E137 - How do Romantic Relationships Work? (w/ Dr. Paul Eastwick)

Dr. Paul Eastwick is a Professor at UC Davis where he runs the Attraction and Relationships Research Laboratory. Dr. Eastwick’s research investigates how people initiate romantic relationships and the psychological mechanisms that help romantic partners to remain committed and attached. He is one of the hosts of the Love Factually podcast. 

https://www.lovefactuallypod.com/

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

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Transcript

Welcome back to The Thinking Mind, a podcast all about psychiatry, psychology, and self development. Today we're continuing our conversations about romantic relationships, intimacy, attraction, and to have that conversation. We're talking to Dr. Paul Eastwick. Dr. Eastwick is a professor at uc Davis. He runs the Attraction and Relationships Research Lab.

His research investigates how people initiate romantic relationships and the psychological mechanisms that help romantic partners to remain committed and attached. He's also one of the hosts of the Love Factually podcast, and this is one of my new favorite podcasts in love. Factually Paul and his co-host Eli analyze romantic films like Titanic before Sunrise, LA La Land, marriage Story, and others.

They discuss what these films get accurate about the nature of close relationships and also what they get wrong. Today I discuss with Paul [00:01:00] how he became interested in studying attraction and relationships. What are some principles he wishes more people understood about starting new relationships?

Misconceptions people often have about compatibility. His thoughts on dating apps, how relationship and family culture has changed in recent decades, and how he started The Love Factually podcast and some of the biggest lessons he's learned during that podcast. I really enjoyed talking to Paul, and as I said, love Factually is one of my new favorite listens.

I would definitely encourage you guys to check it out, even though I'm practicing as a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist, I feel there's still so much for me to learn about the science of relationships and attraction. How relationships start and, and what things help relationships to thrive, what causes relationships to deteriorate, and I was definitely excited to get to learn more about that today.

As always, you can direct any and all feedback to Thinking Mind podcast@gmail.com. Thank you very much for listening, and now here's today's conversation with Paul Eastwick. [00:02:00] Paul, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Very delighted to be here. I had my first episode of Love Factually yesterday, and I really enjoyed it.

Oh, cool. Each episode of your podcast, you and your co-host will look at a film about relationships and you kind of break it down. What works well, what doesn't work well, I'm gonna be a regular listener from now on. Excellent. What got you interested in studying attraction and relationships? 'cause it's quite a niche.

I mean, I was, I was surprised to even discover that world of research and I need to learn more. But how did you get into it? It's fascinating because for a long time I didn't know it really existed either. You know, I'd taken classes in, uh, social psychology, I'd taken classes in, um, psychopathology, uh, you know, trying to understand how people help each other in the mental health realm.

I mean, this is going back to my undergraduate days and I discovered that there was. Interesting branch that covered social psychology. [00:03:00] It also covered the therapy realm a little bit. Um, it tapped into some evolutionary psychological ideas and, you know, this was a field called attraction and close relationships.

So it sort of sits at the intersection of a few different, uh, psychological subfields. And I just found it. Totally fascinating. It seemed to, on the one hand, have very profound and interesting things to say about relationships. These, you know, deep parts of our lives that we often spend a lot of time thinking about.

But it also seemed to harbor a number of contradictions, especially when you look at some of the tensions between the way that evolutionary psychology depicted how people go about forming and maintaining relationships and the way that these other folks, uh, you know, like attachment theorists talked about the way people form and maintain relationships.

And so I got really interested in that intersection trying to understand, hey, where are these ideas, right? And [00:04:00] where are they misleading? And you know, that's kind of what I've been doing for the last 20 years or so. Yes. And of course, aside from being so fascinating academically. Just for people's lives.

You know, we all know romantic relationships and close friendships, family relationships. They have such a huge effect on the quality of our lives. If things are going well in our relationships, generally, we kind of feel our lives are going well. And the opposite is also true. I'm curious, what are, what are some of those contradictions you mentioned?

What are the glaring contradictions you noticed when you got into the field? I guess one interesting contradiction, and this inspired some work of ours that, you know, we, we did about 10 years ago, had to do with. What it means for a relationship to be short term or long term. Now, on the one hand, in the close relationships realm, we think about the length of a relationship kind of synonymously with the how well it was doing before it fell apart.

Okay? And again, there are [00:05:00] limitations to this way of thinking about relationships, but often the long-term relationships are considered like a success story. If you're a couple's counselor, people maintaining their relationships, again, classically speaking, you wanted them to maintain their relationship.

We wanted to try to give people therapy to keep them together. So longer is better. Shorter means something went wrong. Mm. In the evolutionary psychological space, that's not how they think about it. It's not the, the long one is like the better version and the short one, they're two distinct strategies for approaching mating relationships.

You can use like the long-term format, which means that you invest heavily in a relationship and you form a warm emotional connection to somebody. Or you go the short term route, which is often about showing off your sexy attributes or trying to, you know, extract investment, uh, very quickly, [00:06:00] uh, from somebody before you leave them, I guess.

Mm-hmm. Okay. And these very different ideas are, were a little bit tough to marry together because they sort of are grounded in some very different assumptions about the way that relationships work. Yeah. I guess from an evolutionary point of view, the goal is not really the relationship from the evolutionary point of view.

The goal is how do we pass on genes from one generation to the other? There are different ways to do that. You can do, an individual can have 10 short-term relationships in the space of a few years, or they can have one long-term relationship. And it occurs to me that I guess each of those strategies would have different pros and cons.

And then in the relationship attachment space, the relationship is the point. Yeah, I, that's right. So what we tried to do is, I mean, we, we kind of went very like basic and descriptive with this. We just tried to get people to report on what their past long-term [00:07:00] and short-term relationships have been like.

And is it fair to suggest that a short term relationship or like a one night stand or something is like this super like sexy category of relationship and you know, the long term is the warmer one. It actually doesn't really line up that cleanly. Yeah. And that really, it does look like a lot of short-term relationships are things that started just as promisingly as the long-term relationships.

But it was like they never went anywhere. So they kind of stall out as they're sort of making this, you know, we, we talk about relationships in this framework, and we call this the relationship trajectories framework, but you kind of think about relationships as these, you know, uh, kinetic arcs that are launched off the ground.

And the question is, well, how high are they gonna go? And that'll give you a sense of how long that they're gonna last. And some relationships kind of peter out partway up. It's like. This is going well, we're getting to know each other. Maybe we have a [00:08:00] sexual experience together. And it's just kind of okay.

And these are the things that peter out, this is what people will later call a short term relationship or a one night stand. Something that I was like kind of into, uh, but then, uh, something turned me off and then I wasn't, to my mind, that actually doesn't fit very well with the traditional evolutionary conceptualization of what short-term relationship is.

But at the same time, that idea of like, ah, these like little relationships that don't go anywhere, that's like not studied in the close relationships literature either. So it's like there's this whole missing thing that we hadn't been studying. Because close relationships, researchers wait until it's already like a good thing, right?

And then they start studying it. Whereas e evolutionary psychology is, is taking this whole different approach and it's not actually studying people's real relationships. So I feel like through this process of trying to marry these two perspectives that we're very different, we [00:09:00] kind of discovered this other kind of relationship that everybody knows is out there.

Everybody, like a lot of people have had these kinds of experiences, right? But they weren't things that we, that we studied. And they can actually be very challenging to study because when we go around saying, oh, like are you in a relationship? Yes or no? Well, when you're in one of these short term things, you're like, I don't, I don't know.

Right? Am am in a relationship and am I not? I don't know what this thing is or where it's going yet, but, but they're out there and people have these things. Uh, and I think the term that people are using now is the situation ship. Right? Exactly. Exactly. We don't, we don't, we haven't quite figured out how to study situation ships.

You know, it's hard to bring people into the laboratory Yes. To study their situationship because it's not clear. People want to admit that they're in this thing. Much less be like, Hey, I know we hooked up that one time. Want to go, want to go be in a study together? That's a, that's a little tricky. Yeah. I guess by definition it's trying to avoid as much definition as possible.

Exactly. Exactly. So maybe if we start from earlier before [00:10:00] there's any kind of relationship, what are the factors, at least the psychological factors that mediate attraction, and how do people even assess each other as like viable romantic prospects? Yeah, so this is a great question and. Look, there are a lot of sort of truisms about initial attraction that are easy to take for granted, but are very, very powerful.

So we tend to fall for people that we run into frequently. Okay. F familiarity breeds liking, so it helps to be in a situation where you're gonna see somebody over and over again. Often what facilitates that is that you are physically nearby, right? It certainly helps to have lots of opportunities to run into somebody randomly.

Okay? So that's all sort of backdrop, but the tricky thing is explaining, okay, so you know, we go to the same parties, but why have I fallen for this person rather than these other people that I could have fallen for? And it's very tempting. To think that we can explain that [00:11:00] idea by pointing to things like similarity or, uh, this person matches what I'm looking for in an ideal partner.

And these other people really didn't, if only it were that simple. Um, 'cause the challenge is that, you know, things like similarity matching. Boy, you can take all the questionnaires in the world and give them to two people, but you're not gonna do a great job of predicting who in that grouping is gonna fall for whom.

And that's actually, I would say one of the great challenges that we face as researchers trying to unpack this, is that it is very, very hard to predict ahead of time in any meaningful way who is gonna fall for whom? Assuming you get a chance to meet these people in the first place, how much do we understand about the biology of attraction, do you think?

And are there sort of big questions? I think of things like pheromones or smell that's unanswered. Yeah, it's gotta be [00:12:00] playing a role in some way. But I wanna talk about a paper by colleague and friend of mine. His name is Dr. Brian Lakey, had this paper a few years ago that really did transform some of the ways that I think about this, especially if it's things like, you know, we have like pheromones that match in some way and that's why we're drawn toward each other.

And I'll try to explain this in the straightforward way that he does. So let's say, uh, I'm going to a party, I'm gonna meet 10 different people who could be potential romantic partners. If I like one of them, especially highly, the odds that she is going to like me back are essentially 50 50. There really is no good way of predicting how much two people will uniquely like each other.

So what that means is that I can have literally all the similarity information in the world about the two of you. Infinite information about the two of you. It could be your [00:13:00] biology, it could be your interests, it could be your traits, it could be your childhood, it could be anything. I will be unable to predict how much the two of you like each other because, and now I'm gonna get like a little stats heavy.

What you're essentially trying to do is predict a measure that is fundamentally unreliable. Okay? So we use the term UN reliability. To refer to if you measure a thing once and then you try to measure it again, do you successfully measure the same thing both times? And so, uh, this idea that if I like you, really it's kind of a coin flip, whether you're gonna like me, what that means is that at a, at the level of the dyad are, are liking for each other is unreliable.

You could find something that like predicts that I'm gonna like you, but the odds that it's gonna predict that you like me are essentially 50 50. And that's why it explains at a very like statistical level, why ultimately it's next to impossible to predict why two people will like [00:14:00] each other at least in an initial encounter.

Right? So although there must be something biological, it can't be some sort of similarity matching thing. Like our pheromones like fit together in some way and that's gonna make the two of us like each other more at a broader level. That can't be it. And if I can even complicate the picture a bit further, obviously we understand that there's a lot of discussion in the culture about this, especially in the so-called red pill movement online, the manosphere that men and women choose each other on different bases, right?

The stereotype view is that men tend to choose women primarily based on visual cues. And appearance and signs of fertility and things like that. And women tend to select men more on personality characteristics, confidence status, is that overblown in your view, or is there like a lot of truth in that that's worth taking into consideration?

That's a great question. Um, it's all totally wrong. [00:15:00] Okay. Completely, a hundred percent, a hundred percent wrong there. Zero evidence that men and women place different weights on the kind of traits that you're men that you're describing. Uh, when it comes to initial attraction, when it comes to ongoing relationships, there's just no evidence for it.

So yes, men say they care about physical attractiveness more than women do, but. Again, that's like what you say you're into. Mm-hmm. I wanna see like, oh, what inspires people to like, you know, people more versus less. Like, I wanna look at attraction. I wanna predict, yeah. Who's gonna, like whom? So if I have a bunch of attractiveness information about the people at this party, I, I know that the attract people are gonna be more popular when it comes to how they initially come off.

But attractiveness has the same, you know, popularity, inspiring features, whether we're talking about men or women, right. It's exactly the same. Physical attractiveness. Yeah. Yeah. Physical, attractiveness, warmth inspires [00:16:00] liking. Uh, but it does, so for men and women, things like ambition, it inspires a little bit of liking.

It's not a major aphrodisiac, but it's the same for men and women. It's one of these ideas. That we got in our heads because we spent, you know, a hundred years asking people about how much they like different traits. Not realizing that when people answer those questions, they aren't always tapping into genuine self insight about what it is that inspires them.

And so that's what we've seen in, in a lot of work. I mean, we've done this work across culturally now, right? We've seen it in dataset after dataset that yeah, attractiveness is inspiring, warmth is inspiring. We want somebody who's, uh, who's a good lover and we want somebody who smells good. But men and women, they are equally inspired by all of these different traits.

So you're saying men and women basically select each other as far as we know on the same criteria. [00:17:00] Everything we've seen suggests that men and women, that the liking that they experience is driven by the same qualities. I do think it matters what people think they like, because what you think you like will certainly shape the situations you put yourself in.

And I, I think we see that very clearly with the way online dating works. Mm. Right. So if you are somebody who thinks I really want to be with somebody who's tall, for example, you can often shape your pool. To include tall people. Mm-hmm. So when we have the kind of control over our dating pool that we have these days, which really has no ancestral parallel at all, no ancestrally, you got like five choices, you know, it's, it's not that many, but you've got all of these choices.

Now you can use what's in your head to shape what that set looks like, but within that set, [00:18:00] uh, there's not much evidence that you know, that you're gonna, you know, go for the tallest one or, or anything like that. I, is there any truth to the idea that men have like a lower threshold to engage in some kind of sexual activity with the opposite sex than women?

Yeah, so I, I would say the single biggest, and, you know, you could even call it like the one gender difference to rule them all. Uh, honestly, I think that most gender differences in the attraction and sexual realm can all kind of be boiled down to this one, which is simply that. Men are more open and willing to have casual sex than women, especially if we're talking about strangers.

Especially if we're talking about mixed gender pairings, and those caveats are important because the interest in casual sex, that that gender difference gets smaller If you're talking about non strangers, like people that you actually know. Right. It also gets smaller [00:19:00] if we're talking about like women hooking up with other women, women who are bisexual, I'm much more interested in that.

It's not just about like the gender of the person doing the selecting, it's also about the, the gender of the person being selected. That matters too. But uh, I do think that. In the attraction space, especially if we're talking about strangers, the casual sex, sex difference, uh, is a big one. And you know, that's usually the one that I point to.

And what's the reason for that difference, do you think? So, you know, there are, classically, the evolutionary explanations would point to things like parental investment, right? So it's less costly for men to engage in sex. And, you know, ancestrally that wouldn't have been a big cause for him, could be a very big cost for her.

That's sort of a, we call that an ultimate explanation, right? It explains why the feature might evolve, but it doesn't really explain psychologically what somebody is experiencing. And so when you look at that sort of work, what you find [00:20:00] is that, well. Women, especially when they're being approached by strangers, they think it's very dangerous.

Probably is very dangerous in modern context to be approached by a stranger and proposition for sex. Biggest of all though is that they assume that these guys are bad lovers. Whereas when men are propositioned by women, they don't know. They think like, oh, she must really know what she's doing. That's actually the largest effect ki kind of surprisingly, but that, uh, I think explains a large portion of it.

That also explains too, why the gender difference is smaller when you're talking about women being propositioned by other women because they think like, oh, like she knows what she's doing. So there's sort of this shared stereotype that women who are sexually more assertive know what they're doing. Men who are sexually assertive, uh, absolutely have no idea what they're doing.

And, uh, that sort of gendered difference in, in how we think about people's sexual skills can explain a lot of where [00:21:00] this difference comes from. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So now that we understand a little bit about attraction, and it does sound like there's a big X factor there that we don't fully understand, which is kind of cool in a way, kind of leaves some of the magic, some room for magic when we don't fully understand.

Yeah. When it comes to relationships, what, what have you come to learn about the differences between short term and long term relationships? Why do some relationships flame out while others seem to be able to continue for long periods of time? I, I think we can reach back to some of the similarity stuff to try to build off that here because people really believe that similarity is important.

When it comes to forming a relationship, they will work very hard to try to find and cultivate similarities, and they think relationships are going well when they can identify more similarities. The issue is that boy does motivated reasoning play a large role [00:22:00] in the way that people do that. So in other words, if people feel that a relationship is going well, they will exert a lot of effort to find similarities.

And if they don't feel a relationship is going well, they will ignore any potential similarities that might be there. So I think this explains why it's so hard to identify ahead of time which relationships are gonna make it and which ones aren't, because people have. A nearly uh, unlimited latitude in how they go about construing, whether they are or are not similar to somebody, whether somebody does or does not match what they're looking for.

It's just too much wiggle room that people have to interpret the signals to be whatever they want. So as relationships are getting off the ground, what the successful ones tend to do is of the infinite array of things that we could be talking about or that we could be bonding over. We happen to hit on a few things that make us feel good, that make us feel like we have a [00:23:00] connection and we are motivated to keep pulling on those threads to try to find other moments or places of connection.

It's not literally that we had more points of connection than I would've had with somebody else. It's just that we found a few, we got into it, it went well, and now we're trying to recreate that positive experience. The weird thing about relationships is that this is a lot of where the sense of compatibility comes from, right?

So we sometimes talk about compatibility as being constructed. It's not there in sort of stasis or crystallized form from the beginning. At the moment that two people meet, it's sort of grown over time through conversation, through interaction, through spending time together, and maybe even eventually.

Through sexual experiences, you know, other kind of romantically tinged experiences that two people might have. So I, I think that's like the most useful [00:24:00] way that we found to talk about why it is that compatibility is so important to people. And at the same time, why is it so hard to predict? Well, the way you resolve those things is that it's gotta be something that gets grown over time and that in essence why it can be so hard to predict who exactly is gonna click with whom.

There's a couple of points I really want to highlight there in everything you just said. So the first point is, and this is a point I really like to talk to people about, is selective attention. So our, our minds have this remarkable ability to focus on one sort of piece of information to the exclusion of all else.

That could be for a myriad of different reasons, but one reason is commonly our emotional state. So you're saying when we feel good about our partner, our minds are automatically gonna ruminate about all the things that we love about them, which are often, I guess, those similarities. This will often, often you'll see.

When people are in love, and then when people might be having a hard time or close to a breakup, their minds [00:25:00] will automatically somehow forget in the moment all the things they love about their partner and focus on the differences, the problems, the conflicts. So that's, that's kind of what you're saying.

Yeah, exactly. And I think too, with the idea of compatibility being constructed. Makes you realize is that when you're talking about ongoing relationships and you know, people who have been together for a long time, is that a lot of what makes the relationship work or not work has to do with the things that people have sort of built for themselves along the way?

I mean, sometimes we use like a path finding metaphor to help people to understand this. We have daily patterns, things we do on a regular basis that have been set in place. And maybe we set those things in place at one point when they were a good idea that, you know, made daily living good or you know, yearly living good for us.

And the question is, are those patterns still serving their original purpose or maybe they've now become an impediment to where we are now in our lives. And so that's another illustration of [00:26:00] sort of how people construct. A reality for their relationship. And sometimes relationships go south because they forget to revisit whether that structure is still working for them in the same way, could, could you gimme an example of one of those patterns that might be used at one point and then move past the utility?

Yeah. Right. So I often think about the way that couples spend time together. And I, I should be clear, I'm not a therapist. I, you know, I'm not licensed and, and I don't give advice directly to couples, but my sense is that a lot of couples will make it about daily patterns. Okay. So how are you gonna see your partner on a daily basis and have that time to reconnect with somebody?

So let's say for a couple, and this is, uh, we'll say it's before they have kids or pets or large work obligations, and they have dinner together every night. Okay. And that's their moment. To reconnect, but then one of them takes a new job and that job, uh, stretches into the evenings, four nights a week. The question is, do you just [00:27:00] yield that time?

So that's four days gone of no connection without rebuilding it in elsewhere. Or do you then make an effort to rebuild it and elsewhere so you don't lose that time of connection? Or maybe it's, well, we lose that time of connection, but we're gonna make up for it in these other ways. Usually I would spend Saturdays with my friends and now we'll spend it.

You know, there's, there's sort of many ways of balancing those things, but I think it's easy for people to like lose sight of the way that they build their time and their rituals together in ways that, I mean, we do it naturally early on in ways that serve the relationship, usually because people are really into each other and they wanna spend time together and they wanna find moments of connection.

Right? But as things cool off and patterns get a little frozen in place, I mean, sometimes those things can be very good, but they can also, you can realize like, oh wait, our schedules change, but we never like, change the way that we find time to interface. And so, you know, we're not doing it as much as we're, we're not doing it in the [00:28:00] same way.

So really you're making an argument for proactivity that the individuals and the couples need to be very proactive. Exactly. It helps a lot. And again, I think the idea that like our compatibility is something that we construct, right? A relationship is what you make it. Mm-hmm. And so you're making it, whether you're, you're aware of it or not, and the choices that you're making, many of them can be undone, but you gotta just be aware of when you're making them and realize where the choice points were.

And if something ends up not working, you gotta ask yourself how far you can, you can backtrack to change things around. Again, I feel like this idea, I mean, I love this idea of constructed compatibility and I think it's quite a quietly radical idea. And I see that because you know, everything you're saying makes perfect sense to me.

And yet when relationships are discussed in the popular culture. No one's talking about constructed compatibility. They're just talking about [00:29:00] compatibility, and when people feel their relationship isn't working, they would typically say something along the lines of, this is not the right person for me, almost as though they've chosen the wrong product in the store.

And it doesn't, it kind of ess everything you've been talking about. Exactly. And look, I'm not saying like any relationship can be saved if you just like change your daily patterns. Things get to the point where people become so insufficiently motivated to want to continue a relationship. You can't just like convince 'em to do it.

But I think what I am skeptical of is that two people get together. And maybe they're not actually compatible at their core, whatever that means. And so they can make it work for a while, but eventually those core incompatibilities will come to life. If that's true, we've never seen empirical evidence of that.

We've never seen evidence that I can assess something that is deeply true about you and something that is deeply true about this other person and [00:30:00] say, yes, you are meant to make it or you are not. There just is no empirical way to do that. Yet with the data that I've seen, maybe there'll be something and you know, probably small effects, but you know, maybe one day we'd be able to point to a little something, but I'm still pretty confident that those things are gonna pale in comparison to how the thousand decisions that two people make about how their life together works, how they structure their time, et cetera.

Those are the things that ultimately have this, these sort of branching effects that make relationships go well or badly? Yeah. Again, I, I don't know. I find myself still stuck on how important this idea is. 'cause even when I think about relationships, I feel like I tend to think about personality compatibility too much and proactive decision making too little.

And so you're saying when you say there aren't any sort of deep core characteristics which can be incompatible, you're including personality traits, I would imagine? Yeah. I mean, there's just not much [00:31:00] evidence for any kind of like similarity or it's even beyond similarity. So this is some work done by my colleague, Dr.

Samantha Joel, where what she has done is she uses these machine learning paradigms where what you do, so first she did it in the attraction realm and she said, okay, we can't get similarity to work. But maybe it's not similarity. Strictly speaking, maybe it's like bizarre combinations of traits that like we could never think up but are really there.

I don't know, maybe like conscientious men need to be with agreeable women. I mean, I don't know. So if it's really there, what you can do is you could use these machine learning models where you take, you know, 200 traits about the men and 200 traits about the women, and you just tell, tell the model, Hey.

Predict who likes whom, especially highly. Okay, so go for it. Go nuts. Tell me. Tell me what works. Try all the combinations a million times over. What's robust in here? When she does that, you can certainly predict who's [00:32:00] popular, and you can also predict like who's desperate. But again, if we're talking about compatibility, if we're talking about like what are the matches that work?

The models, it can't do anything. It absolutely bonds. The model says like, Nope, there's nothing here. And then she does it and established couples. It's basically the same thing. It's, there's no compatibility, uh, component there. There's no similarity element. And whether you could intuit it or not, you know, when she was doing those studies, that really pushed me from a place of, oh, it's just hard to find these things to a place of like, wait, I think it fundamentally doesn't work this way.

And, and that's, that's why we've leaned so much into the, okay, these things must be constructed then, well, how would people construct these things? What would they construct them around? Kind of questions. Yeah. And I, I was listening to Esta Perel on a podcast recently, and she talks about how, you know, a relationship is a story.

Yeah. And so the story, the narrative that's the construction where you're taking bits of information against selective attention. And creating a story with your partner. And that could be a [00:33:00] story about the past day, the past week, the past year. And I think from with my psychotherapist hat on, I think relationships get into trouble when the story isn't shared.

Like the more each person in the couple has their own private story that isn't like discussed or shared with the partner. The more like resentment builds up and schism develops and things. I think that's when relationships become quite fragile. Yeah. I think that really gets into, I think, I think one, one useful way of thinking about whatever it is that people build that can go well or go badly is to think about it like a little culture is sometimes a colleague, uh, Dr.

Eli Finkel talks about microcultures as being this key component of relationships. And what that refers to are the stories that people have for how we began, how we got to this moment in time, who we are as a couple fundamentally, but also things like the, you know, sort of in jokes that we have, right?

Pet names, you know, the activities [00:34:00] that we do together, the, the, the shared reality stuff of relationships is really important. We do see evidence that when people build a culture and really lean into that culture on a daily basis, they tend to be, uh, a little happier in their relationships and that it matters that it's, you know, that I'm leaning into the culture of this relationship specifically, right?

That it's this thing that you and I built together. It's not substitutable with like, you know, some other relationship culture. It's like because we built it, it has special meaning for us. Yes. And, and maybe to give listeners a concrete sense of what the culture looks like, I'm thinking about. Shared rituals in the couple, like even shared sayings that couples might have inside jokes, all the little things that make that relationship unique as you said.

Yeah, I mean, what's, what's wild about this is look, as psychological researchers, what do we do? We make upscales and we give scales to people, and everybody in your sample fills out the scale and you try to learn something about like, oh, what? [00:35:00] What happens to people when they do or do not feel a sense of intimacy with somebody?

Okay, that's great. But what's so interesting about this microculture idea is that there's not really a scale for it. You kind of give people some open-ended text boxes and they just go to town. Telling you about what matters in their relationship, and you get all this stuff that as a researcher, I'm like, I don't know what this means.

Viking Pub Crawl. I mean, I can imagine what a Viking pub crawl is, but I've never been on one. But it's clearly very meaningful for you, and what people will tell you is to the extent that my partner and I have reminisced about the Viking Pub crawl over the last day, then we're feeling happier in our relationship.

Right. It's kind of humbling in a way as a researcher, because you realize like there's this whole world I'm trying to study and I will, because I'm not in it. I will never actually understand what the two of you're talking about, but I can see that it's very important and on, on the idea we were talking about earlier, that actually there isn't a whole lot of, let's say, what we could call [00:36:00] innate incompatibility.

I guess that makes sense to me from an evolutionary perspective because. You would basically want as many viable men and women, I'm talking about men and women specifically in this case, to be able to get along in some capacity as possible. If you only had, like if you had a tribe that was mostly wiped out and you only had a few people left, you'd want those people to be able to get along and hopefully reproduce, right?

Yeah. Small groups of people. Okay. You're living in a rather small group with limited romantic options. But then on top of that, we're a species that our offspring require a lot of investment from. A lot of people. Right. Yeah. So mom can't really do it alone. She's gonna need help. And a lot of times that help is gonna be a father.

It's gonna be other family members too, but you kind of need everybody to form a cohesive unit and get along and be efficient with the way that they're getting along and investing resources in [00:37:00] offspring. So the idea of like holding out hope for the best mate, I mean, you can make a case of like, you'd wanna avoid people who, you know, may, maybe they're very sick.

I mean, maybe they're not gonna make, but like the idea of like, ah, you know, I got somebody who's like at the 80th percentile, but how do I get somebody who's the 95th percentile? That's a lot of wasted effort. Like, hey, this could be somebody that you could build something with. Luckily, through motivated reasoning and spending time with people, I think a lot of people can end up building something.

Now I recognize. That a lot of the things I'm saying right now, if you're somebody who's like out on the dating market these days, you're like, what is this guy talking about? I've been on 50 dates in the last three months and they've all been awful. And so I recognize that I do have a it. It's certainly an optimistic perspective that doesn't quite gel with some of the modern dating realities.

Right. And I want to get onto the modern dating [00:38:00] realities in a moment and just to point out, because obviously we're talking about there being a difference between let's say dating and relationships when you're a hunter gatherer, when humans are hunter gatherers versus now, and people might be a bit skeptical about that.

Like, can't we change? Haven't we changed? Just so people are aware based on some research I've been doing recently from anthropologists. Civilization, as we know, it has only been around for 1.67% of human history. Yeah. It's not much, more than 95% of human history have been hunter gare. So however we did things then that's shaped our psychology and the way we think about things.

Oh yeah. I, I do think it is very, very useful to think about. Look, I don't think the compatibility idea is new. I suspect that compatibility has felt important to people for a very long time. But the key thing is that you were always gonna be looking in a, in a small network. Yeah. And you weren't gonna be [00:39:00] exposed to hundreds or thousands of potential partners.

It would be a few, and you'd be kind of motivated to make it work with one of 'em. Yes. Now, thinking about the modern landscape where, as you said, we have. Huge amounts of choice, arguably too much choice. Firstly, is it true that, you know, younger people are getting into relationships less having sex less?

This is, these are some statistics. I've heard that this seems to be happening. Yeah, this is interesting. So honestly, this is, um, I find this a little vexing because the data on this are a little hard to wrap your head around. Here are things that, that I've seen that I buy, I, I'm, I'm like a little skeptical of some of this stuff.

I've seen the birth rate data. Okay, like that's clear. The cohabitation data is also clear too, like, 'cause that you got really large scale surveys, right? So people are less likely to cohabitate these days. If you're talking about people forming relationships, what's [00:40:00] tough is that a lot of these surveys, they don't ask that.

They might ask like, are you married or not? But if, okay, marriages are lower, but that just could be the people are not getting married and that's, that's actually not that informative. But there is data going back and I think this is, comes from the general social survey that looks at a trend going back to about the year, like 2004.

Okay. So over 20 years. There has been a steady rise in people who currently don't have a steady romantic partner in the younger set. Okay. So people bet in like their twenties basically have gone from like 35% saying they don't have a steady partner to like 50%. So that's, I think, where you see it, but it's been a steady rise.

It didn't happen suddenly with the advent of the phone or even the advent of the apps. I mean, you can kind of link it to the internet, I guess, but it, it's been a sort of steady climb over about 20 [00:41:00] years of people being a little less likely to have a steady partner. So that's the most compelling data I've seen because it's a steady rise over 20 years.

I actually think it's a little hard to pin it on any one particular thing. My guess is that every, that a, a bunch of modern conventions are playing a little bit of a role. It could be that the apps have turned it into a video game, and so people think they're dating, but they're not actually dating.

You're playing a video game. Or it could be that people are spending more time on their careers as their careers are more demanding in their twenties than it was in generations past. And so that does mean that fewer people get in a relationship. So the, there could be a number of different contributing factors that are kind of adding up.

And it also could be reduced stigma that now some people feel like, well, wait, in ages past, I would've wanted to be single and not be in a relationship, and now I have a little more freedom to do that. So that's another possible explanation too. Yeah. [00:42:00] I, I just worry about people spending too much time alone.

You know, we now just have technologies that just make it really easy to spend a whole bunch of time by yourself. And I also worry about the deterioration of social skills. Just like we don't think about constructed compatibility, we don't think of the ability to socialize as a set of skills. Most people don't think about it like that.

They see some people as social, some people as not. And if they're not, they might say, oh, I'm introverted, so I'm not good with people. They don't see that. Interacting with people for friendship, family reasons, romantically, all a set of skills you can develop. It. That's exactly right. Look, there is one clear piece of data when it comes to sort of the internet and the phones, and the social media, blah, blah, blah.

What, what's the thing that's bad for people's mental health and increases loneliness? It's not hanging out in person with other people. So we on the internet all the time, on social media all the time. Go for it. As long as you're hanging out with other people in person, like [00:43:00] good, good stuff. Yeah. But if you're not doing that, so I, sometimes I think like all the discussions about the social media and the internet, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's a little bit of a red herring.

Like it's about spending time with other people in person and, and young people are doing this less, it could be the internet, it could be the, could be the phones. It could be, you're right. There's just lots of ways to be alone and be entertained these days then in ages past. And that would be the culprit I would point to if we're, if we're worried about things like the loneliness epidemic.

Yeah, absolutely. You gave the example, the really compelling example of the person who they would say, well, you know, I've been trying my best to date. I've been on 50 dates and they're all awful. And that was compelling. 'cause I've, you know, I've heard that in my life personally, I'm professional. I, I'm aware you may not want to give like direct advice, but if someone had that problem was in that predicament, what sort of principles would you want them to understand about dating and relationships to help them move forward and make [00:44:00] some progress with their relationship life?

Yeah, it's tough. I understand that the apps have a role and I guess as long as people like aren't totally hating the apps and that it doesn't feel like a video game, that it feels like it's leading to meeting people in person, then they're, then they're fine to use. And look, the apps have produced a lot of success stories, but if we think about it as a sort of a both and approach, it is worth remembering that there are other ways to meet people.

Sometimes those things take a little more effort on the front end. So you join a club or some sort of team, or you take a class of some kind, right? Or you spend time with friends and other friends, right? So friends, introducing people to friends. Let's just focus on caring, loneliness. Like, well, there you go.

Let's just do that. Let's not worry about where you're gonna meet somebody to date. Let's just hang out with some people in person, and things can evolve from there. If we think specifically [00:45:00] about the apps, I think one of the challenges there is the tendency to kind of maximize efficiency. And what that means is that you like stack coffee date after coffee date, and that really just becomes a resume exchange as if you're hoping to find compatibility in a set of shared interests.

Or look, we both went to, you know, a college and uh, upstate New York or something. And like all that's pretty futile. Like if you're gonna use the apps, if you're gonna go through that effort. Then my advice would be like at least make the dates interesting, like at least do something like active or unusual or something where it's about not directing your attention at each other, like you're interviewing each other, but like what is like a third thing that we could be paying attention to?

I mean, right. I mean, again, not everybody likes going to sporting events, but that's kind of the thing that I'm, that I'm talking about. But anything that gives us a chance to discuss something that [00:46:00] is not like, do you have any siblings? And like, where did you grow up? That stuff can all come later, but none of that stuff is actually important.

It's just easy to talk about on a first date. And what you'll often see is people will talk about these things and they will struggle to find something to connect over, but it's actually very, very hard to connect over that, those kinds of like minute details about a person's life. Yeah, and I, I think that's why people often meet and fall in love at work because in the work context, they don't have to interview each other.

They learn things about each other organically, and they see each other show positive characteristics in an unforced way. Oh, I can see this guy is really competent in his job as a lawyer, or this girl is really competent in her role as a doctor, or whatever it is. And then attraction is just something that comes up unexpectedly as opposed to the kind of data you're talking about where both parties are kind of scanning each other with a mindset that's just not conducive to organic attraction, right?

It's like you and you when you bond over [00:47:00] are like these little things that you could never assess ahead of time. You have like this shared little universe and that's what you're building your relationship around and you know, you get to the small details later and maybe those things end up being meaningful, right?

Maybe it matters that you're both only children or that you both grew up in the Midwest. I mean, it, people can bond over these things, uh, but it's not traditionally, it's not usually where things started. Mm-hmm. When I think about the dating apps, I also think about trying to avoid rejection because. I think normally when people talk about dating apps, they talk about the convenience and the volume.

I can sit in my living room and look at potentially a hundred to thousands of potential partners, and that's usually the reason why people might say they use a dating app. But when Tinder originally came on the scene, a lot of the magic that people fell in love with about Tinder was I, I can't be rejected because you know, I say who I like.

Other people say who they like, and we only find out if there there's a match, right? [00:48:00] Is that a problem? Is this desire to avoid rejection? Obviously it's understandable. No one wants to feel rejected, but again, you go back to our world. Before dating apps, rejection was an inevitable part of meeting people and forming friendships and relationships.

And have we gone too far in our attempts to try and avoid rejection? Should people actively try and, you know, learn to be a little bit more comfortable with rejection when it comes to new relationships? You know, it's a great point, and I hadn't quite put it together. That really, you're right, that is what Tinder did.

Is it just kind of, it made the rejection hidden in a way that you kind of couldn't get away with in the past? You, you would often be rejected. I mean, hopefully it's not too like brutal, right? I mean, it can be, it can be subtle, it can be done subtly, it can be done kindly, but it often had to be done. I mean, maybe you like, you know, did it through friends of friends or something like that.

Like, like I think you [00:49:00] need to move on. I don't think she's that into you. But you are right to the extent that we interpret rejection, not as, she's not seeing the connection here that I do, but rather as a referendum on something horrible about me or horrible about her, or you know, whoever's doing the rejecting, that leads us to a very bad place.

And it would not surprise me if there is something in our culture around what it means to be rejected, how to reject people, how to work through being rejected, that we've lost a little bit and can maybe explain why. You know, then some people turn in a very negative direction when they, uh, when they feel like they've been rejected.

So it sounds like your overall view on dating apps is use them as an introduction tool. Don't overuse them and beware of the kind of trap you can fall into with dating apps. Yeah. Right. I mean, and look, I know nothing about [00:50:00] what it takes to make a successful app or an app that people would want to use.

How do you monetize these things? I have no idea. But in a, a dream world, if the only constraint was, you know what I know about the science, if my goal was just to bring people together, what I would wanna do is have a situation where, okay, you're gonna date this person three times. Okay? So you have to give them three shots.

And they're gonna give you three shots and do three really different things. Like if you gotta do the coffee resume exchange for one of 'em, fine, but do something else. Interesting for the other two. Do something that involves being in a group. I mean, just to, you know, you know, again, my heart is always in movies, but my favorite first date out of all the movies we've covered on the show isn't say anything.

Because what they do is they go to a party. For their first quote unquote date, he takes her to a party. So they actually only interact, I don't know, like 25% of the [00:51:00] time that they're on the date, but they're interacting with other people, seeing how each of them interacts with other people. It's like a whole social landscape happening and I think it's often a great way to get to know somebody is by seeing how they interact with somebody else and then talking to that person.

So, so again, like we sometimes have this view of dating as like, okay, it's you and me in a bubble interviewing each other, but there's like so many other ways to do it. I'd love to talk more about love factually. I love a good podcast origin story. How did that podcast come about? It's funny, I mean, you know, so, uh, Eli Engel and I were good friends.

We go way back and we talk on the phone all the time. Wasn't that long ago. We were kind of lamenting the lack of knowledge about close relationship science. In the broader culture, like what could we do about that? I mean, he's written a number of op-eds over the years. Um, you know, I've tried to promote the science here and there, but not that successfully.

And [00:52:00] so we just kind of had this idea of like, well, you know, we also like talking about movies. What if we talk about movies? But it was like a Trojan horse to actually talk about the science. But we made it like a movie podcast 'cause people would download the movies and then they'd accidentally get the science.

And so we thought like, oh, okay, let's try that. And we started it in our classes as sort of a more interesting assignment. This was in part to combat the rise of ai. So we couldn't quite give the same assignments we used to give. We thought like, well, if we record these podcasts and get people to engage with it, then maybe they won't want to use the AI to the same extent.

And then it, we just enjoyed doing it and so we kept doing it, uh, from there. And yeah, we're about 30 movies in at this point and, um, we got, we got plenty more that we can cover. That's awesome. Well, I, I listened to one episode, which is the episode about marriage story, and I really enjoyed it. Oh, yeah.

What, what do you think Hollywood or mainstream movies in general, what do you think they commonly get very wrong about dating and [00:53:00] relationships that you would like to amend? Well, honestly, one of the fascinating things about doing this project has been how most movies are a mixed bag, and they will often hit things that are right, but get a few things wrong.

And so it's actually been kind of fun trying to pull it apart, like the science would point to this portion of the arc that makes sense, but then all of a sudden this happened. Well, where did that come from? I think a lot of movies. Especially like in the teen movie space, really lean into the idea that there are people that you wanna date and people that you don't.

Right? That there are the dateable people and the undateable people. People you know, again, scientists would talk about like high and low mate value. This often happens too, whenever you wanna layer like a good guy, bad guy story on top of a romantic movie. So, inevitably. That leads to these inferences that like, oh, there are the good relationship partners and the bad relationship partners, and it is [00:54:00] very easy to take this idea to unfortunate extremes.

It is true that some people are initially popular and others are not initially popular, but I think it's very easy to overestimate that effect and also miss the fact that as people get to know each other over time, there's less of a differentiation by popularity. So in other words, when people are getting to know each other, the popular people actually start to look a little less dateable to some people, and the people who were initially unpopular actually start to look appealing to some people.

So it leads to sort of a mixing of made values such that you get to a point where it's a much more. Level playing field. So I think a lot of like the movies in the teen space, they don't quite get at that idea. There are some that do, but I think anytime you're leaning into like a, like a good guy, bad guy, trope, it kind of leads to the [00:55:00] unfortunate assumption that like some people are totally undateable and those people are the villains and nobody should wanna be in a relationship with them.

And that's just not the really backed up by the science all that. Well. What's about the idea of the soulmates? Like as soon as I think of Hollywood romance, I think of the soulmate idea that there's one, you know, special person that we're destined to be with. Is that something you've observed and also the movies you've watched?

Yeah, it comes up from time to time. It comes up in like 500 days of summer. It's a good movie. It's got some compelling ideas in there, but it's also got some kind of out there ideas, and this is one of 'em that it really leans into the idea that there is some sort of force operating behind the scenes that brings people together in a predestined way and that it might lead one to believe that you can sort of trust these destiny forces to guide you to the right person.[00:56:00] 

I do think there is a difference between believing that like two people are destined to be and having a little bit of grace or humility about the chaoticness of the world. And that's a fine line to have to walk. And some movies lean way into the, it was all destined. It was all going to happen this way, and yet it's not the best trope to lean into because generally speaking, when people have strong destiny beliefs, they don't manage conflict all that well.

They interpret, oh, it's a bad sign. Like maybe I should end things. It's almost like they give up their agency. When I think about this, I, I feel like the, the better alternative to destiny is serendipity. So there's an idea that. You know, there is an element of chance, but if you open up your life and open up your behaviors in a certain way, you increase the odds hopefully for something wonderful happening.

And that's like serendipity that you could meet someone and things could go really well in that way. Yeah, I think that's a great way of thinking about it, right? It's [00:57:00] like putting yourself in positions where things can happen. Is a great idea, but believing that, I mean, especially the idea that there's like one person out there for you.

I mean, often people don't actually think this way in real life. Like if people have a relationship that they care deeply about and that relationship ends, the vast majority of people with time will be able to get over it and move on. We just covered Titanic and in fact like that one just came out and one of the things that vex I, I think there are a lot of things that Titanic gets right, but one of the things that vexes me a little bit is her romantic life, Rose's, romantic life.

It didn't really go on. She stayed fixated on Jack kind of for the rest of her life, but then like never told anybody about it and that's a very destiny story. But I don't know. I also think it's kind of a bummer. Yeah. Like she never was able to share that exp, you know, talk about that experience with anybody else.

She was never able to process that [00:58:00] by talking about anybody else like that. That's quite sad. I, I don't see that as romantic at all. So anyway, I like many things about Titanic, but yeah. So doesn't, doesn't Rose end up in a different relationship often? Doesn't she eventually marry and have kids? Yes. Yes.

But she's also very clear, like she never talked to, we, we don't know the guy's name, but, you know, she never talked to him about Jack. So by extension I can infer that she never really talked about the experience of like being a Titanic survivor. Her eventual husband was not in any of the pictures that she puts out.

You know, she brings all the pictures onto the, the ship with her, you know, he's not pictured there. So, yeah, this guy that she knew for three days was the love of her life and they were destined to be, and then like, she doesn't get another shot at that. I just, I just, that's, that's kind of a bummer. And that's not.

What most people would experience major disasters aside. I can't really speak to what the psychology of going through an experience like that was, but generally speaking, people do get [00:59:00] multiple shots at happiness. I mean, it, it is a huge bummer. And then with my psychotherapy hat on again, it's hard for me not to wonder is it so special in her mind because it only lasted three days.

So the fact that it lasted three days allows her Yeah. Kind of encapsulated. 'cause she never, you know, with due respect to Leo DiCaprio Yeah. Fully spent time with him and dated him and saw his flaws and, you know, they were just, it was perfectly fossilized in the in love period of the relationship. Yeah.

Right, right. And she just, she lived with that memory. And maybe as we're running outta the time, but as we approach a close here, what are some of your favorite movies in the romance genre? The ones that you really think nailed it, that. Really delivered some ground truths about the nature of, of dating and relationships.

One thing that's hard for a lot of movies to do is, you know, we only give the highest accuracy marks to movies that really are able to show the full arc of a relationship. You know, many [01:00:00] movies, it's like, oh, people initially meet and then they get married, end of movie. And it's like, okay, but come on.

There was, there was a lot to come and probably a lot that was gonna be challenging, but you just skipped that part. So among the movies that show the full arc, I'm a big fan of La La Land, I think it actually does a remarkable job of showing how two people can get to know each other over time. Through chance serendipitous interactions, the motivated reasoning involved in, instead of seeing a lack of similarity as an immediate deal breaker, actually trying to turn that into something that you can share with another person, the way that they bond over jazz.

But not because she likes it. In fact, she doesn't really like it initially, but he like introduces her to it in a way that she finds appealing. But then it also shows many of the challenges, going back to some of the things we talked about earlier. They sort of set up these patterns in their relationship about what they're striving towards.

And then as he starts shifting his goals about what he wants, [01:01:00] she doesn't really follow him 'cause he's not really communicating what he wants and we see things fall apart. And then at the end we get, I mean, spoiler alert for a 10-year-old movie, we get to see a totally different version of the relationship had they made different choices.

And so I just, I love that depiction because it really does capture the idea that it's about the choices that we make along the way. There was nothing really destined about it from the beginning, but we also see that sometimes things don't work out because people make choices and have goals that pull them in different directions, and that can be very hard.

Yes. I'm gonna have to, I haven't watched that, but that's a Ryan Gosling movie. Yeah, exactly right. Ryan Gosling is kind of the patron saint of our podcast. But yeah, I think it holds up very well. I mean, you gotta like musicals at least a little bit to get into it, but, but I think that one's pretty good.

So the movie I was gonna mention to you, and I don't know if you guys have seen it or covered it, but it's also Ryan Gosling movie. And it's called Blue Valentine. [01:02:00] And for those who haven't watched it, I love this movie because, I mean, it's not pleasant. Yeah. But it's hyper realistic to me and it really shows the contrast.

You know, most Hollywood movies in my experience are really good at documenting the being in love stage, as you said, right up, right up until the point of marriage. And yes, maybe we've worked through some trials and tribulations to get there, but it ends pretty much kind of when the relationship often is just starting to do.

Interesting things. Blue van ine, juxtaposes, the being in love phase with things are really bad phase and what a powerful movie it was. So have you guys covered that one? No, we haven't covered it yet. It is definitely on the list and for exactly the reasons that you described. Some of that juxtaposition is very, very powerful.

And the only reason we haven't gotten to it yet is we're trying not to run through all the great Ryan Gosling movies. We're trying to leave a few on the bone for later. Fair enough. It's been wonderful to have you on. Are there any books that you would [01:03:00] recommend to listeners so they can learn a little bit more about the science of like romance and attraction?

Uh, that's a great question. So a few books I recommend, um, we're recording this in the summer of 2025. My book, uh, bonded by Evolution, will be coming out in February of 2026, so a few months from now. But if you're listening to this and it's after February 10th, 2026, you can check out Bonded by Evolution, my book, another book that I think does a good job of blending.

Dating advice with the science is Logan Yuri's, how To Not Die Alone. She's a dating coach, but she's got a background in behavioral science and so she blends those things together pretty well. And then as a third shout out, um, I'll go with Esther Perel and you know, you know, she's got a lot of great books.

You know, mating in Captivity was a, a big influence on me. So, uh, so yeah, those are a few there that are worth checking out. Wonderful. Paul, it's been so great to speak with you. Thank you so much for coming on. You bet. Thanks so much for having me.