Modern Wisdom
#1056 - Dr Paul Eastwick - Did Evolutionary Psychology Get Dating All Wrong?
07 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Many of the past guests that have been on my show and much of my education, I think, into the world of mating dynamics, understanding relationship science, has been informed by an evolutionary perspective. I think it's fair to say that your new book takes somewhat of an opposing perspective to much of the evolutionary psychology position. Is that a fair assessment?
Yeah. I think that's fair. I am not using the standard like this is not a standard nature nurture thing. That's not where I'm coming from. I'm coming from a place of actually there's a different way of talking about human nature, a different way of talking about the way that humans evolved to form relationships that I think is kind of missing out there.
And that's more or less why I wrote the book.
What's your background? Because most people, when we talk about relationship science in the modern world, are going to be coming out of some kind of EP, mating research lab. What are you?
Yeah. So I would say I'm a scholar of close relationships. There's a whole field. We call ourselves relationship science. We're largely in the social and personality psychological tradition, but there are threads that connect to things like clinical psychology, family studies, things like that. So we are informed by an evolutionary perspective too. It's just a different one.
So, for example, we talk about attachment perspectives a lot and attachment has very deep evolutionary roots going back to Bowlby and so forth. But it's just a little different from the standard evolutionary psychological perspective. That's interesting.
OK, so what is your problem with the sort of classic Evo script as you see it?
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Chapter 2: How does Dr. Paul Eastwick challenge evolutionary psychology in dating?
A lot would be related to sex differences, preferences. I think the world of EP a lot of the time is talking about this, sex differences, especially in terms of preferences for life, not just preferences in another partner. Yeah, I think that's fair. I guess right up top,
The words mating market, probably one of the most ubiquitously used in all of the world of evolutionary psychology mating research. Exactly right. What is your problem with the term mating market?
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. And that has really big implications for whether mating feels competitive, whether it feels like a market.
When you say it fades over time, what do you mean?
Yeah, so let's think about it this way. If you're meeting people for the first time, and let's just make this really simple. You and me, we're going to evaluate a woman, and the question is hot or not. We're just going to make simple binary judgments. Mm-hmm. We probably agree like 70, 75% of the time, okay, as opposed to 50-50 chance. That's pretty good, okay?
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Chapter 3: What is Dr. Eastwick's background in relationship science?
Maybe we learn like, oh, I didn't think much of them at first. Then I realized they have a great sense of humor. So everything about them becomes more appealing. But with other people, it's going to go the other way. And the issue is that different perceivers sort of go along those tracks differently for the same target. So you might find that somebody gets more appealing.
I find that they get less appealing. That leads us to diverge more over time. I think it is really, really lucky that people do this because what this means is that, okay, I'm a six. I'm not going to date a 10. Ah, but I might get to date somebody who I think is a 10. And maybe, you know, she might be a six, too, but she thinks I'm a 10. And that's where the magic is.
That's how people form stable, committed relationships, because they're able to get in a relationship where they aren't really thinking that much about trading up because they think they won the lottery, even if other people don't agree.
Okay. So it seems like the word consensus is pretty important here. That if you were to take a hundred people in a room and get everybody to do that, and I'm going to guess you've done this hot or not. Is that your criteria?
Yeah, I mean, it's easiest when we're discussing it like this to talk about hot or not. We're always doing it on scales. It's like variance shared.
But what do you tend to do? You tend to get people to rank order out of 10? Or do you tend to get people to rate out of 10? What is the metric? Yeah, like rate out of 10 is usually how it would be. Okay, so the first thing that comes to mind is in order for us to get past, let's say, the front door of attraction, or the front door of potential attachment in your language,
you need to have the hot button pressed, typically. Like if the not button gets pressed at the front door, the likelihood of you getting to date, even to date one, you've already either in person or virtually the equivalent of swiped left. Yep. So in order for you to get to your particular perspective, which is these...
Consensus is diverging over time because people's compatibility and how they find the other person to be attractive, alluring, beguiling in a manner that means that they see the beauty in them that wasn't immediately presented. Yep. In order for you to get to that, you need to kind of tick yes on the very first thing.
So presumably this doesn't mean that someone's immediately presentable broad shoulders on a guy, waist to hip ratio on a woman, long hair, good teeth, good skin. Like these things still matter because they are the selection criteria by which you get through the door to the party to actually be able to do your second stage of assessment.
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Chapter 4: What are the flaws in traditional evolutionary psychology regarding mating?
That sounds high.
I mean, I've seen like 30-something. I haven't seen 60. It's at least 40, but I think when you account for social media, I think it's online dating, which is 40, but I think when you account for social media as well, it wouldn't surprise me if it was above 50. So anyway, it's a significant portion. Yeah, but it's big.
Okay, add on to that bars and even introductions from friends, the repeat exposure that you're talking about doesn't necessarily have chance to blossom. Now, I get what you mean. If we're looking at this from a strictly sort of evolutionary perspective, we would have been in our pod of 30 from our Dunbar number of 150.
And you're seeing this person every morning as you get up, you go and refill the bucket. So I understand what you're talking about there. But I do think that that... certainly is mismatched with what our current mating environment looks like. Another perspective, I'm going to guess you've never heard of this. It's called an office plus two.
So an office plus two is, it was used by me and a bunch of my friends. It's a term in the UK that describes someone that you work with regularly who might be a six out of 10, but because they're in the office and you see them every day for a couple of months, they seem to be an eight. So it's called the office plus two.
That's absolutely right. And the only thing I'm adding to that is that... Sorry to make it more complicated because that's really perfect. But you also have got a lot of Office minus twos. You probably aren't talking about them, but they're out there too. And... I don't know if you're at that company for 10 years. Now you're going to have some office plus threes and plus fours.
That is the spread will increase. But that's exactly right. And and I think that the problem with the modern dating environment is that. If we expect people to knock us out right away, if we're expecting to be absolutely swept off our feet at moment one, that just doesn't cater to a lot of people's strengths. But again, I sound like an old man, but like the old ways used to allow for this.
When we got to meet people organically through everyday life, it gave more people a chance. And that's kind of the thing I want to remind people of.
I understand. Unfortunately, saying that the modern environment is not conducive to a more egalitarian type of mating doesn't necessarily stop the issue from happening. I totally get it. If you're somebody who doesn't immediately present in the manner that would be successful in online dating or in a bar...
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Chapter 5: How do attachment styles influence romantic relationships?
Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. I think so. And I think, you know, like we're talking about, I do think online dating exacerbates that inequality. But I think that now if we're talking about like theory, what's the story of human mating? The story, I mean, as I've understood it since the 90s, was really about like, well, you sort of do the best you can.
And, you know, maybe things go well for you and you improve your attributes. And so you might be able to like trade up eventually. And this is why people give advice. Things like, well, if you're a six, you should really try to get with somebody else who's a six. Because otherwise, like if you don't trade up on them, like they're going to trade up on you. And so.
It sure would be ideal, you know, the most stable relationships come from a match in mate value. We look at that kind of stuff. We can look at close relationships over time and how matched people are in mate value. You get matches, you get mismatches, none of it matters.
On average, I certainly agree. Who you click on doesn't necessarily correlate with who you click with. We're not necessarily great judges of our own type. And everybody that's ever fallen for someone who they wouldn't have picked at first knows that. However...
Is it not the case that assortative mating for IQ, for education level, for height, for income, for attractiveness level, and these include things that aren't just objective, but stuff that's subjectively consensus, that if you were to pick that, like on average, sevens get with sevens, and those sevens that look like sevens, will gravitate towards sevens and that occurs over time.
And if you were to look at them in five years time, people would say, yeah, that there has to be a bulge in the compatibility because the likelihood of 10 with two can't simply be the same as eight with eight.
Sort of, kind of. Let me try to unpack this. I mean, this is great. I mean, I love talking about this stuff. I like to put these attributes in two buckets. Because a lot of the things you mentioned, whether it's like income education and stuff, a lot of that is just like who people are meeting in the first place. So there's like sorting on demographics.
A lot of that is about proximity and who people are meeting in the first place. But let's talk about the stuff that is less sorted like attractiveness, for example. So yes, it is more likely that you'll see a seven paired with a seven. Again, if you had two people in front of you, here's a useful thought experiment. You got a guy and two women, and you're trying to guess which one is his partner.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of the mating market concept?
Something like that. Okay. So, so I got, I got a seven and a seven. I got an eight and a five.
Okay.
there is no indication whatsoever that the eight and the five are going to break up sooner, be more miserable, be more likely to cheat relative to the seven and the seven. It doesn't predict a thing.
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And I think that that's true, which is if you are in a relationship with a very high profile guy, let's say, a guy whose mate value due to his level of status or fame or a woman who is incredibly beautiful and very obvious and visible, that is going to create a degree of... increased mate guarding because you're simply going to be aware that their other options are greater.
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Chapter 7: How does vulnerability play a role in attraction?
I confess the divorce data are kind of thorny because a lot of times, yeah, they're not predicting divorce. They're like asking people to reflect back on a divorce and asking them why it ended. So I am I'm familiar with divorce. with those data that you're talking about. But generally speaking, these gender differences are very, very small.
And we can get into like the contemporary education stuff too, because that's also interesting along these lines. Yeah, hit me. Yeah, well- So now we see, right, that women are earning more degrees than men, okay?
Chapter 8: What strategies help individuals recover from breakups?
And I think some people are really worried that this is a contributor to the rise in singledom. I think this is a red herring. From the data that I have seen, there aren't costs to women being more educated than men. Nowadays, when couples who are mismatched in education form, it's more common that the woman has more education than the man. And again, there's no risk to these relationships.
These relationships are not at any greater risk than if they've been matched in education or if the man was more educated. So I do think there is a rise in singles. And I do think that, you know, there are challenges there. But I don't think it has to do with the men's education level. I think that is unlikely to be the explanation.
Hmm.
Explain to me then what you think women mean, modern women, when they say men need to up their game. There's a million ways that I can put it. Improve their standards, pick themselves up by their bootstraps, sort themselves out. Men need to up their game, which I think is what a lot of the young female, like if I look at mid-20s,
classic dating advice from whatever the female equivalent of the manosphere is like dating commentators that are female in their 20s much of the advice much of much of the justification given is we're not putting up with men who don't meet our standards anymore yeah what do you think they mean by that i think what they mean is that what they're seeing online is disappointing
Online dating? Yeah. I think that they're probably not actually meeting many of these guys. And that could be on the guys. That could be because some men have retreated from traditional modes of social interaction. Do you know if they've done that more than women? That I don't know. It's plausible. I mean, you know, it's happening at all ages. That I can tell you.
I mean, we're often very eager to blame this on, like, Gen Z. We want to, like, blame the kids these days.
I know that the American Time Use Survey recently found out that the average female pet owner spends more time with her pet than all humans combined. Oh, wow.
That's... But look, I do think... spending time that, you know, phones, screens, I mean, whatever it is, that's not out there interacting with real people in the world. Um, So I haven't seen the data, but I would certainly buy the idea that that's happened to men more than women. That, I would suggest, very well could be the problem.
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