Dr Paul Eastwick

There's an emphasis on gender differences, right?

Like men and women are really, really different in the mating realm.

I also think there's this emphasis on like the short-term versus long-term mating distinction.

And like some people are good at one or the other.

I think these ideas, we've got a lot of misconceptions, to put it mildly, about those three things.

And I think once we kind of pick those things apart, we can put the pieces back together in a way that fits what I'd call the relationship science view, which is more about attachment, compatibility, and forming relationships through small networks.

Okay.

So I think the mating market, it's a way of thinking about how humans form relationships like it's a competition.

Right.

And the competition follows from the idea that some people are really desirable.

They've got lots of attributes that will make them very popular and they'll be great partners if you can get in a relationship with them.

I think this idea, it is true to some extent, but I think it's true in a more limited way than we realize.

And specifically, I think it describes initial attraction markets among strangers pretty well.

So that's a context where we can think about mating markets, like you're meeting people at a bar, you're going to a party and meeting people for the first time.

And in those contexts, people are going to agree about who the other desirable people are, and it's going to feel competitive.

It's going to feel like the tens get all the attention and the twos just kind of, you know, hang out over in the corner.

But what we find through a lot of our research is that that period of time, that segment of what it's like to form a relationship is actually kind of short lived.

especially if people are getting to know other people in groups over time.

It's like become a little bit of a lost art.

But when we conduct studies like that, we find that even though people tend to agree pretty strongly who are the tens and who are the twos when they're first meeting, that tendency to agree actually fades over time.