Modern Dating Is Broken | Paul Eastwick

When we think about how we evolved to be men, I think there's a tendency to think in the terms that you just described. We are supposed to dominate, and we are supposed to lead, and we are supposed to intimidate, and this is how we win and achieve success. It is exactly backwards because if you look at the evolutionary trajectory so now I'm talking about hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years. It was not the case that the strongest, most dominant ones were the ones who are more likely to survive. In fact, it was the opposite. It was the smaller ones. It was the gentler ones. It was the ones who were good around kids, the ones who were less aggressive that the females tended to prefer. We lost our sharp canines. That's because we don't fight for mates in the way that our ancestors did six million plus years ago. We men got smaller relative to females over the course of the last several million years because we were selected for our gentleness around offspring. Alright. Let's kick off today's show. Today, we're talking with Paul Eastwick. He's a social psychologist who spent twenty years studying attraction and close relationships. You'll learn why online dating makes finding connection harder than face to face meetings. Paul wrote bonded by evolution, and the big takeaway is form social connections for their own sake, not just to date. Paul shares why online dating exaggerates desirability hierarchies, how relationships change who you are, the networking approach that actually leads to romance, and what healthy masculinity looks like today. Welcome to the show, Paul. It's great to have you. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I think this subject of love connection dating is probably one of the areas where there's the most conflicting advice. I know. And I think a lot of it is culturally, traditionally passed down to us by our ancestors and our family. So we're excited today to really dig into the science and and what the latest and greatest says about this exact part of our lives. But I'd love to hear first from you a little bit about the project and then maybe what surprised you the most in writing this book. I've been a social psychologist studying attraction and close relationships for about fifteen to twenty years. It's really what got me excited about, you know, the use of experimental and observational methods to study psychological topics in the first place was this idea that this totally mystifying and omnipresent process. Right? I mean, you know, maybe you're single and you're looking for somebody or maybe you're in a relationship, but these issues are always with us. And that realization that we could use scientific methods to study this whole idea was was just very compelling to me. So, yeah, you know, this book is really the outcome of twenty years of, like, studies trying to fit the pieces together, trying …