Paul Eastwick

Does she make me feel small in comparison or is her confidence rub off on me?

Like, I think people do these things pretty well.

I just worry like when the offline starts infecting the online.

This is a bummer.

And look, it's true in every context that the people surrounding you, it really matters that people feel like the people nearby support their relationship.

This is just another one of these classic findings in the science that people feel better about their relationships when their friends are supportive and when your friends like your partner and they like you with your partner.

So many times we can leverage that for good, but this is really capturing the downside of that experience, especially when who you're surrounded by is this sort of broad group.

I mean, she's probably not exactly friends with all of these folks, yet they have this big influence over her life.

So I am often touting the importance of groups and that people can introduce people to each other.

And this is often where the magic happens.

But this story is a good reminder, too.

Like there are real downsides, especially when it's a larger group.

They're not all exactly your friends and they've got ideas about what you should be doing.

I think so.

When I talk about the Evo script, I'm referring to some of these ideas that originally grew out of evolutionary psychology in the 1990s.

This was genuinely part of the science, but it's really gotten spun out in our culture and online, especially in a bunch of nefarious ways.

And one of the components here does have to do with these standards that we assume that we have to meet.

Mate value is part of it.

We talked about that.

You feel like you've got to be an eight or a nine if anybody's going to pay attention to you.