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 UC Davis, about the research behind how people form romantic attractions and lasting partnerships.
Summary
Andrew Huberman interviews Dr Paul Eastwick, whose research challenges many widely held assumptions about attraction and mate selection. Eastwick's data show that both men and women are equally drawn to younger partners when meeting face to face — contradicting the common narrative that only men prefer younger mates. His speed-dating studies also reveal no meaningful gender difference in how much men and women value financial ambition in a partner, despite what people report on surveys. A central theme throughout is that the marketplace model of attraction — where people are ranked by consensus desirability — describes initial stranger encounters reasonably well but breaks down rapidly as people spend time together, because individual perceptions diverge sharply from consensus ratings. Eastwick argues that dating apps amplify the worst features of the marketplace model, while small-group social activities remain the most reliable path to genuine connection.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The Marketplace Model of Attraction and Its Limits
Andrew Huberman: 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 immediately go to — and again, this is just purely theoretical — this sounds very limbic. This is very much like the hypothalamus. This is very much the kind of thing that 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. They don't know what their number is, but you count to five and then ask 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.
Dr Paul Eastwick: But people don't like it. If you get a low number, it's not an enjoyable experience. And 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 going to a party where they haven't met anybody. This is an analogy for how people internalize and act upon something we call mate value — it's supposedly linked to traits that reflect your core desirability, like 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. That agreement required for the study to work — the study only works because you can read the numbers on people's foreheads. 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. 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 also think she's a ten. 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.
So many things come to mind. The first is the question: who and what are others 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're 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 for what we should do. That can be very informative in healthy ways, but it's also 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 put the blinders up to how other people are necessarily behaving. The two words that come to mind are "junior high" — the junior high school dance is kind of the first time most kids, who are starting to hit puberty, are recognizing who is cool, who's not cool, who's getting attention, who's not. And admittedly, 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 and don't 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 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. 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." 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.
How Attraction Actually Forms Over Time
Andrew Huberman: I'd like to divide this process we call dating, romance, and relationships into some pieces that may or may not be the right way to segment it. We're talking about impressions that either seed or don't seed desire for more time — so, interest — and then I'll broadly separate that from 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, the numbers don't play out such that if people get together and make the commitment, it works out most of the time. 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 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, they think it's got to be there right away and they'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. 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." If you accumulate enough of those, you find yourself just keep coming back. 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 measuring how you feel about somebody if you're looking at a picture or if you've hung out for like four minutes. 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 is my favorite thing to think about, and it's also one of the most mysterious. What happened from minute ten to day thirty, where now you were really determined to be in a relationship with this person? That's a typical amount of time — it usually doesn't happen instantaneously that people know right away, "This is it, I want to be with this person." It's that slow accumulation.
When we look at it, 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. What you just hope for is that as two people, you're both collapsing to a fairly stable and very positive impression of each other. And hopefully accurate too.
Andrew Huberman: The accuracy part is interesting.
Dr Paul Eastwick: 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 kind 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. 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 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, 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. That relationship can be very hard to salvage.
Andrew Huberman: The statement has been made by someone I know and trust 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. It's just clouding the signal. It's noise.
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.
One of the best situations to end up in is where you're in a new relationship and your friends basically think, "We're happy for you and 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 — 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.
I vividly remember these junior high, early high school experiences of dating somebody but also having friends who were 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 that moment I discovered evolutionary psychology, and it just felt like such a double-edged sword. How wonderful to think about how people have been navigating these challenges — ex-girlfriends breaking up with you for your best friend, this has been happening for tens of thousands of years. And then to also read, "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.
The Science of Compatibility and Attachment
Andrew Huberman: I have a question about how to study these sorts of things. If we're talking about a kind of unique hook — let's assume the people are within the range of attractiveness, they think the other person's attractive, they're dating because they want to find someone, they're not resistant to commitment — the number of histories that people are bringing to that is near infinite. The unique glue is near infinite. So how do you study this process? And to what extent does being aware of what's critical to oneself help lead to better choices in partner choice?
Dr Paul Eastwick: With any relationship, it's almost like you have to hold these two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time. One is that no two people in the history of the world have experienced what we're experiencing right now. And yet there are broad general principles that can explain some of the dynamics of every romantic relationship that has ever existed.
When it comes to broad principles, I love the attachment framework. What's fascinating about attachment is that this is just as evolutionary as all the other evolutionary theories you've heard about online — it's just a different evolutionary theory. This perspective suggests that we are creatures that form bonds with each other. We essentially crave closeness, intimacy, support. We thrive when we get it. We're more likely to recover, we sleep better, we get all of these benefits from close attached relationships. But for some people, or at some points in their lives, we can struggle to have those kinds of relationships — sometimes because we become too anxious about them, we need them a little too much, we become uncomfortable in our own skin. Or we tip the other way: we become very avoidant, overly independent, convinced that we really don't need anybody else.
A lot of people have probably heard about anxious attachment style or avoidant attachment style, and all of that is true. But one thing we know today from studying more couples over longer periods of time is that people's attachment orientations really can change. Somebody can come into a relationship with an avoidant, trauma-filled past, but with enough time with the right kind of person — sharing their unique bond, which maybe science will never crack, but they know all about it — that person will start to become less and less avoidant with time. They'll become more secure. They'll get more of those physiological benefits out of the relationship, more of the support-related benefits, and that can in effect turn somebody into a more secure person.
These are the attachment lessons that I often point to. Two very broad processes — anxiety and avoidance — are always happening behind the scenes, and yet the way it unfolds for any one particular couple is always going to be this weird unique combination of stories and in-jokes and little moments that scaffold up to hopefully help somebody become more secure eventually.
The Aliquoting Story and Idiosyncratic Attraction
Andrew Huberman: I'm thinking about movies. 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 like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce — people are like, they're both winners, they're both super attractive, they're both super successful, and you're like, they totally belong together. Then there's the breaking of that model — the athlete pairs up with the nerd. And then the third model is the "you're screwed up and I'm screwed up but we're really good people" — like the movie True Romance. She'd been a call girl for three days, he's someone whose friend paid for him to be on that date, they fall in love, leave their professions, go on this semi-crime spree that demonstrates their immense love and devotion to one another. The whole notion is they both think the other person is super cool, don't care about their past, and 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? That'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. But regular acquaintance is not nearly so dramatic.
One example I like to use: if our job was just to evaluate whether somebody standing in front of us was hot or not — somebody we'd interacted with briefly, 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%. 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 those market forces that give the desirable people all the advantages.
Andrew Huberman: As a neuroscientist, 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 — was her prowess at aliquoting. There's a thing you do with antibodies in labs where you put them into little tubes and freeze out a little bit. 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. They actually have children together. He's a professor. 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.
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, which indicates something that opens up to a special discussion, and then there's this intimacy 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 I ask somebody what it is 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 — it goes 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 with.
Speed Dating, First Impressions, and the 36 Questions
Andrew Huberman: If two people are on a date and they have only a few minutes — 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, or where they're from, and try to find something they can bond over. That can work very well. But 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. 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 — 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 think you've ever told anybody this before, and it is such a rush. 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. In four minutes you just got to get a little nugget of something that you want to build off later. Maybe that is your hometown, maybe it's just acknowledging, "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: Does there seem to be more excitement if one gets the sense that the other person is taking a bit of a risk in disclosing it?
Dr Paul Eastwick: Again, the science historically has been so focused on traits, and I get it, I understand the evolutionary focus on traits. 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.
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 very happy with their single lives. And I also understand that a lot of people who are single and dating — look, there's 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. But I also happen to think that once the ball gets rolling, the pull can be very strong. Part of that pull is this desire to have somebody see you, get you, understand you. The 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.
Gender Differences: What the Data Actually Show
Andrew Huberman: You've said in so many words 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. 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. It was very clear for decades that if you ask men and women about the qualities they want in a partner, you'll see differences show up pretty routinely — 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 reacting to a set of people who might be very attractive, or of middling attractiveness, or not very attractive at all. That seems closer to capturing what people actually want.
So we ran speed dating studies to try to capture exactly this phenomenon. We have men going speed dating, and some of the women are very ambitious — they're going to be lawyers and doctors — while 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 definitely positive. But then when we flipped it and 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.
It's been 20 years of this. We've looked at ongoing relationships, we've looked at around 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 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.
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: That's a great term. Do you know who coined it?
Dr Paul Eastwick: I know the year is like 2019, but I forget the author. It's like men and women can't get along — how could they get along? They've got different interests and different priorities. 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, and 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. 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.
Men's Eagerness to Commit and the Social Support Gap
Andrew Huberman: I'm glad you brought up gender differences because I think you're hitting on one that as a relationships researcher you'd say is the big one.
Dr Paul Eastwick: 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 — that's where they're getting most of their support and intimacy needs met. Probably the person who, at least for a while, is mostly in their corner. And this is why you see across the full arc of a relationship that men are always a little bit more eager than women.
Andrew Huberman: Eager in what sense?
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 all the way through to 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.
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 or other sources of connection.
Andrew Huberman: Could it be that the connection I feel to my male friends and co-workers is very deep — they're important to me, they're like family to me by now — but it's a very different kind of thing? I don't ever think of the word "intimacy." I think of "trust." And it just makes good intuitive sense to me that if I have something I want input on that has more of an emotional undercurrent, I would bring that to my romantic partner.
Dr Paul Eastwick: 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?
Andrew Huberman: Definitely.
Dr Paul Eastwick: That is the essence of social support. It's actually not literally whether you take people up on it. It's whether you kind of 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.
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 friend, 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 activity-based things. I could not count the number of kickball and softball teams I participated in throughout my 20s and 30s. 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.
Couple Friends, Social Networks, and Relationship Support
Andrew Huberman: It seems like barring an emotional or physical safety issue, the less that couples are talking to other people — besides a trained therapist if they choose — about their relationship, probably the more protected their relationship is. There's the suffering in silence piece, which I don't think is good. But there's also the going out for external assessment piece. In relationships, if something feels good, maybe we shouldn't be going out and getting input.
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think the good version of this process — the one I would advocate for — comes from research looking at couple friends or double date nights. I'm not asking you for input on my relationship, but in effect I'm asking you and maybe your partner to experience our relationship in real time by hanging out together, the four of us. That can often feel like validation without explicitly asking for it. And there's research showing that couples who feel like they have couple friends and are embedded in networks like that tend to do well on average.
You can feel that you have the support of the people around you without directly asking for their assessment of your relationship, because the reality is other people don't know. When I encounter couples and I have friends who are in relationships, it is so tempting to look at that relationship and think, "Man, she shouldn't have done that," or "I don't know if I were her, I wouldn't stand for this." But I'm not in that relationship. Unless you are a therapist and they're coming to you for therapy, I find it useful to try to resist that impulse, because a relationship is this vast deep store of information that two people have, and often we're not privy to what's really going on there.
Dating Apps, Texting, and the Hyperverbal Advantage
Andrew Huberman: The apps absolutely pull for this dynamic where everyone's competing for the same small number of people. And I think the dynamics on dating apps — the algorithms, which are clearly designed to make the company's money — do you think those are more female-driven algorithms or male-driven algorithms? Not meaning who runs the companies. Do you think the apps are trying to optimize for more women to come to them, or more men?
Dr Paul Eastwick: My understanding is that when your goal is getting users and engagement, what you're probably trying to do is 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 getting 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 — the fact that women will swipe yes on like 5% of the men they see, but men swipe yes at about 50/50.
Andrew Huberman: In the realm of text communication, there's a kind of bias toward people who can be witty in writing. A good listener in a face-to-face interaction can just sit there, listen, not interrupt, nod, maybe reflect, tell me more — and can 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, 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. Do you think that's skewing things?
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think this is a really good point. Some work in the early online interaction space 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 for them has at least the advantage of reducing some of the anxiety — 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 — this is a great researcher named Mimi Bunberg at Ohio State — what she does is get couples who are together and then says, "Let me see your texts," and gets the whole text thread going 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. 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.
Perceived Similarity vs. Actual Similarity
Andrew Huberman: We're sort of veering towards compatibility. What do the data say about similarity?
Dr Paul Eastwick: Perceived similarity is this general sense like we have a lot in common — 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. 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.
What you see in the political matching data is that the odds of people with diametrically opposed preferences getting 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 — you just compartmentalize it. If we match, it's important. If we don't match, who cares?
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. That's actual similarity — I take things that are true about you without the ability for you to engage in motivated reasoning, and I 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 — if you just pair up people who want the same things, 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.
Age Preferences: What the Data Actually Show
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, I think, 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. They set people up on these dates, and 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, if men are looking for younger women and women are looking for older men, is that when we look at how the age of the partner affects whether you want to go on a second date, it should be that younger folks appeal to the men more and older folks appeal 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 they're trying to create these couples, but you only create a couple a fraction of the time. 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 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.
Derogation of Alternatives and the Threat of Social Media
Andrew Huberman: In some ways, committed partnership is about setting aside the idea that there might be somebody better for us. A former guest on this podcast who happens to be a divorce lawyer has talked about the fact that many of the divorces he's involved in started with an innocuous communication on social media — starts with a like, starts with a conversation, ends up in the corner of a grievance or 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. 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 that 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 — or rather, a protective mechanism — that people have.
At the same time, people also do this thing that'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." 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 is that there can be some value to — in her first book, I think — this notion that someone isn't feeling as much chemistry in a relationship, so they go to a bar and flirt a bit, and then some sense of sexual confidence is restored and their husband is then attracted to them differently again. You hear the more crude phrase, "Doesn't matter where you get your appetite as long as you eat at home." 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. There was about a 20 or 30 year period where people kind of assumed that monogamy could thrive despite the inputs, and perhaps even better if people acknowledged this aspect of self that is still attracted to other people.
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think the way I think about it is that the protective cloak is there as a baseline, but then signals will get through sometimes — sometimes because you're messing around on Instagram, but sometimes because you went to the bar with your friends and there was this cute guy who was chatting you up. The evidence there I interpret the way Esther Perel would interpret it, and 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 — how much sexual desire do you feel for your 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, again 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 others 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.
Dr Paul Eastwick: 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 — that 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 the divorce lawyer is referring to when he talks about social media being an attack vector on a relationship.
Mate Value, Self-Worth, and the Limits of the Construct
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 worked out in gyms — it was kind of reserved for guys or for female bodybuilders, but she wasn't a bodybuilder. She liked lifting weights and was a super accomplished athlete. 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." And then she said something absolutely shocking to me — I've shared it 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. It got to her. My interpretation was: 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 in someone who was married — she said if a bunch of unattractive people hit on her, she sort of feels like she has to go get a clear perception again of whether or not she could be with an attractive guy. And she's married to someone that anyone, male or female, would describe as super good-looking, and they have a super stable family.
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 — the way we experience it most acutely — is indeed in the attention we get from strangers, or in the junior high type scenarios 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? Like, do they think I'm a seven? Do they think I'm a four? What has happened to me?
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. I'm not going to judge it, but it is a fascinating flip of the way I typically think about these things.
Physical Intimacy as a Predictor of Relationship Quality
Andrew Huberman: Is it true that sexual attractiveness — a person rating their partner as a quote unquote good lover — is among the strongest predictors of how positively they feel about their partner? Because I want to make sure that if that's true, it comes through. What I'm hearing is yes, those feelings can wax and wane, and yes, life circumstances and raising kids and job stress — everyone 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 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. You don't feel desirable, and it's going to cascade in all of these negative ways.
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 are actually our 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 we spend apart, and that can be rekindling in various ways.
So 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 that you feel like 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.
Relationships, Breakups, and Narrative
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's all about our choices. She said something beautiful: "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. 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 sense of: we're here now, this is time from now forward, and where it goes we determine. But histories are real.
Dr Paul Eastwick: I'll even go a step further. 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, to look back and say "I failed." And people reinforce this even unintentionally. You go through a breakup and people say, "I'm so sorry." 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.
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 know there are so many people out there right now who are like, "Yeah, but my ex is a dick." And I'm with you, I totally get that. But to the extent that there's any ability to hold these two thoughts in mind simultaneously, I think it's good.
Andrew Huberman: Is time together a factor? Like when you control for everything else, 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, over time people were the happiest early on in their relationship than they are today. It's actually kind of a bummer.
But let me say this: the narrative — the idea that we experienced a lot, that we grew, that we faced all these obstacles, that we had a shared story — 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 that 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 with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the end is death. "Till death do us part" is written into the script. So if it ends early, a lot of people don't know how to integrate it into their life story.
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think it's useful to think about those investments as being about self and story. 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.
Finding Partners Through Small-Group Activities
Andrew Huberman: I'm not trying to provide pushback here, 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 don't just at face value present a sort of trajectory of maturational stages that you can continue to be in the relationship within. Does that make sense?
Dr Paul Eastwick: This 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. It's not like the culture encourages it.
Whereas there are certain things that are a bit more — 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. No matter how evolved or progressive we are, 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. And then I think you're right on the initial attraction side — having a sense that we're part of this larger collective provides structure that can help keep moving things forward.
Andrew Huberman: Who's going to church now? There's this idea that more young people are going to church, which is a values indicator — people are there for certain reasons, they're either trying to build on or have certain values that are family, children, morals adjacent. Is there any data that that's a response to the kind of wild west of online dating and social media?
Dr Paul Eastwick: To the extent that church is fulfilling a function of putting you in contact with a small group of people over repeated occasions, 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. You can join any kind of intramural sports team. 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. I think these things are all wonderful.
Are people doing it because they're trying to limit the pools to the folks that 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. It's more about getting yourself in a small group environment.
Andrew Huberman: In the absence of that kind of specificity, my answer is always just be around people on repeated occasions.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Exactly. And in the absence of that kind of specificity, my answer is always just be around people on repeated occasions. I'm embarrassed to say my field can't answer the question of, "In 90 days I want to be in a relationship — what are the things I should do that give me the best likelihood?" We can't answer questions like that. So in the absence of that kind of specificity, my answer is always just be around people on repeated occasions.
What Students Are Asking About Relationships Today
Andrew Huberman: Your course on this topic is incredibly popular for obvious reasons. What are the questions that students are asking most often nowadays?
Dr Paul Eastwick: I think most of the questions are about — there is often an assumption that these days it's so screwed up. You have this undercurrent. I worry about this sometimes, that when I teach the science on these topics there's a general sense of, "Okay, but that's 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: 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.
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. 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. Like you can throw a picnic or a party.
Andrew Huberman: 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. It was every Friday and there was only one rule — you had to at least attempt to do the bump-set approach to beach volleyball. You couldn't just hit it across. It didn't matter how bad you were. And then everyone would go for Thai food. Anyone could come. 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.
There were also 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. I had no time in graduate school — I was working all the time — but I would make time for these things occasionally and they were a lot of fun. These things are super easy to do. 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.
Dr Paul Eastwick: 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's 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: whether it's the entertainment companies or the apps, they're trying to keep you away from real socialization. Young people, don't you like rebelling and stuff? Rebel against this. Form these groups. Go out and meet people again in person.
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. Even if you don't feel like going out and interacting with people, you can kind of nudge yourself to do it.
Andrew Huberman: Thank you so much for the work you do. It's very brave — 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, which is of course why your book and your work is so popular. 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. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you.
Dr Paul Eastwick: Thank you so much for having me.