Andrew Huberman interviews psychologist Dr Paul Eastwick on the science of attraction, compatibility, and long-term relationships
Andrew Huberman speaks with Dr Paul Eastwick, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.
Summary
Andrew Huberman interviews Dr Paul Eastwick, whose research challenges many widely held assumptions about attraction, mate selection, and relationship formation. Eastwick argues that the evolutionary "marketplace" model of dating — where people are ranked by consensus desirability and pursue the highest-value partners — accurately describes initial attraction settings but breaks down significantly as people spend more time together. His speed-dating and matchmaking data reveal that both men and women are equally drawn to younger partners, and that men and women show no meaningful gender difference in how much a partner's earning potential or ambition drives their actual attraction to real people they've met — contradicting decades of survey-based findings. Eastwick also presents data showing that perceived similarity matters far more than actual similarity in relationships, and that what people say they want on paper is essentially uncorrelated with who they end up being attracted to in person. The conversation covers the protective mechanisms that keep committed relationships stable, the risks posed by social media and dating apps to long-term partnerships, and the importance of small-group social activity for both finding and sustaining relationships.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The marketplace model of attraction and its limits
Andrew Huberman: There are a lot of theories out there, a lot of speculation about attraction, dating, romance, and relationships, which are separable things. We'll talk about all of them. But one of the semi-dominant themes in the public narrative — and indeed on many podcasts — is a kind of anchoring to evolutionary theory, which, to put it really coarsely, is sort of a market-based theory. People even say "I married up," and they put quantitative measures on people: they're a six, they're a seven, they're a ten in this but a four in that. As a neuroscientist, I hear that and I immediately go to — and again, this is purely theoretical — this sounds very limbic. This is very much like the hypothalamus. This is very much the kind of thing you might expect under conditions of low food availability, low mate availability, a lot of weapons, and very few laws to regulate violence. Meaning men will harm each other in order to get access to mates, women will be deceptive. This is the whole idea. And you step back and you go, well, that's not the world we live in now. We have a forebrain. We can make choices. We can be strategic in the direction of benevolence. We can think about kindness. So it seems we need a revision, or at least a better understanding of what's actually true in 2026 and forward. What are your thoughts about what is not true based on the data, and perhaps what is true about this evolutionary model of dating and relationships?
Dr Paul Eastwick: The marketplace ideas definitely have their place, and they derive from a sensible evolutionary perspective like what you're describing. I think they describe well what happens in initial attraction settings when people are really meeting for the first time. There's a class demo that I do in my undergraduate classes — a lot of people use this demo. You have a bunch of students put a number on their foreheads, held up so they can't see it but other people can. You tell the students their goal is to pair up with the highest value person they can, and they don't know what their number is, but you count to five and then you want them to stroll around the room and try to make mating offers to folks. What you see is that the people who have been randomly assigned a low number start to panic, because nobody will talk to them.
Andrew Huberman: And this is random — otherwise it would be very unethical. But people don't like it. If you get a low number, it's not an enjoyable experience.
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think there is a parallel to what people are experiencing as they're growing up, or maybe even if they're a little older and they're going to a party and they haven't met anybody there. This is an analogy for how people internalize and act upon something that we call mate value. It's supposedly linked to traits that reflect your core desirability — like maybe your physical attractiveness, but it could be other related traits too, like the size of your bank account or your status. What we tend to see is that when people are meeting for the first time, this is a reasonable facsimile of how people behave. But interesting things tend to happen when people get to know each other over a little bit more time.
What then tends to happen is that the agreement required for that study to work starts to break down. That study only works because you can read the numbers on people's foreheads. But if I were to blur that number, we wouldn't see as much pairing up. It wouldn't be as sad and as difficult for the people with low numbers. And in real life, that's kind of what tends to happen. We stop agreeing about who the eights are and who the fives are. People might on average say that you're a six, but if I've gotten to know you over time, there's a chance I think you're a nine. There's also a chance I think you're a three. And so that increase in idiosyncrasy and variability is a really fortunate thing. It's the thing that's going to allow a lot of partners to find each other even if they're not consensually the most desirable people — consensually meaning in the eyes of others.
Andrew Huberman: So even if on average people think you're kind of middling, with enough time people are more likely to find, "Okay, you all think I'm a five, but she thinks I'm a ten." And then what you're crossing your fingers for are these moments where you think she's a ten too. It's this emergence of what we might call compatibility that's been missing from the evolutionary narratives, but plays a core part in explaining how couples get together.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Exactly. And I think what's happening is that if people are spending time together — and I often go back to thinking about what it's like when we're hanging out in mixed-gender groups — we're spending time together and maybe for whatever reason I happen to spend more time with this person. We find something interesting to chat about. I see her reacting in situations that other people don't get to see. And so the particular time that I spend with her ends up being the material that causes my opinion to diverge from everybody else's. So everybody else might be like, "She's not all that great." And I think, "But you weren't there when we were hanging out talking about some family challenges that I had" — or talking about problems at school or problems with other friends. She was supportive and listened to me, and then I was supportive and listened to her. That reciprocity through a unique experience with another person — a lot of times this is where initial attraction comes from. It sounds a little squishy. It doesn't sound like the sexy form of attraction that we often think about, but what we see in our work is that a lot of times this is how it happens. It takes a little while, but attraction can form when two people spend that time together, pulling unique things out of each other.
Idiosyncratic attraction and the limits of consensus desirability
Andrew Huberman: So many things come to mind. The first is the question of who and what others are looking at. It seems like one of the less evolved aspects of self — not in the evolutionary biology context, but in the life maturation sense — is when we are not thinking about what we actually like and don't like, but we're paying a lot of attention to what other people like and dislike as a barometer of what we should do. That can be very informative in healthy ways, but when it really comes down to it, it's a potentially very toxic aspect of human nature. What I hear you saying is that at some point there's a kind of dating, romance, and relational maturity that people come to where they're really able to sense what they actually like and they're able to put the blinders up to how other people are necessarily behaving. The words that come to mind are "junior high." The junior high school dance is kind of the first time most kids are starting to hit puberty, and there's a lot of recognition of others — who is cool, who's not cool, who's getting attention, who's not — and we're all pretty immature in junior high. Has this been looked at in a structured way? Are there adults who are good at ignoring the consensus, and are they able to find mates and set up relationships more readily than people who are paying a lot of attention to what other people like?
Dr Paul Eastwick: I am sure that there's considerable individual variability in how people react to what's going on around them. Sometimes you see this phenomenon called mate choice copying — you kind of look to see who's attracted to somebody, and if everybody's attracted to this person, there must be some signal there. I totally agree it's a very junior high way of thinking about this whole process. But I think a lot of what is happening is that if people are spending time together, and maybe for whatever reason I happen to spend more time with this person, we find something interesting to chat about. I see her reacting in situations that other people don't get to see. The particular time that I spend with her ends up being the material that causes my opinion to diverge from everybody else's. So everybody else might think she's not all that great, and I think, "But you weren't there." A lot of times this is where initial attraction comes from.
Andrew Huberman: I'm thinking about movies, and there seem to be at least three bins. One is "you're awesome, I'm awesome, let's get together." Nowadays, I think the kind of royally celebrated couple is the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce couple — people are like, they're both winners, they're both super attractive, they're both super successful, and it's very hard to say anything except "wow, they totally belong together." There's a sort of consensus there.
Then there's the breaking of that model — the very '80s thing where the athlete pairs up with the nerd. And then the third model is "you're screwed up and I'm screwed up, but we're really good people" — like the movie True Romance, where she's been a call girl for three days and he's someone who was paid to take her on a date. They fall in love, leave their professions, go on this semi-crime spree that really demonstrates their immense love and devotion to one another. The whole notion is "you're so cool" — they both think the other person is super cool, don't care about their past, and kind of enjoy the fact that they're both from hard-scrabble backgrounds.
What's so different about those models compared to today, where I hear this notion that everyone's competing for the same small number of people? It's like saying everyone's supposed to like the same top three songs even though you might not even like that genre of music.
Dr Paul Eastwick: The apps absolutely pull for this. When you look at who gets the right swipes and who receives messages on the apps, it's the most popular people. Folks have claimed that it's one of the most unequal markets in the world — basically a kleptocracy, the extent to which it's skewed, where the rich, quote unquote, get all the right swipes at the top. But regular acquaintance is not nearly so dramatic. One example I like to use is that if our job was just to evaluate whether somebody standing in front of us was hot or not — somebody we'd interacted with briefly and we're making simple binary judgments — you and I are going to agree about two-thirds of the time. That's better than 50/50, but it's far from 100%. I think that would surprise a lot of people. There's a reasonable amount of disagreement there. That's already starting to set the stage for us not necessarily pursuing the most appealing person, because if there's disagreement, that means there's a chance you're going to go for this person, I'm going to go for that person, and it levels out the playing field somewhat. I don't think the influence of attractiveness ever goes away — there's always going to be an unlevel playing field to some extent — but the more that people spend time together getting to know each other, it reduces some of those market forces that give the desirable people all the advantages.
The "aliquoting" story and how unique moments seed attraction
Andrew Huberman: The reason junior high seemed so dreadful in my memory — and I had a good time in junior high school, but it was largely, at least for me, the fact that people in my peer group were hitting puberty at different rates. There was a kid in our town who I think went on to not become a professional soccer player, but he was just fully developed by the eighth grade — facial hair, fast, legs like tree trunks, and he could move. It was completely dangerous to have him out on the field with the rest of us. He was respected, adored, admired. And it was very context-dependent.
I think you and I are both scientists. Coming up, you spent a lot of time in labs. I never forget there was a romance in a neighboring lab that none of us understood. I remember asking my friend who was in this pairing, and he said the attraction for him — although she was also attractive — the hook was her prowess at aliquoting. There's a thing you do with antibodies in labs where they come in and you have to put them into little tubes. Apparently it's really hard to get good at. But apparently he walked in one day and she had a bunch of these little tubes stuffed between her fingers and she was just aliquoting really quickly while talking, and from that moment he was just smitten.
Dr Paul Eastwick: That's beautiful.
Andrew Huberman: They actually have children. He's a professor. They have children together. They seem very happy. I think anyone would say they're both attractive people. But their pairing seemed not predictable by any other external metrics. And the fact that something so specific was the hook, and that opened up into what turned out to be a long-standing marriage with kids, is kind of wild. But is this uncommon? Because what you described before is kind of like this — there's something unique that makes it feel like there's a special attraction that indicates something, that opens up to a special discussion, and then there's this kind of intimacy that they share around aliquoting that was spawned by aliquoting.
Dr Paul Eastwick: This is an incredible example. If we're talking about couples, I think most people would find this idea intuitive — if you ask somebody what it is that they love about their wife or husband, if you get them talking for long enough, you'll get some idiosyncratic details, some stories. Maybe if they're really forthcoming, they'll give you the in-jokes and they'll explain the moments that made them feel something special for this person. What I'm suggesting is that those moments — the creation of a narrative with another person — go back earlier than we think. A lot of times what we're doing when we're trying to figure out if we're into somebody, yes, we look at how they look visually and we take in all that information and it matters a lot. But we're also talking with them, forming little stories. If you have a little bit of good banter, that means when I see you at the party next week, I'm going to want to sit next to you and see if we can recreate that moment. And that's often where attraction is coming from.
I think that's why the apps are so hard — because they turn it into an interview where you're trying to impress other people with your traits. And traits are important, but it's not the life of the thing. The life of the thing is the little stories and moments that two people are sharing, and that's something that people can be doing more of.
The phases of dating: impressions, desire, and compatibility
Andrew Huberman: I'd like to divide this process that we call dating, romance, relationships, etc. into some pieces. We're talking about impressions that either seed or don't seed desire for more time — so, interest — and then broadly, compatibility over time. Let's spend some time on impressions that lead to desire. Which ones are meaningful? Which ones aren't? Which ones can be a bit misleading? The compatibility over time piece is the one that is really hard. If you just look at the statistics on marriage, let alone other relationships — it's not a bleak picture, but the numbers don't play out into "if people get together and make the commitment, most of the time it works out." So what do the data say about what people are picking up on as really valid cues that drive real desire, as opposed to the "great on paper" kind of thing?
Dr Paul Eastwick: The early phases especially are just naturally filled with a lot of uncertainty, and I think this is a bummer for a lot of people because it can feel like you're really into somebody, or like they're really into you, and then it turns on a dime. Part of that is about searching for signals, trying to resolve the uncertainty. The problem is that it's not like, "Oh, if I get sufficient evidence that you're smart, that's going to do it." What people are trying to do is figure out: do I feel enough of something for you that I want to continue this, that I want to keep going?
But I don't want to act like — because sometimes when people think about the spark, what they think is, "Oh, it's got to be there right away and I've already got to be feeling 100 for this person." That actually isn't what happens on average. Typically, if you look at what most relationships look like and you look back at the beginning, the typical first impression is middling. That's how we feel at first. Just kind of middle of the sky. That seemed all right. It was fine. And then we interacted again — not bad, not over the top. And as we spend a little more time together, "Oh, actually I find him pretty funny," or "I think he's really smart," or "I really like how good a listener he was." What people are often trying to do is get enough moments that fit enough of these different trait categories that they think, "Well, whatever other people say about this person, with me he seems like a pretty sensitive guy. With me he seems pretty witty. With me I actually think he's really hot when he does XYZ." And if you accumulate enough of those, you find yourself keep coming back. So that's how I think about it — this slow accumulation of information. Sometimes people will encounter things like the ick, where there's one moment and then they tip over the edge the other way into feeling like they can't be with this person.
Andrew Huberman: Is that typically women who feel that about men? Do men describe that?
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think men have those experiences too. It is pretty under-researched. And one of the reasons why is because this whole phase is remarkably hard to study. We as researchers are very good at "how do you feel about somebody if you're looking at a picture or if you've hung out for four minutes" — that's what a lot of the initial attraction paradigms look like. And then it's very easy to recruit couples and see what happens to them, what explains why their relationships stay together and why they fall apart. But this period in between — it's my favorite thing to think about and also one of the most mysterious — is what happened from minute ten to day thirty, where now you were really determined to be in a relationship with this person. It usually doesn't happen instantaneously. It's that slow accumulation. It's almost like you've got a window of uncertainty and it's slowly collapsing to a stable impression as people gather a little bit more information. And what you just hope for is that as two people, you're collapsing to a fairly stable impression that is both very positive of each other.
Perception versus accuracy in romantic relationships
Andrew Huberman: Hopefully accurate too.
Dr Paul Eastwick: The accuracy part is interesting. Social psychologists are big into "your perception is your reality," and you see a lot of evidence especially in relationships that people are biased when it comes to their romantic relationships. It can happen in ways like — everybody kind of agrees that your partner's a jerk, but you genuinely don't think they're a jerk, and when they're with you they don't seem like a jerk. So by any measure, your perception of your partner versus everybody else's perception, you would seem to be horribly positively biased for your partner. The question is whether you're wrong. And I land on the side of — from your perspective, you're not. To argue that it would be better to listen to the consensus that your partner is a jerk is sort of like arguing for a sleeper effect, like there's wisdom in what other people know that you don't see. The evidence for that is actually not great. What usually happens in relationships is that people's own impressions and perceptions tend to be the major driver.
Now, that can go the other way too, because we might all agree this person would be the most amazing partner to be with, and yet you've now gotten to the point in this relationship where you don't see it anymore, and you can't unsee the negative things you've seen. And so that relationship can be very hard to salvage.
Andrew Huberman: The statement has been made by someone I know and trust — about all things in life, not just relationships, but certainly including them — that if people just treated their taste in people the same way they treated their taste in food, everyone would be a lot better off. Meaning, if one has the impression that they really like something, they really like this person, then just go for it — unless there's some sort of danger they're not aware of. Music, you hear it, you either like it or you don't. We don't tend to have a hard time defending our stance on those things. But when it comes to relationships, many people are walking around with a lot of that junior high narrative in their mind. They're integrating all this other information in a way that's not helpful. It's not protecting them. In fact, it's just clouding the signal. It's noise. And as a consequence, people are wasting their time and other people's time.
Dr Paul Eastwick: It does take a pretty strong person to say, "Listen, I know that's what you see, I know that's what they say, but this person's great. They're right for me." And when people do that in general, people tend to back off. Of course, there's Shakespeare about this — that tends to be cultural pressure, like "you two can't be together" or the parents don't want it. Some of the greatest romances have been born out of that defiance of the elders, the community. But this is a little different.
I think one of the best situations to end up in is where you're in a new relationship and your friends around you basically think, "We're happy for you, we're going to celebrate this relationship, we support you — we just wouldn't be terribly interested in this person ourselves." That's the ideal, right? Where it's not exceptionally competitive. You're not worried about your friends trying to poach your partner away, but at the same time they're supportive of the relationship, because that support from friends and family does shape how people feel. There's a way to navigate that that doesn't make it a "I'm glad you like my girlfriend, but don't like her too much please." You want to try to find that balance. And that's a tricky thing. I think this is a lot of what people are trying to navigate in adolescence — how can I be part of a friend group and have a romantic relationship and navigate the complexities that come with that.
I vividly remember these junior high, early high school experiences of dating somebody, but also your friends are into this person. Actually, it was a relationship where my girlfriend at the time broke up with me and started dating my best friend. We're all friends now. It's all fine now. But at this moment I discovered evolutionary psychology, I discovered this narrative. And it just felt like such a double-edged sword — how wonderful is it to think about how people have been navigating these challenges for tens of thousands of years, like I'm not alone, I'm not the first person to experience this. And then to also read at the same time, "Oh my god, this reflects something true about my deep underlying value." Those two things together, weirdly, were what got me hooked on this. The feeling that evolutionary psychology is fascinating and really bleak at the same time.
Gender differences in commitment and social support
Andrew Huberman: I'm glad you brought up these gender differences because I think you're hitting on one that as a relationships researcher I would say is the big one. And the big one is that women generally are better at cultivating social support from all corners of their lives, not just their romantic partner. Whereas for men, it's largely their romantic partner where they're getting most of their support and intimacy needs met. This is why you see across the full arc of a relationship that men are always a little bit more eager than women.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Eager in all the ways. I want to be in this relationship in the first place. I'm more likely to say "I love you" first. I'm more likely to want to be exclusive. I'm more likely to want to take things to the next level. Men are more willing to do that — counter to all this stuff about men being non-committal. There are new review papers on this that are really compelling, and it's kind of the same effect size across the board. It's medium-sized, but it's just right there all the way through — through breaking up. Who's more likely to want to break up? It's women who are more likely to want to break up. Men are more likely to be thinking about their exes.
Andrew Huberman: Not while they're in a relationship.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Right. Now it's over. The reason put forward for this, and I find it very compelling, is that men just don't quite have their social lives put together in the same way that women do. They don't have a lot of male friends. Activity-based friendships are the dominant theme, but men not having connection in other things — the connection that you feel to your male friends and co-workers can be very deep, they're important, they're like family. But it's a very different kind of — I don't think of the word intimacy, I think of trust. And it just makes good intuitive sense that if you have something you want input on that has more of an emotional undercurrent, you would bring that to your romantic partner.
Andrew Huberman: So here's the question I would pose. If something went wrong, do you feel like you have a sense that there are other people in your life — not your partner, but other people — that you could go to if you needed to?
Dr Paul Eastwick: Definitely.
Andrew Huberman: See, that is the essence of social support. It's actually not literally whether you take people up on it. It's whether you have a vague sense that people are around. That's the part that matters. That's the part that gives us the health and well-being benefits. It's like a bank account you never have to dip into — it just gives you the sense that you could.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Just the feeling that it's there is really the core component. And I think there are a lot of men out there that don't feel like they have that social support bank account — a close male friend, female friend, platonic or family. Who's more likely to lose touch with siblings? I'm willing to bet that's more likely to be men too. I think this is part of the modern challenge of masculinity that worries me. I think men can cultivate it through all the activity-based things — I did that myself throughout my 20s and 30s. I could not count the number of kickball and softball teams I participated in. I did that not because I wanted support. I don't think I ever got emotional and cried in front of any of those guys, but I knew they were there, and that if I ever had to go to that, I could.
Andrew Huberman: I think most guys would probably say that scene in the movie The Town, where Ben Affleck walks in and says, "Listen, we got to do something. People are going to get hurt. We got to do this. And you can't talk to anybody." And his friend's only response is "Who's driving?" — that's kind of the essence of what a lot of men want and idealize in male friendship. The loyalty. The trust. Friends who aren't going to ask too many questions, who can hold in the center of their mind without any long preamble that their friend needs something and they'll do whatever it is because they love them.
The heteropessimism problem and what the data actually show
Andrew Huberman: I'm realizing there's a big contradiction — not in the scientific literature, but in the public perception. One common narrative these days is that men failed, they didn't step up, they weren't committal. And then you hear the other narrative that women are very extractive, they'll trade up. And I saw something on Twitter/X some time ago that just stopped me in my tracks, which said: "The way you destroy a society is to get the men and the women to hate each other" — or maybe I'd underwrite that as distrust each other. We need to move through this. What do the data say? For instance, do you think that the dynamics on dating apps — the algorithms, which are clearly designed to make the company money — do you think those are more female-driven or male-driven algorithms?
Dr Paul Eastwick: My understanding is that when your goal is getting users and getting engagement, you're probably trying to bring more women in, because my understanding is that there are more men on the apps. But engagement is the goal — that's what the apps want, you spending time on it, and then they want you to get the fancier features. I expect that when you're trying to create an app for heterosexual men and women, you're going to have to somehow marry those two challenges.
One of the bigger gender differences we see in the whole realm of sex and relationships is in swiping behavior — women will swipe yes on about 5% of the men they see, but men swipe yes at about 50/50. That fits the evolutionary narrative about men being less selective. But to my mind, the whole thing around "men want to spread their DNA" — okay, I believe in evolutionary biology, but there are a lot of modern features that make accountability for offspring and things like that very real. It's not like men can run around just having kids with anyone and afford all of that.
What's so interesting about these gendered dynamics is that they tend to get the largest gulf between men and women in the situations that are the weirdest. For example — and this is a real study — you recruit confederates, someone working for the experimenter, and they go around campus and ask people, "I've noticed you around and I find you very attractive. Would you like to go to bed with me?" When you do this, you find that men are about 20 times more likely to say yes to that request than women. Very few women say yes, but a reasonable number of men do. But if you do one little tweak — you ask about the last time something like that happened in real life, in a context where you knew people — the gender difference is not 20 times more, it's two times more.
Andrew Huberman: What do you mean?
Dr Paul Eastwick: Like, the last time somebody among a group of friends asked, "Hey, do you want to go hook up?" — how much more likely are men to say yes than women? Men are still more likely, but they're only twice as likely rather than 20 times as likely. I would conclude from this that approaching strangers in a romantic or sexual context is very very tricky, very challenging, and it is a weird modern skill — because we actually evolved in environments where you didn't actually meet that many strangers. So if some people are adept at that, God bless. But for most of us, we had to get to know people over time. We needed that long process to make a good impression on somebody, because most of us are not so appealing that people fall for us the moment they see us.
What I would tell hypothetical incels is: I think part of the problem is that you're locked into a way of thinking about sex and romance that it's about a pickup line or an initial impression. I think women are more interested in casual sex when it's somebody they kind of know and have been friendly with for a while and have had some good banter with. If you surround yourself with people — not just women, but also men — and you meet friends of friends, you're going to find more opportunities that way. It's a shift in the mindset about how we meet people and how we get to know them. Hitting on strangers is low yield, very difficult. Spending time with friends is time-consuming, although it's enjoyable in and of itself, and it's ultimately going to be better for more people.
Andrew Huberman: I'm very grateful that you're bringing up this notion of spending time in small groups, probably around certain activities. That's how people used to meet. One of the reasons the Coldplay concert affair went so viral is that the woman was head of HR — so there were a number of ethical violations independent of the relationship itself. In laboratories, many people have coupled up. My advisers were always really adamant that no one should do that. My graduate adviser actually suggested I not even date within our graduate program — peer to peer. For the most part I obeyed, but I was so focused on work. And of course there are certain married couples nowadays with kids — several of them — that met in the lab just by proximity, interest, and who knows, aliquoting prowess.
But unlike our earlier discussion where other people's input can be kind of toxic to the process of understanding one's own sense of taste, this is a context in which you can get a read of how someone behaves, their values, their reflexive levels of kindness or lack thereof with other people. You get a lot of data in a setting that you're hopefully enjoying yourself in anyway. That seems very valuable.
Speed dating, the 36 questions, and the value of self-disclosure
Andrew Huberman: So we're talking '80s movies and '90s movies. I'm going to throw out Say Anything. Do you remember Say Anything?
Dr Paul Eastwick: Absolutely.
Andrew Huberman: The John Cusack lead character asks out the Ione Skye character, but where they go on their first date is absolutely fascinating. They go to a party. They're clearly going together, but they don't spend the whole party attached to each other and they're not interviewing each other like they met on an app. They're actually kind of watching each other as they float through various groups. And one of the moments where Ione Skye starts to fall for John Cusack is when he's actually looking out for some of the other folks there — like taking their keys away so they don't drive. The idea of watching how someone behaves around other people can be very powerful. One of his unique qualities was that he's protective of other people and responsible, and he put other people's safety ahead of his own desire to drink that night.
I'm brought to this mildly traumatic experience in high school where I didn't go to any high school dances early on — I was really in the skateboard community. Then it was my junior year of high school, and a now-woman, then-girl, asked me to the Sadie Hawkins dance where the girls asked the boys. We go, and she had something back then where her hands would get really cold. She went into the bathroom to warm her hands and was in there a really long time. I'm standing out there and people are coming up to me going, "What are you doing here? Why are you at a dance?" I said, "So-and-so invited me." And no one believed me. It was the most mortifying thing. I kept waiting for this moment where she would come out and vindicate me. She eventually came back, and I just remember thinking, "I'm either completely outclassed, or this is one of the best opportunities that ever landed in my lap and I'm going to pursue this with everything I've got." So I went with the second thing.
The John Cusack example is a really good one because his character in that movie is a little awkward along certain dimensions. He's certainly not quote unquote ambitious in the typical sense, although he wants to be a great kickboxer. There's a great scene between him and her dad where he's explaining what he's going to do in life, and not in any kind of fluent way, and her family clearly has other plans for her. But it gets to this thing I want to ask about next — this notion of texting in particular. Not even apps, but let's say it's migrated off app, people meet, they exchange numbers, and there's some texting. And this notion of the kind of unique advantage early on that I think can be somewhat misleading — of people who are hyperverbal. And in particular among men.
Years ago when I was on the job market for academic science, a really fantastic neurobiologist who ran a very famous school in Boston's brain science center said to me, "You know, the worst part about the job search process in neuroscience is that it selects for hyperverbal people — people who can present their data, excite people about it, present their vision. And there are so many amazing scientists that just don't know how to communicate their data." He was absolutely right. Some of the best scientists in the world — speaking isn't their forte.
In the realm of text communication, there's a bias toward — can somebody be a good listener in a face-to-face interaction? A guy can just sit there, listen, not interrupt, nod, maybe reflect, say "tell me more," and convey a lot of genuine ability to communicate and bond. Over text, just listening doesn't work. And this is where some people might be screaming, "No, no, no, that's what I want." But there's a strong selection process now for people who can communicate quickly with their thumbs, be witty in writing. The hyperverbal thing has moved to text. Do you think that's skewing things, because the ability to get and keep somebody's interest early on is strongly dependent these days on texting?
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think this is a really good point. I was reminded of some work in the early online interaction space that suggested that actually anxious people get a lot out of being able to communicate with a keyboard or with texting, because they don't get so overwhelmed. So it might be that texting has at least the advantage of reducing some of the anxiety for them — they can take a minute to think about what they want to say. But I also think you're right that the ability to be witty over text, as opposed to the kind of nonverbal listening you're describing, is going to be a special advantage for some people today. So it could very well be skewing things in the way you describe.
There's not great data on this either. But some of the people who have tackled this question — there's a great researcher named Mimi Brinberg at Ohio State. What she does is she gets couples who are together and then says, "Let me see your texts," and gets the whole text thread, with their permission, all the way back to when they first started texting. What you see are some cool things — essentially their styles of communicating start to cohere. It's like a pattern of mutual influence where they get a similar cadence and start using similar words as they're talking to each other. Now, of course, those are the successful cases. What would it look like if we had the unsuccessful cases? I think you're right — we would see that the people who can't match or can't be witty early on, those are the text threads that never become couples. We just have to figure out how to recruit those folks to be in our studies.
Compatibility, shared activities, and what actually predicts relationship quality
Andrew Huberman: If I were to ask a close family member what's great about the relationship she's in, she'll generally talk about the things that her male partner does and the things he is able to do in support that may or may not even require the ability to speak. It's more about what he does. And when we've had conversations on this podcast in the past about relationship glue, it's like, "Oh, one person always makes the bed by the time I'm back from the bathroom in the morning," or "the other person always sets out the coffee." It's the little thing phenomenon. Rarely is it "I love the way he strings together sentences." It's often about actions. That's a kind of window into the difference between the exploration and courting process — where what people do arguably matters more than what they say — and the long-term thing, the consistency and stability of the relationship over time.
So it's a shame that apps don't select for action. The only way to do that would be something where you'd say, "Okay, if you're going to sign up for this app, you're going to go on at least three dates with anybody you match with, and we want to see you dating in very different circumstances where the point isn't always just to talk at each other." I wish there were dates that were like assembling IKEA furniture.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Don't people still go for a hike or go to a show?
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, that's good too, because at least it's talking and interacting, but a different kind. I want physical challenges. Get out of this escape room, stuff like that.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Events that are exciting that you're doing together but also facilitate interaction can be really good. It is very very hard to simulate the patterns of what it would be like to be in a long-term relationship with this person and the 4,000 daily responsibilities that come with that. And I think even when we are really crazy about somebody early on, we try to forecast what that's going to be like as best we can, but we really don't know.
The beautiful thing but also the challenge that a lot of relationships have is that you create this very elaborate structure that guides not just your day-to-day lives and the crap you have to do, but also how you communicate, when you communicate, what you communicate about. If you create a business together, that can create a relationship that starts to feel more transactional, that's maybe less warm, has less opportunity for connection — as opposed to creating a relationship that builds time for fun activities together, for fun experiences. At least when you are interacting, are you able to interact about the fun, silly things that brought you together in the first place?
When people go to couples therapy and it's effective, it's usually because therapists are able to help couples essentially rewind all the bad patterns they've created and go back to when things were good — rediscover what it was that they really appreciated about each other and recreate their relationship from there in a new way. But yes, many of these things are just deeply deeply hard to forecast.
Andrew Huberman: There's always the natural desire to want to know if one's time and energy is well spent. You talked before about this kind of crystal ball question — probing for particular disclosures that people are willing or not willing to make as a perhaps better indication of whether somebody is interesting or appropriate. I realize however that the notion that there's a question or a set of questions that would say "green light" — that can't be true. There's probably some answers that are red light. Everyone knows red light. But it's the yellow lights and not knowing what questions to ask to see if there's a green light path forward. If two people are on a date and they have only a few minutes — kind of a speed dating type situation — and they need to make a good assessment as to whether they'd genuinely like to spend more time with the person, what are the questions they should ask?
Dr Paul Eastwick: I like the questions that are a little bit more offbeat. What people tend to do on speed dates is they want to find common ground quickly. If it's college students, maybe they'll talk about their major. "Do we share a major? No. Where are you from?" They'll try to find something they can bond over, and that can work very well. But I think the core of what we want in an initial interaction with somebody is to take away something that feels at least a little different than all the other interactions we have. And so sometimes what that means is going a touch deeper than people are comfortable with.
In four minutes it's tricky, but if you have a little bit longer — like a regular evening-length date — I really like the 36 questions test. Sometimes it's called the fast friends procedure. These are questions like, "What's one thing that you've never told somebody that you've always wanted to tell them, and what's stopping you?" After you've been hanging out with somebody for 60 to 90 minutes, that is a pretty good way to elicit real depth and give both people a chance to do some reciprocal self-disclosure. Because that's what people connect over — "I feel like I've just heard you. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but I feel like you've just told me something that you haven't told most people, and maybe you haven't told anybody."
I vividly remember falling for somebody when that moment happened. I don't know, man — the internet has convinced us all we care about is sex and hotness. There is nothing like the rush of having somebody tell you something they've never told anybody else. This is the stuff that gets relationships researchers excited, because this is what we see in our data — responsiveness, closeness, building trust.
Now, four minutes is really hard. Four minutes you just got to get a little nugget of something that you want to build off later. Maybe that is your hometown, or maybe it's "Isn't this a weird experience that we're only going to get to chat for four minutes?" But whenever there are routes to go for a little bit more disclosure, I usually advise that people go for it. It will pay off on average, even if it can feel kind of awkward in the moment.
Andrew Huberman: Do you think there's more excitement if one gets the sense that the other person is taking a bit of a risk in disclosing it? Does that mean that people are walking around — especially single people — harboring parts of themselves that they're craving intimacy around, things they've never told anyone that they wish they could tell someone, feel safe enough to tell them? Is that what you're talking about — creating a real moment of intimacy early on that's not physical intimacy? It's like human connection. "I'm a person that's had particular experiences and you're a person that's had particular experiences, and we have these narratives and stories about ourselves."
Dr Paul Eastwick: The science historically has been so focused on traits, and I get it. But humans are stories. We're narratives. We want other people to be privy to that narrative and then maybe eventually be a part of it. I think that is often what can be very powerful. Now for people who are single and want to be in a relationship, I do think that can be the sense that they're lacking. A lot of people are single and are very very happy with their single lives. And I also understand that if you're single and dating, there are a lot of reasons to be cautious. Forming a relationship is a low base rate event. It doesn't happen all that often. It's time costly, financially costly, energetically costly. We don't go around forming relationships with everybody. But I also happen to think that once the ball gets rolling, the pull can be very strong. And part of that pull is this desire to have somebody kind of see me, get me, understand me. The sort of desire to open up and have somebody really get you — it's so core to the relationship science worldview, and I think it says a lot about who we are as a species and how we form mating relationships.
Men and women want the same things — what the data show
Andrew Huberman: You've said in so many words before that men and women essentially want the same things. I think that's going to hit some people square in the face and they're going to say that is so not true. Men just want blank. Women just want blank. I'm on this campaign lately to try and defang the trolls. They seem to have this constant narrative — these people are always bad and extractive, these people are always cold and avoidant. And if those narratives were just constantly posted on the walls and talked about over lunch and whispered in the hallways, it would be very poisonous to the whole environment. And that's kind of what the internet is. Some podcasts will amplify these narratives because they feel juicy and they get clicks. Most people are pretty well-meaning. Most people are looking for good partnership. Nobody's perfect, but most people are looking to at least modify their behavior over time. It's all reasonably benevolent, but then there are these nasty characters out there and we give them so much credit and so much power. So — men and women want the same things. What do the data say?
Dr Paul Eastwick: This was one of the first things I studied when I started looking at attraction almost 20 years ago. In part because I found the gender differences fascinating. It was very clear for decades that if you ask men and women about the qualities they want in a partner, you'll see these differences show up pretty routinely — and they are differences that in the hands of nefarious characters online get spun out into exactly the narrative you're describing. Men will say they care about attractiveness in a partner more than women. And women will say they care about earning potential in a partner more than men.
Now, I'm phrasing that in a particular way — I'm saying what people say they want — because I'm critiquing the experimental paradigms that were used. It usually had people rating a bunch of traits on scales. But we wondered whether that's different from what happens when you're meeting people face to face and you're reacting to a set of people who might be very attractive or of middling attractiveness or not very attractive at all. That to me seems closer to capturing what people actually want. So we ran speed dating studies to try to capture exactly this phenomenon.
I'll make it about earning prospects because it's really the same thing. We have these men and they go speed dating, and some of these women are very ambitious — they're going to be lawyers and doctors — others are a little bit less ambitious. What you'd see is that the men tended to like the women a little bit more to the extent that they were ambitious. It wasn't a huge driver of their liking, but it was definitely there and it was definitely positive. But then when we flipped it and we looked at what the women were drawn to — not what they said, but what they were drawn to — they also tended to like the ambitious men a little bit. And the magnitude of that preference was identical. And it's been 20 years of this, where we've looked at ongoing relationships, we've looked at about 40 countries throughout the world. That narrative plays out every time. There are no gender differences in the extent to which these traits appeal to men and women when they're evaluating real people they've actually met. Online is different. What people say they want is different. But real people that you've at least met face to face seems to dramatically reduce the power of the gender differences.
Andrew Huberman: Fascinating, and runs countercurrent to what many people including myself have heard out there.
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think the key lesson here is: believe your subjective experience when you're interacting with somebody and you're getting to know them. Maybe that subjective experience is, "She's hot, but I am not feeling this." And maybe that subjective experience is, "I know that maybe to some people he looks like he doesn't have his life together, but I really see a spark there." If you trust that experience, I think that's likely to go better. And we don't have an experience to go on like that when it's online. When it's online, it's very easy to put people in boxes, put people in groups, and then make the groups fight each other. And I too am very distressed about all the heteropessimism.
Andrew Huberman: Great term. Who coined it?
Dr Paul Eastwick: I know the year is like 2019, but I forget the author.
Andrew Huberman: It's like "men and women can't get along, how could they get along, they've got different interests and different priorities."
Dr Paul Eastwick: In the close relationships realm, it's not true. And that's the realm I know. Men and women want the same things out of their relationships. Yes, there are gender differences in the thresholds for sex, especially early on, that can be really messy. But overall I see a lot of similarity and a lot of potential for the bonds that men and women form to do great things for people — and women and women, and men and men, and any gendered combination you want to come up with. I think we're pair-bonding creatures. We get a lot of joy and fulfillment out of that. And I want to see men and women find a way to make it work again.
Andrew Huberman: Springboarding off of the heteropessimism term — is there any research on what I'd call homopessimism, which is not the same as homophobia? Meaning, I'm not hearing my homosexual friends, men and women, talk a lot about how dating culture is much worse now. I hear this too, but my sample size isn't that great. So is there pessimism in homosexual dating communities — guys saying "well, guys these days," or lesbian women saying "women these days"?
Dr Paul Eastwick: I don't think that's out there nearly to the same extent. I think the apps did a lot of good in the world for people who felt like their social networks had no options in them — especially for people who might have been living in places that were genuinely unsafe for gays and lesbians, and might have helped them find romantic partners. I always want to be the first one to give the apps credit for that.
Classically speaking, what you tend to see is that the time frame as people form relationships has tended historically to be even longer for folks who are gay and lesbian forming same-gender relationships. And I think part of that is something you might even call a bigotry tax — because if you lived in a place where it was vaguely dangerous to admit your same-sex attractions, you had to be really careful before you started disclosing how you felt about somebody. Rejection doesn't just mean rejection — it maybe actually carries other threats, stigma, loss of jobs. So that's an important difference. And I think the apps were really good at helping people come together in that sense.
Financial status, income, and relationship stability
Andrew Huberman: You mentioned there aren't real big gender differences in how financial status drives attraction. Income level on its own is somewhat informative, but what's more informative is having the additional data point of where they started out. People with money who didn't have to work very hard to get it — it's a different picture. Some people who had to work very hard to make their money are often still in the working-hard mode. The additional question that's useful is: how much free time do you have? A lot of the people I know who have a lot of money don't have a lot of free time. So if people pair up with them thinking they're going to feel very financially secure and have a lot of stuff, that might be true. But how often they're going to see their partner or the co-parent of their kids is an important question.
Dr Paul Eastwick: So many of these attributes that in the abstract sound really good to us — when you actually put them in a person who also has all these other attributes and things going on, you realize, wait a minute, their cutthroat ambition actually wasn't that great, because it means they're never around. For this reason it can be very challenging, especially if you're looking at long-term relationships, to take things like a person's income level and use that to forecast how their partner is going to feel about them. A person's objective income has very very small effects on how their partners feel about them. The bigger effects are things like whether you have the resources to get by as a couple. That can be very challenging for people.
I've seen numerous examples of couples where the man loses his work, and if he's not able to get stable work again reasonably soon, in most of the examples I can think of the couple eventually dissolved — and it wasn't necessarily for a lack of enough resources, families were able to help. My guess is that the challenges are coming more from his genuine loss of identity, loss of self — "what am I going to do with myself?" — and less about his partner thinking, "Oh, now he's no longer a provider." That's just generally my bias from what I see in the science: when tragedies befall us, they affect our perceptions especially strongly.
Stepping back and looking at the broader picture of the data, it used to be true that marriages were more fragile when the woman earned more than the man. But this stopped being true in the '90s. So that gender difference doesn't exist anymore. And I think it's easy to surmise that what's happening there is that people in general have gotten more comfortable with gender-imbalanced relationships. Today, even if on average the man earns more than the woman, in education it's flipped — women, at least in younger couples, are more likely to be more educated than the man in the relationship. And that's not a risk factor. The mismatches in level of education and income don't spell a problem. We just got to get men feeling good about themselves again.
Andrew Huberman: And the data say they're not.
Dr Paul Eastwick: The data that concern me the most are that men — and especially low-SES men — are the ones that feel like their social networks are gone. They don't know where to go to get any kind of companionship. If they're really feeling that acute sense of loneliness, of lack of belonging among real people in their lives, that's the thing I worry about. Because then that's going to affect your sense of self, that's going to affect all of your ambitions, and in really bad cases might push people to some of those nastier corners of the internet.
Age preferences: what the matchmaking data reveal
Andrew Huberman: In the kind of classic pure stereotypical narrative, men who were slightly older had more resources. But apparently, based on your work, it's a myth that women desire older men and men desire younger women. Your work points to the possibility that there are no gender differences in attraction to younger partners.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Let me say that this is one of the more important findings, and it's a big sample size — 4,000. We partnered up with folks who do matchmaking. These are people who are paying for a service because they want to be in a long-term relationship. Within that pool, the men who are searching for dates are older than the women by about four years on average. And they set people up on these dates. So most of the time the woman is going to be younger than the man, but there's a range — sometimes the woman is much younger than the guy, sometimes the same age, sometimes even a little older.
What you'd expect to see is that if men are looking for younger women and women are looking for older men, then when we look at how the age of the partner affects whether you want to go on a second date, it should be the younger folks appealing to the men more and the older folks appealing to the women more. But that wasn't what we saw. We saw that the younger folks appeal to the men more — and by the way, it's not a huge effect, it's not like the gross stereotype that's out there. Men are a little bit more interested in the women to the extent that they're younger. But women are doing the same thing. They're a little bit more interested in the younger guys. They don't say that on paper — in fact, sometimes they're like, "Don't set me up with the younger guys." And then they do, and they say, "Huh, that was interesting. I enjoyed that date. I would like to see him again."
Andrew Huberman: Are the stated reasons similar in any way? For instance, are both groups saying "less baggage"?
Dr Paul Eastwick: I don't know, and I would love to know. I think sometimes when women downrate whether they care about attractiveness or something, I think sometimes they are kidding themselves a little bit — that they actually do appreciate a younger guy who's fit and in shape, or they don't fully appreciate how exciting it would feel to be sitting across the table from a guy like that. That's my best guess.
What's so fascinating about this data set is that look, they're trying to create these couples, but you only create a couple a fraction of the time. Much of the time the people don't really hit it off. But in the couples that get created, the guy was four years older than the woman. And in the couples that don't get created, the guy is also four years older than the woman — because that was what they had in the sample to begin with. So we look around and we see that age difference. That age difference is real, and I'm sure it means something important. But data like this just make me think something else is going on here. Whatever is creating this age difference, it's at least not happening on date one. It's not happening at the initial attraction phase. Maybe it's happening earlier — who puts themselves in the pool. Maybe it's happening later.
Andrew Huberman: What I've heard before — I'm 50, I have some female friends who are dating — they'll say that they do date younger guys, but then the deal breaker is if the guy says he wants kids.
Dr Paul Eastwick: That's tough. And that's a common thing. Actually hear about this more and more these days. One thing that online dating affords is if you've got something like that that's exceptionally important to you, there are opportunities to filter on it. We haven't talked about this too much yet, but you can get into a whole line of research on whether people filtering for things in the abstract matches what's ultimately going to appeal to them when they meet face to face. We find that generally speaking, these things tend to be pretty uncorrelated. So what people think they want doesn't match up with what they actually end up liking once they meet somebody face to face. But you can argue that sometimes that's not a good thing. If somebody really wants kids, shouldn't it be within their power to craft a pool of partners who also want kids? That seems like a reasonable humanistic thing to do. And to the extent that the apps are able to do that, I think that's ultimately a good thing.
Small groups, social structures, and meeting people in real life
Andrew Huberman: Who knows if the news is accurate, because it's not real data, but there's this idea that more young people are going to church — which is a values indicator. People are there for certain reasons, either trying to build on or have certain values that are family, children, morals adjacent if not central. Are there any data that that's a response to the kind of wild west of online dating and social media and the general culture? Even in high school there were subgroups. But the vastness of the internet and social media — even if you state your preferences about what you do and don't want to see — is like a fire hose.
Dr Paul Eastwick: You need some way to reduce it to something manageable. We evolved in an environment where we knew like 50 other people — that's your group. Maybe you knew more than that, maybe 150, some nearby groups, but that's all ages and all genders and everything else. It's a small number of potential partners for you, but you had reasons to interact, structures that were going to put you in contact with each other. And to the extent that church is fulfilling a function like that, I think that's great. And if church isn't your thing, there's a million other things that people can do in any kind of modern urban context that are going to be helpful along those lines. You can join any kind of intramural sports team.
Andrew Huberman: Improv class.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Exactly. Improv classes are amazing because not only is it a chance to interact in a group over a period of time where you don't get to opt out if you don't love somebody right away, but also you're practicing being vulnerable and being responsive. So I think these things are all wonderful. Are people doing it because they're trying to limit the pools to the folks they think will fit what they're looking for? I'll bet some people are doing that. I'll bet that if somebody's like, "I really want to be with somebody who's active, so I'm going to join a running club," or "I want to be with somebody who shares my values, so I'm going to join church" — I think that's great. If I'm being a buzzkill scientist, I'd probably sit here and say it probably actually doesn't matter. Like, join the church, join the running club, join all these things. You're probably more or less equally likely to find somebody that you're going to click with.
Andrew Huberman: It's more about getting yourself in a small group environment.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Exactly. But I'll be the first to say that when it comes to the base rates of these things — if your goal was "in 90 days I want to be in a relationship, what are the things I should do that give me the best likelihood?" — I'm embarrassed to say my field can't answer that question. So in the absence of that kind of specificity, my answer is always just be around people on repeated occasions.
Andrew Huberman: I'm not trying to provide pushback, but I feel like there are certain small-group environments — like church, or a hiking club, or rock climbing — where the culture of that thing provides additional opportunities to grow the relationship with peers. Certain things like a pottery class or pickleball — at face value they don't present a sort of trajectory of a set of maturational stages that you can continue to be in the relationship within. Does that make sense?
Dr Paul Eastwick: Totally. And this by the way is a great reason to not meet people at work. Often times that relationship doesn't necessarily flourish in the context of the work environment. It's not like the work environment makes the relationship grow. I've seen more things split over time if both people work there. Often times they have to move to separate buildings for a variety of reasons. Whereas there are certain things that — since you were talking for a moment there like an evolutionary biologist — we evolved in small villages and small groups where you had peers and elders that provided this positive reinforcement on relationships.
Andrew Huberman: I don't know many women that ask men to marry them in 2026. I'm sure they're out there, but it's still the tacit assumption that men are going to do the asking. So how progressive are we really? It's also true that when people get married, most of the time they stand up in front of other people and state their vows. These days it ends up on Instagram. So there's clearly a feedback that comes from being part of a larger structure that reinforces relationships over time.
Dr Paul Eastwick: And it can be a big "you promised — not just to me, you promised to the whole world." That can be an important source of support too, because then it's that subjective sense that these people have our backs. If we run into hard times, there's a community that's going to be there and support us. And I think you're right on the initial attraction side — having a sense that we're part of this larger collective, there's something about that that feels good and provides structure that can help keep moving things forward.
One place I trained — it might have been UC Davis — all the junior faculty, of which there were many when I first joined, a large fraction were couples in the department or had spouses in other departments. I think more than 80% of those couples ended up divorced.
Andrew Huberman: Wow.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Now we can't — there are a lot of variables there. Fortunately most of them are on good terms. I can't say they ended up with other people in the department — that didn't happen. But I watched and was like, "Whoa, this is interesting." There does seem to be some additional stress of that. So this gets to a question you've actually studied, which is this notion of similarity.
Perceived versus actual similarity
Andrew Huberman: Maybe we should talk more about that because it's a more data-driven question. Perceived similarity matters more than actual similarity. What is perceived similarity?
Dr Paul Eastwick: Perceived similarity is this general sense like "we have a lot in common, there are a million things we could talk about, we share the same values and attitudes and preferences about things in general." But notice the way I'm describing it — I'm not tethering it to any particular attitude or value or preference, because it's so free-floating. I as the perceiver get to attach it to whatever I want. And that affords people a certain amount of motivated reasoning, so that when they like somebody a lot, they will find the similarities there. They will really come to think that what really matters is that we love Japanese cinema and that we share the same politics. Whereas for another couple, "We have different politics, but that doesn't really matter to us."
Andrew Huberman: Does anyone say that nowadays?
Dr Paul Eastwick: People still do. What you see in the political matching data is that the odds that people with diametrically opposed preferences are going to get together in the first place are very, very low. But among the mismatches that do exist, it actually doesn't predict satisfaction all that much. And I think this is why — because you just compartmentalize it. If we match, it's important. If we don't match, "Oh, who cares? Does anybody care about that?" So much motivated reasoning.
So if what I wanted to do was take two people who had never met, assess everything I could about them, and figure out whether they were going to be a match based on whether they were similar — I was probably going to be no better than a coin flip at figuring out whether they were going to click. That's actual similarity. I take things that are true about you without the ability for you to engage in motivated reasoning and say, "Okay, you're an 83% match on all the things I could assess. You two should like each other." When we've done studies like that, you basically get a coin flip every time.
Andrew Huberman: Well, this is why the apps seem totally useless — because if you just pair up "you want this and you want this, I want that too and I want that too," you're telling me it's as good as chance.
Dr Paul Eastwick: It's as good as chance. And look, if there's evidence for similarity on anything, it could be in the realm of demographics, socioeconomic status kinds of things. I've seen some promising unpublished data, but even then those effects are so small. We're going from a 50/50 coin flip to like 53/47. These are small effects across the board, because we get all of this motivational latitude. When we really like somebody, we find the things we have in common, we focus on those, we convince ourselves those are the most important things in the world. And the thing is, who am I to criticize them? Because the people in the happiest relationships — that's what they're doing. They're exhibiting those kinds of biases. It's like stupid human tricks, but it kind of works.
Dating apps, Instagram, and the derogation of alternatives
Andrew Huberman: You want to hear something really scary? Someone I know who would know told me that the biggest dating app in the world by an enormous margin is not Tinder — it's Instagram. And this was very much in parallel to the algorithm favoring communication by direct message. People will say social media isn't social anymore. The real dynamics, the real time spent — if there's a strong correlate to communication through direct message, it's a dating app that's kind of cloaked for many people as a social media app. Of course I use it to teach neuroscience, and this will be on Instagram, so I'm a big fan of Instagram and other social media platforms for teaching and learning. But the majority of the time spent now is not scrolling — it's getting to communications that move to real world and then feed back to social media.
I'm imagining a question because you study questions people ask on dates. We used to be able to say, "If you were on a deserted island, who would you want to be there with?" Now I think the question should be, "Who's the one person that would get you to not engage with anyone else in the world?" In other words, set down what you called — and I've never heard this before — the derogation of alternatives. In some ways, committed partnership is about setting aside the idea that there might be somebody better for us. And Instagram is the opposite of the deserted island. A former guest on this podcast who happens to be a divorce lawyer, James Sexton, has talked about the fact that many of the divorces he's involved in started with an innocuous communication — starts with a like, starts with a conversation, starts with a commonality that's sensed, and then the derogation of alternatives emerges and eventually the relationship dissolves.
Dr Paul Eastwick: We think about how people handle alternative partners. If you're in a purportedly monogamous relationship, this is a challenge that relationships are going to face. I sort of see these twin streams happening at the same time. What you see in general is that for people who are in relationships — and especially if they are happy in that relationship — any alternative partner you can throw at them, they will tend to think that alternative partner is pretty weak sauce. They think that person is less desirable than any other metric you might want to come up with for how desirable that person actually is. That's what we mean by derogation of alternatives. They're coming in up here, but because I'm partnered with you and I'm happy with you, I see them as less desirable than they actually are. Side note: that's one of the reasons why the marketplace metaphor starts to break down, because people actually start to become bad barometers of what is quote unquote good. You stop seeing this alternative's actual value because you're so happy with the person that you have. This is a real defense mechanism that people have.
Andrew Huberman: Is it a defense mechanism, or is it protective of a healthy monogamous relationship?
Dr Paul Eastwick: Yeah, yeah. In our jargon we say defense mechanism, but I mean that in the best possible way. You're defending the relationship.
At the same time, people also do this thing that you might call playing with fire — but it's more like playing with what really seems to be a harmless book of matches. "I'm just messaging these people. What's the big deal? This isn't going to go anywhere. We're just chatting a little bit." And things escalate.
Andrew Huberman: One of our former guests on this podcast who's immensely popular in the dating, relationships, and romance sphere is Esther Perel. And I think the perception about some of her messaging — whether accurate or not — is that there can be some value to someone not feeling as much chemistry in a relationship going to a bar, flirting a bit, and then some sense of sexual confidence is restored and their husband is then attracted to them differently again. And you know the more crude phrase, "Doesn't matter where you get your appetite as long as you eat at home." None of these statements come from me, although my mouth is saying them. These are things you hear out there. Directly in opposition to what you're saying — which is not to say what you're saying is wrong. I just think there was about a 20 or 30 year period where people kind of assumed that monogamy could thrive despite the inputs, and could thrive perhaps even better if people acknowledged this aspect of self that is still attracted to other people. What you're talking about is really more of a protective cloak around the commitment.
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think about it as the protective cloak that's sort of there as a baseline, but then signals will get through sometimes — because you're messing around on Instagram, or because you went to the bar with your friends and there was this cute guy who was chatting you up. And the evidence there too — I interpret it the way Esther Perel would interpret it. What you see in the data also suggests something like a protective mechanism. If you look in studies where they ask people to have a sexual fantasy about their partner and then measure how much sexual desire they feel for their partner — it has gone up. That's pretty straightforward. Now please have a sexual fantasy about whoever's in second place, not your partner. Then you start having sexual feelings for that person and you start having sexual feelings for your partner at the same time. So it's exactly the metaphor you're describing — when we feel a sense of attraction, it can rebound onto our partner. And by the way, it doesn't happen in the reverse. Your current partner, for most people in happy relationships, holds a special position where even when there is a little bit of a threat and you've noticed somebody, it rebounds somewhat.
Andrew Huberman: You're saying it rebounds — it's a fuel for the relationship the way that Esther Perel and other people have talked about. That's a real thing.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Yeah. Recent studies — I can point to one or two, all within the last few years.
Andrew Huberman: This is going to be very uncomfortable for some people to hear — that their partner may come home immensely attracted to them because they had some sort of interaction during the day of either being attracted to someone or receiving signals of attractiveness. Where I am a thousand percent with Esther Perel is that the danger, the problem, is not that your partner was sexually attracted to somebody else. The problem is usually in the escalation — are they now repeatedly hanging out with them and having conversations that feel secretive? Those are the warning signs, because then what will start to happen is that the protective layer that people typically put around their partners will start to erode, and that's when people are at a greater risk of infidelity. It's usually a process like that. The simple fact that we can be attracted to other people is not a problem for the average relationship. It's the repeated follow-through on that attraction that becomes a problem.
And that's something that evolved in recent years — there used to be far more transient interactions that would never resurface again. You sit next to someone on a plane, you'd have a conversation, there might be attraction, but you'd never hear from them again. Nowadays, there's almost always an opportunity for people to follow up and connect. That's what James Sexton is referring to when he talks about social media being an attack vector on a relationship.
Dr Paul Eastwick: It's tricky. I don't recommend using that sort of process to bolster your relationship. I guess if you're going to do it, try to do it by watching somebody — if you're a man who's with a woman, just ask her what actor she has the hots for and be kind enough to watch a movie featuring him. Maybe that's a way to make this work.
Andrew Huberman: Some of the strongest and happiest couples that I know — I know very little about their dynamics, which is kind of an interesting thing in its own right. But some of them seem to have a pretty relaxed rapport around, "Oh yeah, my spouse really likes that actor or actress." It's just a thing that they understand, but it's over there. It's at a distance. It's not a looming threat.
Dr Paul Eastwick: It's very different if it's about somebody that you both know and spend time with. It's much more threatening in those cases. And I think that's also part of why the derogation process happens — because that threat feels very uncomfortable. Even if it's your own attraction, you kind of want to downplay it, because the thought of what would it mean if you're with the wrong person, or what would happen if this thing spiraled out of control — it's upsetting for most people. We take all this time to build a relationship up to be this thing that we really value, that's a central part of our lives. The thought that it could disappear at a moment's notice because of a mistake we would make — it can be threatening to most people, even if we're imagining ourselves engaging in the actions that would bring things to an end.
Mate value, self-worth, and the limits of the marketplace metaphor
Andrew Huberman: I heard a really scary story that may or may not be informative. I was going to a gym and I had a truly just platonic friendship with this woman. Back then, not a lot of women lifted weights — it was kind of reserved for guys or for female bodybuilders. She liked lifting weights and was super fit, a super accomplished athlete now. One day when we were leaving, she was really upset. I was like, "What's up?" And she said, "All these guys kept coming up to me." I said, "Well, that's happening all the time." She said, "No, they were all really unattractive." I said, "Okay, well, you're good at dealing with that." She was very skilled — very beautiful then and now — very skilled at saying "thanks, but no thanks." And then she said something absolutely shocking to me that I've shared with other female friends and some men, and they always go, "No way." She said, "I feel like I have to go flirt with a really attractive guy now."
And it was clear that despite being incredibly attractive and incredibly accomplished, she was questioning her own value — because the guys that were approaching her were in her mind very low value, unattractive. My interpretation was, "Okay, guys, the next time a really attractive woman walks up to you and seems like she's chatting you up, you don't know that it's actually about you." And years later I observed basically the same dynamic, but she was married. She said, "If a bunch of people hit on this other woman too, I sort of feel like I have to go get a clear perception again of whether or not I could be with an attractive guy." And now granted, she's married to someone anyone would describe as super good-looking, and they have a super stable family. I've been perplexed by it for a long time. If a lot of really attractive people of the opposite sex start talking to you, you perhaps start to wonder if something important is going on there.
Dr Paul Eastwick: The part of the story that's the most head-scratching is that they're in relationships. Shouldn't they be getting positive feedback on a regular basis? One of the reasons that scientifically I am out here questioning the usefulness of the mate value construct is because I know that people of quote unquote low value can have absolutely fantastic relationships, and people of quote unquote high value can have absolutely terrible relationships. I think one of the strongest, most resonant things that mate value does for us — or the way we experience it most acutely — is indeed in the attention we get from strangers, or the junior high type scenarios that we talked about. We do have a level of attractiveness and it changes as we age. There is a consensus out there about how desirable we are. And that consensus is not going to stay exactly where it is. It's going to shift. And you might be in a relationship and be very happy with the person who unambiguously thinks you're a ten. And yet still wonder, "What does everybody else think? Do they think I'm a seven? Do they think I'm a four? What has happened to me?"
So I totally get that experience of "how am I coming across to the world? Is it less than I thought it was?" And the only great information you have is how strangers respond to you. It's sort of a funny way of flipping all of this stuff around, because again, as a relationships researcher, my bias is always: your husband thinks you're a ten, you think he's a ten, you won the lottery. That's it. You did it. But I acknowledge there can be cases where we still wonder about what strangers think of us, and it might matter to our sense of self-worth and sense of who we are. So I'm not going to judge it, but it is a fascinating flip of the way I typically think about these things.
Andrew Huberman: It makes me wonder whether there's a healthy compartmentalization that we could adopt as a society. Not saying that anyone can be attracted to anyone and therefore commitment isn't real. Nor is it saying that when you're in a committed relationship it's a complete black box. But maybe if people understood that those are two different things — sometimes we refer to it as the shiny object — that's an aspect of self or an aspect of wanting that's real, but maybe there's a way to compartmentalize it so that it has the potential to be toxic to a relationship. But acknowledging that it's real, that it's part of our wiring, might diffuse some of its power.
Some of these couples have where they're like, "Oh, you get a hall pass" — which is never going to happen, right? It's a hall pass that exists in this alternate universe where the other person could actually sleep with someone.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Be careful with the hall pass notion because I don't know where that could lead.
Andrew Huberman: Not a protocol I suggest. But the parallel that comes to mind is — if you're in Los Angeles long enough, you get to know some people who are actors. From time to time you'll run into somebody, male or female, who was a spectacular actor, had an amazing run on a comedy series or movies, and they're no longer working. And it's a bimodal distribution. People who are happy and content and focusing on their life and can see "that was the younger, more attractive, working, funny, sexy version of me" — versus the tortured "I'm not getting work, the work is not as good as it used to be." And I've seen this with people who had fame young for other reasons, in sports and things like that, and they are crushed. What you want to say is, "Just realize that you have this awesome aspect of self that doesn't live in you right now anymore, but it's still you. You got that."
Dr Paul Eastwick: I totally agree. And in fact I'll even go a step further, which is to say I try — I don't always succeed — but I try to think this way about relationships that have come and gone too. Because there's a real tendency to see past relationships that have ended, and I'll even put divorces in this category, and look back and say "I failed." And I think people reinforce this even unintentionally. You go through a breakup and people say, "I'm so sorry, come over and have some ice cream." You go through a divorce and people say, "Well, what happened?" Because they're trying to make sure it doesn't happen to them, because they're interpreting it as a failure. And boy, I think if we give each other a little bit of grace and see it all as, "Yeah, that was a thing that happened. It was real. It mattered in that moment. Things happened along the way. It didn't work out. I changed. You changed." Being able to accept that all of those things are real and have or had value — I'd love to try to encourage people to do that.
Andrew Huberman: My girlfriend and I have a rule. We don't talk negatively about anyone else that we've ever been with. We're very comfortable with the fact that we've had previous relationships, because early on we realized that in the end that's all about our choices. And she said something beautiful — she said, "I'm grateful to all the good and bad things that you've had to experience," and I said the same to her. Because the relationship is great and we bring that. And I do think it was built on the trials and tribulations and great things. I'm careful not to ask too many questions and she's careful not to ask too many either. We have a selective ignorance around certain things — I genuinely don't go down certain lines of inquiry and she doesn't either. And I think it's great. It sets up a "we're here now, this is time from now forward, and where it goes we determine." But histories are real.
I have always admired friends that paired up very early and went through all these developmental milestones together — first jobs, some even graduated college as couples, kids, all this stuff. There's something really beautiful about people who have a long developmental trajectory to big milestones that they reach together. Nowadays, people are pairing up later, getting divorced and remarrying. It's harder to build a common narrative. Is there any data about common narrative — good or bad? Is duration of relationship an indicator of quality and satisfaction?
Dr Paul Eastwick: If we're looking strictly at relationship duration, honestly, on average, it tends to be a bad sign. In other words —
Andrew Huberman: Wait a second. Staying together is bad?
Dr Paul Eastwick: No, no — it just means that over time people were the happiest early on in their relationship than they are today. Kind of a bummer. But let me say this — the narrative, right? The idea that we experienced a lot, that we grew, that we faced all these obstacles, that is huge. So literal time is not the best metric to capture the essence of what you're getting at. It's a sense that "we were in this together and we had a shared story." This is also why breakups are so hard — because not only are you often losing a source of support, perhaps for men it might be their only source of support. Not only do you have to face the possibility of getting back out there, but you're also losing the continuity with yourself. You're losing the stories and the narratives that you've built with this other person, and all of those memories and all of those components.
Andrew Huberman: I think that's why it can feel like a failure — because there's this understandable and very desirable wish that it's like a novel. It's going to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the end is death. "Till death do us part" is written into the script. And so if it ends early, a lot of people don't know how to integrate it into their life story.
Dr Paul Eastwick: The evolutionary biology part — all we have is time and energy. And when we invest, time is running. There's no do-over. So I think people carry a lot of resentment about the time lost. And the energy and the investments that you put into it. But I think it's useful to think about those investments as being about self and story. And to the extent that you can use it as an opportunity to reinvent or recreate — you preserve some of the parts of yourself from the prior relationship but maybe not all of them, there are some things you'd rather let go — to the extent that you can hold on to the good parts of the story, the parts that you want to remember and keep. It's so painful when you're going through the breakup in the first place that a lot of times people just want to take all of it, put it in a box, and get rid of it.
Physical intimacy as a predictor of relationship quality
Andrew Huberman: Hypothalamus versus forebrain. Does the good primitive stuff — sexual attractiveness — outweigh the ability to think about how great someone is? Ideally there's both. But this idea of "the good lover beats stated preferences" — is the real glue in a long-term relationship some form of physical intimacy? Or put differently, can we think and talk our way forward through a relationship that doesn't have that physical intimacy?
Dr Paul Eastwick: Usually, you will see that things like sexual satisfaction or sexual desire for your partner are going to be pretty tightly related to how you feel about the relationship in general. It's an important component. I wouldn't say it's an essential component or even the central component for many people, but for other people it certainly can be. And I do believe in the church of Esther Perel, which is that there are ways of recultivating sexual feelings about somebody that actually are sexual feelings about somebody. It's not like a switch where it's just on or it's off. Sometimes it's about the things we're talking about, the time we spend together, or the time that we spend apart, and that can be rekindling in various ways.
The key thing for me is not to engage in fatalism about the sexual desire component. When the passion fades in a relationship, that doesn't mean it's gone forever. It might not be something you feel every day at 7:00 p.m. anymore. It might be the kind of thing that comes to the fore in certain circumstances or when you're not totally exhausted. I think that's okay. And a lot of relationships can absolutely thrive under those circumstances. You can push it to extremes too, where it's like, "My partner hasn't been sexually attracted to me in years and years." That's going to be tough. And part of the reason it's tough is because you don't have the sexual intimacy. But also part of the reason it's tough is because it's making you feel terrible about yourself. So these things all cascade in various negative ways, but they can also be helped in ways that engage some of the parts of our brains that we're more aware of and have some agency over.
Andrew Huberman: So is it true that rating one's partner as a quote unquote good lover is among the strongest predictors of how positively they feel about their partner? Because what I'm hearing is yes, those feelings can wax and wane, and yes, life circumstances and raising kids and job and stress — yes. And yes, everyone including me acknowledges that. But this idea that it's not important after a certain stage, or that a really healthy romantic relationship can exist without that — what I'm hearing is the data point in the other direction.
Dr Paul Eastwick: No, that is absolutely correct. The subjective sense — and that's exactly the wording that we use — the subjective sense that this person is a good lover, or likely to be a good lover in the case of attraction scenarios, is a very very good sign for how positively you feel about the relationship in general and whether you want the relationship to continue. But again, it's that subjective sense. And that's kind of where I'm getting to this component of — if I start to feel like you're not a great lover, that's going to rebound. So then you don't feel desirable, and it's going to cascade in all of these negative ways.
Andrew Huberman: All seems to converge on: it's an important feature of romantic relationships to cultivate and protect.
What students are asking, and the path forward
Andrew Huberman: Your course on this topic and related topics is incredibly popular for obvious reasons. What are the questions that students are asking most often nowadays? Because I realize that as a 50-year-old male, I suffer from a number of different delusions about relationships, as it is for people in their 20s and 30s. But I think even though the college classroom is not a perfect sample, you're going to get a lot of different people in there — men, women, straight, gay. What are the big questions that people seem to want answered that you're hearing over and over again? Both in the direction of "this is a challenge" and also "what's going right out there?"
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think most of the questions are about — there is often an assumption that "yeah, but these days it's so screwed up." That's what they're saying. You just have this undercurrent. And I worry about this sometimes — that when I teach the science on these topics, there's a general sense of "okay, but this is science from the before times. Today the apps have controlled everything and nobody goes out anymore. What are we supposed to do?" And sometimes I fall back on, "Well, look, these groups and clubs we were talking about — they're still out there. You can still get out there and meet people through these avenues. They tend to work pretty well."
At the same time, I have to acknowledge that the generations are going to change and these folks' experiences will be different than the experiences that my generation had. I do think that these students go out less often. I think they drink less often. I think they aren't spending time socializing in the same way and they're interfacing more with technology — that's probably helping some people and it's probably really making it hard for some other people. So I try to live the example of "hey, I spent time hanging out with people in groups and it was hard and I got rejected and my high school girlfriend dumped me, but I ended up doing okay." And I hope that other people can resonate with that message.
Andrew Huberman: I'm also hearing — perhaps don't just sign up for something, but be the person who organizes it.
Dr Paul Eastwick: I love this. I love this.
Andrew Huberman: Like you can throw a picnic or a party. When I was a graduate student at Davis, every Friday there was a pickup beach volleyball game. And then people would go to a Thai restaurant that was also a bar. That night sometimes ended the next morning. There was a tattoo shop right across the street called American Graffiti — some people got tattoos. Do not recommend, and definitely don't get tattooed drunk. But it was every Friday and there was only one rule, which is that you had to at least attempt to do the bump-set approach to beach volleyball. You couldn't just hit it across. And it didn't matter how bad you were. And then everyone would go for Thai food. Anyone could come.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Things like that happened a lot, and it took like zero planning. It was an email that basically just went out and no one person was in charge. It was just kind of in the collective. They did cooking competition things where you'd meet at someone's house and everyone would have to bring a particular dish and then everyone would try them. These things are super easy to do.
Andrew Huberman: I just feel like there's so much opportunity for that, but the barrier must be really there for people if they're not doing these things. Technology has a pull. And we can say it's the phones, but we could also say it's whatever is on your TV. There are lots of reasons these days for people to stay in that just weren't there 20 to 30 years ago. I'd hope that the message would resonate — the entertainment companies and the apps are trying to keep you away from real socialization. Young people, don't you like rebelling? Rebel against this. Form these groups. Go out and meet people again in person.
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think it's coming back. I really do. I think it was like a long pandemic hangover where we just kind of forgot this part of our social architecture, but it's coming back. It didn't go anywhere. We're still social creatures and we also have these great frontal lobes. And even if you don't feel like going out and interacting with people, you can kind of nudge yourself to do it. I think that's pretty fantastic.
Andrew Huberman: Thank you so much for the work you do. It's very brave because it runs right up against some long-standing theories, of which I still think very highly of a good fraction of the evolutionary biology and psychology literature. I now have to filter it through these new findings. But you've created your own new field basically. And your work is so popular, and I love the optimism that it shines into every interaction. You're not a doom and gloom guy — you're a solutions guy. Really appreciate your time here. Many people will thank you — both those in relationships who learned some things to armor and understand their relationship better, and those who are seeking partners or who are just observing the world around them. So thank you so much. Really appreciate you.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Thank you so much for having me.