Why Your “Type” Is Ruining Your Love Life | Paul Eastwick
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Why is your 'type' a poor predictor of attraction?
men get more of the health benefits of being in the relationship relative to women. The popular idea in the culture that's completely wrong is that, oh, she's always looking for commitment and he's looking to resist that commitment. That is just not true.
Paul Eastwick has spent his career unlocking the hidden science behind love and attraction, and he's the author of Bonded by Evolution.
If we're talking about snap judgments on apps, the hot desirable people dominate the market. For most of us, we have a demoralizing experience.
What are women looking for? What are men looking for when it comes to dating?
There's a real tendency to think that men and women are super different. Women will say that they care about things like ambition and earning potential. Basically, there were no gender differences in the appeal of these traits.
We are seeing a loneliness epidemic. Do you think it's partly because of how we interact online?
I worry about this a lot.
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Paul, if I hand you my dating checklist right now, the traits that I swear that I need. So for example, I'm really looking for someone that is smart and tall or whatever. How confident are you that my checklist predicts who I'll actually fall for?
Not all that confident. I believe you that those are desirable things that you've just listed off there. But a lot of times what we're trying to do is we're trying to predict what's gonna uniquely appeal to us specifically. So are the things that we list out as our key deal breakers, like are those things really gonna matter especially to us once we meet somebody in person? And the answer is not really. These things tend to have pretty small effects. Here's one example of like the kinds of studies that we run that get at this phenomenon. So if you listed your deal breakers like that, and then I introduce you to somebody who has those qualities, you're likely to be like, yep, you did your job. Thank you.
I'm super into her. I can't wait to go on a second date. The problem is if I had accidentally mixed up the list and and I had set you up with somebody that actually fit another person's deal breakers, you would have told me, good job, you really selected somebody who fits what I'm looking for. So the problem there is that the things that we list out as being especially important to us, well, those are good traits, but they tend not to uniquely appeal to us.
What factors influence what men and women look for in partners?
When we're looking for a partner, when we're dating, should we be looking for someone for the rest of our lives or for someone that suits us at that point in our lives? Because in the past, like I'm 40 now, but I've dated a number of different people. And then every time that I've gone through a breakup and I've moved to a new person, they're always different to the last person. And a lot of my family or friends will say, that person's totally different. Why are you going for that person now? And I guess now that I'm older, I realize, well, I don't want some of those traits that I met in that last person. Is that what's going on here? Yeah.
Yeah, there is some of that. It's a funny thing, because when you look at like a network of people's exes, this work's actually very challenging to do because it's not can't always get the exes to participate in the study. But if you do, what you'll sometimes see is that they just kind of all seem vaguely unrelated to each other. I mean, they might share a few things in common. A lot of times those things are derivative of where you live, right? I would probably be dating, you know, U.S. Americans, for example, because that's where I live. But you're right that there's this funny dance of, oh, you know, I dated somebody with these qualities.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Why is your 'type' a poor predictor of attraction?
0:00–3:04
2
What factors influence what men and women look for in partners?
3:04–8:31
3
How do dating apps distort our partner choices?
8:31–17:16
4
Why aren't love languages predictive of relationship success?
17:16–30:21
5
What does research say about compatibility in relationships?
30:21–51:05
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from Sonia and Simon
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