Paul Eastwick

And the only way to get there is to engage in radical acts of self-improvement, which can be very demoralizing for a lot of people.

Some of it ends up being pretty gendered, too.

The

early phase of evolutionary psychology really had a lot of components in there that were about how different men and women are, how different their concerns are, how different their wants and desires are.

And look, there are many domains of life where men and women are quite different, of course.

But what we've tended to see in the more recent science of attraction is

That, again, when you step away from those broader pressures and you look at what people actually like when they're meeting each other face to face, we usually don't see much in the way of gender differences.

That's even true with stuff that seems obviously gendered, like earning potential, ambition, like it's surely more important for a guy to be ambitious than for a woman to be ambitious.

But what we actually see is that, this is surprising to some folks, but when men meet

ambitious women, they tend to like them more than the less ambitious women.

That is not what I've been told on Instagram comments.

Exactly.

On Instagram, where the women are quite ambitious.

But setting that irony aside, that little boost that you get in terms of your appeal for seeming a little bit more ambitious, seeming like you've got your life together, it's there for both men and women.

And I think the fact that women will say something

On surveys, they care about earning potential and ambition more than men do.

Doesn't reflect their real life experiences of attraction.

I think that's one great example of how you get gender differences over here and what people think, but not over here in terms of what actually appeals to people.

Yeah, I think one of the biggest problems is this idea that we need to make ourselves appealing to strangers.

We've got this idea that, okay, to succeed at the mating game, you have to go out there and attract people from ground zero.