Is There a Science to Finding Love?

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is doctor Anna Machen. Doctor Machen is a British evolutionary anthropologist, writer, and broadcaster at the University of Oxford, best known for her research on the neuroscience, genetics, and psychology of love. In this episode, we discuss common misconceptions about evolutionary psychology. We talk about what love actually is from a scientific perspective. We talk about the unique challenges and pitfalls associated with dating apps. We talk about attachment theory. We talk about polyamory. We talk about so called sex and love addiction. We talk about whether pheromones are real. We talk about the effects of birth control. Doctor Machen debunks the myth of menstrual synchrony. We talk about the concept of love languages. And finally, we talk about whether having kids really makes you happier. So without further ado, doctor Anna Machen. Okay. Anna Machen, thank you so much for coming on my show. It's great to be here. So we're gonna get into a lot of topics related to evolutionary psychology, love, romantic relationships, friendship, love in the context of friendship, love in the context of family. Really, as you put it in your book, a a three sixty degree conversation about love informed by the best science, that that we have. So I've got a lot of questions, and this is one of those topics that is relevant to anyone who loves, which is hopefully everybody in the audience, probably almost everybody, except the couple, you know, non anxious, non attached, or non anxious avoiding people. We're gonna get into that sort of stuff. So, it's great to have you on. Before we get into everything, can you give my listeners just a short summary of who you are? How did you come to be interested in this topic? What drew you to it? And, what you studied? Okay. So, yeah, I'm an evolutionary anthropologist, which is somebody who studies humans, but I study it from an evolutionary point of view. So the questions are, why does something evolve? What was its purpose? You know, what anatomical neural changes did we undergo to achieve that particular purpose? So that's what I do. In terms of love, I kind of with most things in my career, I kind of fell into it. And it, I did a very early version of it for my PhD, the evolution of social and sexual behavior. And then I went to work work at Oxford with a very prominent professor called Robin Dunbar. And he employed me to do close human relationships within his social and evolutionary neuroscience research group. And he's the Dunbar of Dunbar's number? He is the Dunbar of Dunbar's number. So, yeah, our whole research group was very looking at social networks, and all my colleagues looked at sort of the the macro side of things, which is looking at social networks, healthy social networks, not healthy, how they formed, how they decayed. And my job was …