of cheating bothers you more? Is it the emotional or the sexual men are like fifty fifty and women are like 80 / 20, the emotional is worse. But if you’re asking people about the actual infidelity experiences that they’ve had, that is they’ve had a partner who’s committed some form of infidelity, the emotional part is usually the one that people are the most upset about. That’s the one that they perseverate on. That’s the one that they worry about quite a bit in the real events that happened to them. So I think in the abstract we underestimate how much it hurts to lose that, to feel like you’re losing that emotional connection to somebody because they’re forming a bond elsewhere.

ELISE:

Yeah. So when you think about this whole world of psychology, the way it’s been abused or misunderstood, what do you hope to see and what do you feel like are the big questions? I mean, maybe we’ll never know, right? Your point is all that research into these algorithms, which are again, kept under lock and key, but evidence suggests they’re not science, they’re just questionnaires or something, right?

PAUL:

Yeah. I mean, I think back in the days before the apps when eHarmony reigned and look, a lot of these websites, they did well. They created a lot of couples and they would boast impressive success rates. But for all we know, and this would be totally consistent with the evidence, for all we know they were giving people these questionnaires and if you scored a little high on say depression, they said, “I’m sorry, we don’t have any partners for you.

That would make your numbers look better on average because the people who then got into relationships would look happier than folks in a control sample, but that’s because you’re not helping the people who need the most help. So my hope is that one day we can get to a place where we’re at least a little more efficient with how we introduce people to potentially compatible partners. At this moment, I am very, very skeptical that there’s any sets of questionnaires that people can report about themselves and then we say like, “Oh, you’re this type, or these are the kinds of people that are ultimately going to appeal to you. So we’re going to set you up with these folks and you’re going to have better outcomes.” I’m very skeptical that any kind of self-reported knowledge that people have about their preferences, about their personality, about their lifestyle preferences, their values, et cetera, I’m skeptical of these ideas.

If I instead imagine an AI powered world that knew something about ... And this is potentially very creepy. I’m not wishing for this, but if you ask me what is plausible, if you knew how I felt about the 50 women that I interacted with between the ages of 19 and 23, which ones I liked, which ones I didn’t like, what clicked between us, what didn’t, and then you forecasted my attraction specifically to a set of folks I hadn’t met yet. I don’t know, maybe that’s at least better data because the data now aren’t coming from my ideas about myself. It’s coming from my actual experiences with real live women that actually existed in the world and then trying to project that forward. Maybe I don’t know if I were trying to do this thing, that’s the space I’d be looking at.

ELISE:

Yeah. But you make the point, which I loved where when you actually the expectation that someone has a type or a predilection and then when you look at people’s exes,

PAUL:

You would then

ELISE:

Expect a hedge ... Like you’d expect them to be the same, right?

PAUL:

Yeah. Right. Yeah. See, it doesn’t work all that well. So we find this with religiosity is a good example. So if I looked at your exes, they probably are similar in the extent to which they are religious or not, which on the surface might imply that you’re consistently selecting partners with a level of religiosity that matches whatever preference you happen to have. But then we look at where you live, because of course, at least in the US, religiosity is concentrated in certain places. So then when we remove that from the equation and we look at what was going on in your pool, and then you were selecting randomly within that pool. So the religiosity of your partners was entirely being shaped by where you lived, not who you were selecting within the pool that was available to you.

ELISE:

No, totally. And when I think about the significant Xs that I’ve had, you’d be hard pressed to find a red thread outside of those types of factors, like well educated because that’s the, I was well educated, so those were the people I encountered. Yeah.

PAUL:

And so maybe my AI powered thought experiment wouldn’t actually wouldn’t in fact work because whatever the thing is, whether it was something that we could assess about those partners or not, right, it’s that all of compatibility is constructed in a happenstance way. It’s like the stories that we create. You end up in some really weird places if you take this idea really seriously, because what it means is that you could take any pair of people and run the simulation of them interacting for the first time over and over again and eventually they will hit on something. And I don’t know if I believe that, but I find it exciting to entertain to at least consider how close we could get to that idea. I mean, does every pair of people have something that they could connect over if they get sufficiently lucky with what they’re talking about?

Again, I don’t believe the extreme version of this idea, but there are at least reasons to consider some very liked version of that idea that many pairs of people, many more pairs are compatible than we would naturally think.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, I go back to this night when my now husband and I remet again, ran into each other on Valentine’s Day and I was just running through the scenario in my head and yes, we ended up chatting until four in the morning, but it was kicked off because a friend of mine happened to be there who is the world’s most gregarious person. So she came in and then started talking to Rob about New Jersey and this nephew and then got him going in his natural excitement about being an uncle, which was shocking to me. And then he I had two friends, a friend there from Hong Kong. He went to high school in Hong Kong with his ex- girlfriend who was obliterated and she just kept saying, “You guys love each other. You guys are going to get married.” And I think about that particular encounter as enough of an icebreaker in a relational way and a wild drunk girl way to be like, “Oh, that’s probably what we needed to push past his shyness, my

PAUL:

Introverted

ELISE:

Shyness and my prejudgements.”

PAUL:

What if the dating app we need is just bring a drunk girl to the party to say ridiculous things like, “You guys are going to get married.” You

ELISE:

Guys want to make out.

PAUL:

It was wild. See, that’s what we need.

ELISE:

It is what we need. Not more swiping. I honestly am like, I wonder what would’ve happened if Lori Birkamato had not been there painting him in this warm, loving. Yeah. So that’s your advice, right? Go out.

PAUL:

Find a Lori. Everybody needs a Lord. Find a Lori.

ELISE:

Everyone needs a Lori and then also erase the whiteboard, take the vision board apart, right?

PAUL:

Exactly. Yeah. That it is okay to meet people who are outside of the typical range of folks that you would commonly interact with. And if you find yourself falling for one of them, that’s okay. It’s okay to explore these ideas. What we draw up on paper often doesn’t correspond to what actually appeals to us. It might. It actually tends to correspond about 50% of the time and about 50% of the time it doesn’t, which in our book is random, but don’t close yourself off to possibilities just because it doesn’t match what you think you would’ve drawn up ahead of time.

ELISE:

100%. And this might sound judgy, but I think about some of my friends who partnered off early and quickly and maybe things didn’t work out. And I actually think a lot of it was putting too much emphasis on both on mate value and potential.

PAUL:

That’s interesting.

ELISE:

Yeah. This idea of, well, this is the person who’s going to deliver a secure and stable life to me. And the reality, the compatibility didn’t pull them through.

PAUL:

Yep. There are lots of confounds in these sorts of studies, but it’s still true that folks who get married a little older, that their relationships are a little more likely to last. Yeah,

ELISE:

There you go.

PAUL:

Some of that wisdom be part of it’s totally possible.

ELISE:

Well, I can’t wait for whatever ... Are you working on another book?

PAUL:

Not exactly. So the big thing that I do right now is Eli Finkel and I have a podcast called Love Factually. And so we talk about how these ideas are reflected in the movies. So we do one movie at a time. We just released before midnight the third in the Richard Linkletter Trilogy, which is I think the one that for most people is the hardest watch.

ELISE:

I don’t even think I got that far.

PAUL:

It’s good. Because it’s

ELISE:

Before sunrise, before sunset

PAUL:

Or vice versa. Sunset. Yeah. Yeah. And then before midnight is the third, but now they’ve been together for a while and how’s that going? It’s like, take a deep breath.

ELISE:

This is a fantastic ... Well, and it gets into this idea that we didn’t really get to explore today, but maybe we’ll do it again around social the way that these stories are sold to us, right? Yeah. Including Anna Nicole Smith and the 85-year-old billionaire

PAUL:

And

ELISE:

The way that we get acculturated.

PAUL:

Yeah. And what’s been so funny about bringing the scientific lens to the movies is that they’re kind of all a mixed bag. Yeah. Sometimes they do the, oh yeah, the older rich guy with the young, hot woman. I mean, they do the tropes that the science doesn’t really support, but then sometimes they really get it right. I mean, a lot of movies are really good about the two people getting to know each other over time and falling for each other because that’s compelling drama that you can depict in 90 minutes. I think a movie would be kind of boring if it was just people swiping and meeting for 20-minute coffee dates. So we don’t really get those movies.

ELISE:

Well, one of the biggest tropes to that end, I’m curious about a quick hot take on it is this idea of the dorky ... We see she’s gorgeous, but she’s not popular, this low mate value dorky girl who is finally understood to be the catch.

PAUL:

Yeah. Okay. So let’s talk about Clueless because that kind of gets at this particular trope. What I don’t love is that the version of it that you just described is what I call desirability as a project. And boy, is that just reflected in everything in our current culture too. You got to do things to make yourself more desirable. You’re a four. We got to somehow lift you up to being a seven or an eight. My family. Actually, yeah, exactly. Now the funny thing is Clueless kind of gets this in the end because the Brittany Murphy character, Ty, kind of ends up with the skater boy anyway that was like the guy that she had her eye on from the beginning. Yeah, right. Not Elton. So it ultimately goes in the right direction, but there are others too that do this. I mean, 40-year-old Virgin is all about desirability as a project.

He’s got to become more desirable for women to take him seriously. Whether the movies are supporting those ideas or poking holes in those ideas or doing both of those things, I mean, that’s sort of the funny tension that exists in a lot of these things.

ELISE:

All right. You’re going to come back and we’re…