What is Love? Paul Eastwick on the New Science of Attraction

[0:36] Andrew Keen: Hello everyone, it’s Saturday, February 14, 2026, a special day: Valentine’s Day, the day of love.

[0:45] Andrew Keen: To celebrate that, I’ve lined up an expert on love, Paul Eastwick, who teaches social and personality psychology at UC Davis and is the author of a really interesting new book on the new science of love and connection called Bonded by Evolution.

[1:05] Andrew Keen: Paul is joining us from Sacramento, just up the road in California. Paul, Happy Valentine’s Day.

[1:11] Paul Eastwick: Happy Valentine’s Day. You know, this is one of my favorite holidays because I get to talk about one of my favorite subjects.

[1:18] Andrew Keen: What do you mean one of your favorite, Paul? I’m sure it’s your favorite, isn’t it? I mean, it’s your day.

[1:23] Paul Eastwick: It’s probably number one, I know. I feel very fortunate that I get a day devoted to this.

[1:29] Andrew Keen: So what’s the etymology and the history of Valentine’s Day? When did it begin and why do we celebrate it? Is it a hopeful holiday? Is it usually celebrated by people who haven’t had the good fortune of finding love?

[1:42] Paul Eastwick: Yeah, I mean it’s an interesting question. It’s been around for a very long time.

[1:47] Paul Eastwick: My experience mostly of Valentine’s Day is the fact that, you know, it tends to create pressure for couples.

[1:52] Paul Eastwick: I think people often feel like they’ve got to pull out all the stops on Valentine’s Day, do a lot of special things that can elevate expectations and be a little bit challenging.

[2:04] Paul Eastwick: But I at least like that there’s a day out there where, yeah, we get a chance to talk about this subject where there’s sort of broader attention paid to the topic of attraction and romance.

[2:14] Paul Eastwick: I think these are some of the most important influential themes in people’s lives, so for what it’s worth, I’m glad Valentine’s Day gives us a chance to talk about these things.

[2:23] Andrew Keen: And your book is getting rave reviews. It got a starred review on Publishers Weekly, which always reflects a very positive response to the book.

[2:34] Andrew Keen: The subtitle is The New Science of Love and Connection. Is there an old science, Paul, that you’re challenging?

[2:40] Paul Eastwick: In fact, there is. And now a lot of things can be great in old science, I’m not here just to point out that hey, the new overtakes the old.

[2:50] Paul Eastwick: But there are some ideas that have been with us for a long time that haven’t fared as well as our scientific methods have improved and we’ve developed new theories and models around them.

[3:02] Paul Eastwick: It so happens that some of these older ideas have really gotten a lot of currency online these days in some nefarious ways, and I’m thinking specifically here of like the incel and deep manosphere corners of the internet.

[3:16] Paul Eastwick: They’ve taken some of that old research from the ‘90s and really run with it in some strange and I think unjustified ways.

[3:23] Paul Eastwick: So one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was to kind of make the point that actually we’ve moved on a bit from some of these ideas that have gotten a lot of, I think, undeserved currency online.

[3:35] Andrew Keen: But would it be fair to say, Paul, that there are an increasingly large group of men who aren’t finding love?

[3:43] Andrew Keen: And so whether or not the science is right, the reality is that many men are missing love and aren’t happy about it.

[3:51] Paul Eastwick: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think there’s a lot of men out there, I think there’s a lot of women too, who are frustrated by the sort of modern state of dating out there, and that there are a lot of theories floating around about why that is.

[4:05] Paul Eastwick: One of the main themes in my book is that I try to point out that we’ve lost a little bit of the old art of socializing, of meeting people and hanging out with people for the sake of meeting people and hanging out with people, and that often that tended to be where our romantic connections flowed from.

[4:26] Paul Eastwick: Online dating did a lot of good for a lot of people, but it’s also sometimes feels like you’re doing the dating when you’re swiping, and swiping isn’t really dating and the apps can kind of get addictive all by themselves.

[4:40] Andrew Keen: You’re certainly not the first or the last person, Paul, as you know better than I, to point a finger at social media and the internet in terms of our loneliness and our inability to connect.

[4:52] Andrew Keen: What are you saying in Bonded by Evolution that is original when it comes to perhaps a critique of the virtual world and its failure to generate love for a lot of us and even connectivity?

[5:06] Paul Eastwick: That’s a great question. I want to start with the idea that attraction and relationships and love are like a market.

[5:15] Paul Eastwick: And that if we participate in that market, what that means is we get assigned a value. Maybe that value is very high, we’re a very desirable person, lots of people would want to be with us.

[5:26] Paul Eastwick: Maybe that value is middling, or maybe it’s unfortunately very low.

[5:32] Paul Eastwick: And we kind of figure out where we are in this market, and we meet other people and they treat us either like the tens we are or the twos that we are.

[5:40] Paul Eastwick: And we kind of have to deal with that reality, find somebody who’s at our level, match up with them, and then I guess like try to trade up if we can later on down the line.

[5:51] Paul Eastwick: This is a pretty depressing idea that nevertheless was a cornerstone of the science of attraction and close relationships for a while.

[6:01] Paul Eastwick: The idea is not completely wrong, but it is more limited than we think.

[6:08] Paul Eastwick: And I think one of the problems that we have had recently with the advent of online dating is online dating makes life feel even more like an intense competition in a mating market.

[6:20] Paul Eastwick: Now we’ve got to stand out on apps, now we’ve got to make ourselves, you know, look and sound especially impressive because you get a couple of seconds to impress somebody.

[6:30] Paul Eastwick: If it were up to me, and it’s not up to me, but if it were up to me we would have gone the other way.

[6:35] Paul Eastwick: We would have pointed out that actually those market-based metaphors, they explain initial attraction okay, but actually their influence fades over time and there are lots of settings out there that don’t behave like a competitive market to nearly the same extent.

[6:52] Andrew Keen: But Paul, we don’t, or most of us at least don’t get married online.

[6:58] Andrew Keen: We find somebody who we’re attracted to, who might be attracted to us, we do the clicking, the swiping and all the rest of it, and then we meet for lunch or drinks or dinner and then we determine whether or not there is any long-term or even medium-term viability in a relationship.

[7:14] Andrew Keen: So no one’s expecting us to use this sort of market-based system as a final way of determining love and connectivity, are they?

[7:23] Paul Eastwick: No, that’s a great point. But I would say this: when you’re meeting people on the apps, it’s the way most people treat it is okay, I’m going to meet you in person, and I’ve got some mental threshold for how impressed I need to be to consider date number two and then another, you know, subsequently date number three and so on and so forth.

[7:47] Paul Eastwick: This is okay for a number of people. I think people who generally have a lot of desirable attributes, or at least the attributes that appear desirable on the surface: maybe they’re physically attractive, maybe they’re especially socially charming, maybe they’re very funny.

[8:00] Paul Eastwick: I think it can work well for them.

[8:03] Paul Eastwick: There are many, many people out there who are what I would call a slow burn, okay? You have to get to know them for a little while and then some people are going to find them more appealing.

[8:13] Paul Eastwick: This idea that I can bail on getting to know you if you do not sufficiently impress me after a 20-minute coffee date or even after, you know, a two-hour dinner date, this can be tough for a lot of people.

[8:27] Paul Eastwick: There are other ways. There are other methods of meeting people that are, for lack of a better word, more democratic.

[8:33] Paul Eastwick: That is, the people who might not be consensually considered tens, maybe they’re considered fives or sixes.

[8:40] Paul Eastwick: If they get to know people over time, what will happen is that they will become more appealing to some of the other people in that group.

[8:49] Paul Eastwick: But it’s really important that people not get the opportunity to bail on somebody after a first or a second impression for this process to work.

[8:58] Paul Eastwick: So it’s very competitive if people get to opt out, but it’s less competitive if people have to stay in these groups and get to know each other more over time.

[9:07] Andrew Keen: You’ve mentioned twos and fives and tens, Paul. I’m actually surprised that a professional academic like you, an expert in this, would even use those terms.

[9:18] Andrew Keen: Are you using them metaphorically or polemically, rhetorically? Do you actually believe that we all are twos or fives or tens or is it all relative?

[9:29] Paul Eastwick: Well, I mean, what’s fascinating about that question is I think if you ask most academics they would sit here and say absolutely it’s real.

[9:38] Paul Eastwick: It is real that you have a collection of attributes, of traits, that make you a certain level of desirability.

[9:45] Paul Eastwick: I’m probably the one out here who, I mean I’m using that way of speaking to try to connect and communicate.

[9:51] Paul Eastwick: The reality is I think that dimension, that ability to sort people on a hierarchy of desirability, is far more limited than most people realize and most academics realize.

[10:04] Paul Eastwick: But if we look at the contemporary science of attraction, we see all of this evidence that people actually don’t agree nearly as strongly as they would have to about somebody else’s attractiveness even, if the world were indeed sorted in this way.

[10:20] Paul Eastwick: Here’s a thought experiment that I think is useful. If you and I were looking at somebody’s photograph and we were just going to make a simple hot-or-not judgment, is this person attractive or not?

[10:31] Paul Eastwick: If you I think listen to a lot of people out there and if you listen to a lot of academics you would think that we would agree an enormous percentage of the time.

[10:39] Paul Eastwick: The reality is closer to like 65% of the time, you know like two-thirds of the time we’re going to end up agreeing. So it’s actually not super high.

[10:49] Paul Eastwick: And what’s important is that if we got to know that person over time, our agreement would go down.

[10:55] Paul Eastwick: If we had known that person for months and were making that same judgment, this person is attractive, I would like to date this person, now our agreement is only a little bit better than 50-50, right?

[11:06] Paul Eastwick: It’s like a 55% chance that we’re going to agree. I think that right there indeed casts doubt on this idea that there is a real hierarchy of desirability.

[11:16] Paul Eastwick: What is real is that some people will think this person’s like an eight or a nine and some people will think that they’re a two or a three.

[11:24] Paul Eastwick: Those idiosyncratic disagreements about how desirable somebody is, I think explains the lion’s share of what goes on in initial attraction settings.

[11:33] Andrew Keen: Do you think there’s something—and I use this word carefully, Paul—un-American about all this, in the sense that we’re all promised the opportunity, first, second, third chances to realize ourselves and build and rebuild ourselves?

[11:46] Andrew Keen: And yet in reality some of us might have a very big nose or an oddly shaped head or an ugly voice or might struggle with body odor. It’s not our fault.

[11:58] Andrew Keen: So Americans in particular struggle with quote-unquote the science of love and connection. In fact, they may be looking for a science as a way out from the aristocratic nature of this.

[12:12] Paul Eastwick: It’s a really interesting idea that there is something maybe uniquely cultural and uniquely American about a discomfort with some of the hierarchy, a discomfort with some of the ideas that oh like this person is more worthy of love and attraction than this other person.

[12:30] Paul Eastwick: So I totally get that. I do think part of what the book does is it indeed makes the case for that more democratic view of how love and attraction works.

[12:43] Paul Eastwick: To be clear, in initial attraction settings, that is the least democratic part of this process when people are meeting for the first time or when they’re swiping, when they’re forming impressions of other people through photographs.

[12:57] Paul Eastwick: I think it’s also very important to keep in mind, and the reason I talk so much about evolution, you know both like in my time and in the book, is that when we think about the environment in which people evolved, it wasn’t actually a lot of meeting strangers.

[13:13] Paul Eastwick: It certainly wasn’t looking at photographs of people.

[13:16] Paul Eastwick: Much of the time we were interacting in small groups. There might be like 150 people that you know period, and you’re likely to find a mate in this small group of people.

[13:30] Andrew Keen: Or it’s the Dunbar, it’s the old Dunbar number.

[13:33] Paul Eastwick: Exactly, exactly. And you know, your group is like a small group of 50, but there are a couple of neighboring groups.

[13:38] Paul Eastwick: So you’re likely to get to know these people over stretches of time, I mean in many cases you may have grown up kind of alongside them or you know near them as what would have passed for neighbors in hunter-gatherer ancestral contexts.

[13:54] Paul Eastwick: So I think that the modern environment is making the meritocratic part of this whole thing seem a lot worse and a lot more grueling than either it needs to be or than it would have been, you know, half a million years ago.

[14:10] Andrew Keen: But is love itself a creation of modernity? You talk about hunter-gatherer societies, small groups of people traveling around together, they mated.

[14:20] Andrew Keen: My understanding, and again it’s a very amateurish understanding, is that the idea of love, the promise of love, the glamour of love didn’t exist in hunter-gatherer societies or even in the medieval world. Is there some truth to that?

[14:34] Paul Eastwick: This is an interesting idea. I think it’s important to keep in mind that look, the way we think about love today, it’s wrapped up in a million other things: stories, fantasies.

[14:46] Paul Eastwick: We now think that love is especially important in a marriage context when you have the merging of families, but we didn’t always think about it that way.

[14:55] Paul Eastwick: The two pieces that I think there’s where I think there’s the best evidence for cross-cultural but also cross-time universality are a couple of things.

[15:07] Paul Eastwick: One is the experience that two people have early on as they’re falling for each other, as they’re you know we use words like infatuation, there’s a very academic sounding term called limerence out there, but sometimes we could just call it passion.

[15:23] Paul Eastwick: Passion has basically existed whenever and wherever we have tried to find it.

[15:29] Paul Eastwick: It is pretty much everywhere. The idea of, you know, two people eloping away, escaping their parents, trying to escape their current situation because of how they feel about each other, is a very powerful experience that has been around for a very long time.

[15:43] Paul Eastwick: So we did not invent this idea 500 or 600 years ago.

[15:47] Paul Eastwick: We have certainly placed a lot of emphasis that like oh marriage should have these things, and we have all sorts of ideas about the way monogamy should work and what we do with adulterers, like all of these things are highly culturally and historically dependent.

[16:03] Paul Eastwick: But the idea that people have powerful feelings for each other and also, the second component, that we need other close people in our lives that we feel like they’ve got our back, they’re going to celebrate our successes, and that we care about them and we want to be around them.

[16:20] Paul Eastwick: I talk about this as the attachment bond or the pair bond, and that’s another feature that you basically see throughout the world.

[16:29] Paul Eastwick: So I think those two features together, they’re pretty broad, but we can point to those two components as being a pretty consistent part of the human condition.

[16:39] Andrew Keen: So when it comes to this new science of love and connection and the things we look for in a mate, a lover, do we tend to look for the other, or is it a mirrored world where when we go out and look for a mate we’re really looking for ourselves?

[16:59] Andrew Keen: I know there’s all sorts of metaphors about unity and there was even I think a Greek mythology about everyone being associated with someone else at birth and spending their life finding them.

[17:10] Andrew Keen: So are we looking for ourselves or are we looking for the opposite of ourselves? Or is that the wrong way of thinking about it?

[17:16] Paul Eastwick: Both ideas, you can see how both ideas could have some merit, right? I want somebody to complement my strengths, you know whatever my weaknesses are, be nice to have somebody who has those things as strengths.

[17:28] Paul Eastwick: But you can also imagine this going the other way where hey, I really value and care about topic X, I’d like to find somebody else who cares about that too.

[17:37] Paul Eastwick: And it is all wrapped up in this idea that you’re talking about where it’s like um, I seem to need, I as a person seem to need another person who fits me like this.

[17:48] Paul Eastwick: And if I knew all the pieces, if I could assess all the components of a person, I would figure out who is the right person for me and maybe you know you have a one-and-only theory about the case that there’s only one person out there with all those attributes, or maybe you have a broader theory of the case that oh as long as they have you know these seven pieces I could probably make it work with them.

[18:09] Paul Eastwick: This has been one of the most fascinating topics in the science over the last 10 years or so.

[18:15] Paul Eastwick: The reality is it tends not to work that well. That is, it is very, very hard to find any kind of evidence at all that two people on paper are ultimately going to make a good match if you were to put them together.

[18:30] Paul Eastwick: We’ve tried to use machine learning to get at this idea. In these machine learning studies, we basically take all the information we can get about you and all the information we can get about the dates you’re going to meet and we say okay, tell me who is uniquely going to be compatible with whom, right?

[18:49] Paul Eastwick: The models can’t do it at all. And this tells me that what some of this magic is, that’s like okay feeling like this other person is especially important to me, it isn’t something that’s easily detectable at the beginning, that it’s probably more likely to be something that’s grown over time as people make choices together, spend time together doing X, Y or Z.

[19:13] Paul Eastwick: So this has been one of the great mysteries and I do think we are coming around to the conclusion that whatever it is that special alchemy that two people have, you can’t find it by matching them up either as being similar or dissimilar with respect to their traits, preferences, values, morals etc. It just doesn’t work that way.

[19:35] Andrew Keen: The book is called Bonded by Evolution, which of course raises the Darwinian perspective on all this.

[19:43] Andrew Keen: Is there an element in your new science of love and connection where we seek a mate in order to make ourselves essentially eternal? What’s the Darwinian element here?

[19:57] Paul Eastwick: So I think one of the underappreciated pressures that our ancestors would have been facing one to two million years ago was in the realm of what do we do with these extremely helpless, extremely demanding, resource-intensive young children, young infants?

[20:18] Paul Eastwick: Because what was happening a couple of million years ago is that our brains were expanding, and those brains are very expensive calorically, they’re very expensive in terms of requiring investments from both parents, and their period of childhood was becoming longer and longer.

[20:36] Paul Eastwick: So it just took that much longer for these young children to grow up and eventually become contributors themselves.

[20:44] Paul Eastwick: So this is why it was the case that a couple of million years ago our ancestors started shifting towards a more pair-bonded style of mating.

[20:54] Paul Eastwick: So it wasn’t actually what you see in the other great apes where mating is, you know if you think about gorillas it’s a harem style, right, where one male has sexual access to all the females until a stronger male comes along and dethrones him.

[21:09] Paul Eastwick: We actually look very different than that. And one of the reasons why was because this was a way to get both mothers and fathers too to contribute to offspring, to invest deeply, now the father is going to be especially invested not only in his offspring’s outcome but in the wellbeing of his partner as well.

[21:26] Paul Eastwick: So this mating system ends up becoming especially important.

[21:30] Paul Eastwick: You see all kinds of interesting evidence of this in the fossil record.

[21:34] Paul Eastwick: So for example it was during this period of time that males get a lot smaller relative to females. We stop being these, you know, dominant overbearing brutes, we become gentler guys, right? That’s because that’s who the women were picking.

[21:49] Paul Eastwick: We also lost our sharp canines because we weren’t spending all our time fighting anymore. The women were picking the men who were safe around babies, right? You don’t want your ape relatives the males around babies. That would not be safe, but human men are perfectly good caregivers.

[22:04] Paul Eastwick: So I think this is an important part of our evolution that’s often neglected. In some ways it turns the whole idea of what it means to be an evolved male on its head: the evolved male is the good caregiver and good dad, and I think this explains a lot of what we see in the attraction science today.

[22:23] Andrew Keen: You’ve talked about harem style arrangements perhaps with other species, but of course humans have often pursued that in some religions, the Mormons of course pursued that in some ways.

[22:36] Andrew Keen: Polyamory is rather fashionable these days. What does the science then tell us about polygamy and polyamory, Paul? Is it unnatural, is it un-Darwinian, does it go against the laws of evolution?

[22:52] Paul Eastwick: I actually think polyamory is maybe the best example to illustrate this point.

[22:56] Paul Eastwick: Now the research on polyamory is really just getting started, but I have some wonderful colleagues who do some of this work.

[23:03] Paul Eastwick: My understanding is basically that if you look at polyamorous couples, they will show levels of trust, wellbeing and attachment to their partners that matches if not exceeds what you would find if you looked at purportedly monogamous couples.

[23:19] Paul Eastwick: In other words, people are capable of attaching to multiple other people at the same time.

[23:25] Paul Eastwick: Whether or not sex enters the picture is something that can be culturally shaped, can be personally chosen, so it doesn’t surprise me that polyamorous communities have managed to find an arrangement where you might have a couple of sex partners.

[23:39] Paul Eastwick: Odds are that in many cases they have strong feelings of attachment to both of these folks.

[23:45] Paul Eastwick: All of that completely makes sense with this story of human evolution that I’m describing, where the foundational fundamental thing when it comes to our mating relationships is that attachment, especially if given enough time, attachment will likely enter the picture.

[24:01] Paul Eastwick: Attachment in the form of I like going to you for support, I trust you, I feel like you’re somebody who has my back, I feel close to you, I want to disclose to you—these are the things we talk about as relationships researchers.

[24:14] Paul Eastwick: Polyamorous relationships again in my understanding have all of those features in spades.

[24:19] Andrew Keen: It’s becoming quite fashionable, particularly amongst Gen Z-ers and the research I’ve seen suggests that sex seems to be less important for Gen Z-ers than certainly my generation the boomers for whom rebellion was bound up in sex.

[24:36] Andrew Keen: We haven’t talked too much about sex. I mean obviously sex and love are two different things.

[24:41] Andrew Keen: Are these generational differences, Paul, or really when it comes down to it do we make too much of the different generations and that for everybody whether they’re boomers or the golden generation or X-ers or Y-ers or Z-ers or whatever they are, love and sex and connectivity are really the same thing?

[25:01] Paul Eastwick: I think there are some generational shifts that we see.

[25:05] Paul Eastwick: It can be really hard to know whether you’re looking at a generational shift or an age shift, it can be very, very tricky to sort these things out, but I buy the general idea that these days, you know whereas the like age of first sex was decreasing for a long time throughout the latter part of the 20th century, I think it’s rising a little bit now.

[25:25] Paul Eastwick: The way that I’d put it with respect to Gen Z is that we’re just seeing a bit of a longer delay before people have their first meaningful romantic relationship or before people you know have sex for the first time or before they get married.

[25:39] Paul Eastwick: It’s like an elongated stretch. Is that this generation? Is Gen Alpha going to show the same thing but more so? I’m not quite sure.

[25:48] Paul Eastwick: I do suspect that some of this is the lack of socializing in person. Now I’m not one of the people who’s like the kids and the phones, okay?

[25:57] Paul Eastwick: What I would say is everybody in the phone, I think you know adults in their 70-somethings are on their phones you know way too much as well.

[26:05] Andrew Keen: They may even be watching this on their phone, which I don’t hope is such a bad thing, Paul.

[26:10] Paul Eastwick: Yeah, don’t turn the phone off yet.

[26:12] Paul Eastwick: But I do think it’s pretty clear in the data that you know like kids in high school, they aren’t going out and partying to the same extent that they used to. They aren’t hanging out in person to that same degree.

[26:24] Paul Eastwick: That I think could explain some of this delay. Because if you’re not out there hanging out in person, it’s just going to make it a lot harder to find a relationship, to find somebody you connect with, to have those initial sexual experiences with somebody.

[26:38] Paul Eastwick: So if in-person socializing is down, I would expect indeed that would carry first sex and you know first meaningful relationship and everything else with it.

[26:48] Andrew Keen: How’s your love life, Paul? You study this stuff. Do you have a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a marriage, a partner?

[26:55] Paul Eastwick: Yeah, I’ve been in a long-term committed relationship for about 10 years and we have a kid, we live here in Sacramento.

[27:03] Paul Eastwick: So it’s good, I can’t complain.

[27:06] Andrew Keen: What does your wife think of all this Bonded by Evolution, all your studies of romance and love and sex?

[27:12] Paul Eastwick: It’s great. I think look, there’s plenty of of the wisdom that I try to impart that I’m sure has been insepted by her in various ways.

[27:23] Paul Eastwick: She’s also a social scientist who definitely gets this stuff. I think I’m very lucky that she enjoys talking about this sort of material in the same way I do and having a meta perspective on maybe how we’re behaving with each other and stuff like that.

[27:38] Paul Eastwick: I can test out some of these ideas on her so I’m very, very fortunate.

[27:42] Andrew Keen: Is she a two, a five, a ten?

[27:44] Paul Eastwick: She’s a ten to me and that’s the part that matters.

[27:48] Andrew Keen: So what are you going to be doing later today? I know you’ve given a great deal of thought to romcoms, you even put out a podcast about whether romcoms depict realistic relationships.

[28:01] Andrew Keen: This evening I’m actually going to go and see Wuthering Heights which again coincidentally is just coming out this week. Should we go and see them?

[28:10] Andrew Keen: You know, recently I saw The Roses, which is about a breakup in some ways of love. My wife and I love to go and see When Harry Met Sally. Are romcoms healthy or unhealthy in terms of understanding love, Paul?

[28:24] Paul Eastwick: You know, it’s a beautiful mixed bag. I’ve been very fortunate to have a work colleague, Eli Finkel, who also likes these movies as much as I do.

[28:34] Paul Eastwick: So we started a podcast about a year and a half ago called Love Factually and yeah we pick apart the themes in the movies. But they’re mostly mixed.

[28:44] Paul Eastwick: You know, a lot of them get the science kind of right and a lot of them absolutely butcher it.

[28:49] Paul Eastwick: So what we try to do is you know we go one movie at a time and kind of try to suss out like okay these were the parts of the movie that seemed to get pretty accurate, you know these parts not quite as much.

[29:00] Paul Eastwick: But let’s see, later on this week what are we going to be watching? Well we just released an episode on the Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet, the one from the ‘90s starring Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio.

[29:13] Paul Eastwick: So that’s a fun one if for anybody who’s eager to take that trip back to the you know that ‘90s aesthetic. It’s really something, that MTV style of filmmaking, but it’s a pretty solid adaptation of that classic story.

[29:28] Andrew Keen: When Harry Met Sally is one of the best loved romcoms. Unfortunately, of course, Rob Reiner was murdered this year and lots of stories about his life and even that movie.

[29:41] Andrew Keen: Apparently, the movie didn’t have the ending, the happy ending it has, but he changed it because he met his wife during the making of the movie. It just shows how arbitrary things are, doesn’t it, Paul?

[29:55] Paul Eastwick: Yeah, I think so. And you know, I think there could have been also a satisfying end to that movie where the two of them didn’t end up together.

[30:03] Paul Eastwick: I mean one of the reasons I love that movie and where I think this movie got a little like butchered in our public consciousness is they have a genuine friendship for years.

[30:13] Paul Eastwick: And it’s one of the most beautiful friendships depicted on screen I would venture. In the second act of that movie they are genuinely friends doing what friends do, supporting each other, kind of giving each other dating tips.

[30:25] Paul Eastwick: I mean I really think it’s amazing. Yeah if I’m going to hit the movie for anything inaccurate, it’s kind of what you’re saying, it ends with they get together and then they lived happily ever after.

[30:35] Paul Eastwick: Like that’s, you know, there’s a lot that happens after two people get together, it’s sort of you’re missing a good chunk of the arc of the relationship.

[30:43] Paul Eastwick: But depicting the front end, the whole friends-to-lovers pathway that that movie holds up pretty well on that front.

[30:51] Andrew Keen: Well let’s end with a reference to Valentine’s Day today, coming out of your new book Bonded by Evolution, the new science of love and connection.

[31:01] Andrew Keen: You’re happily married, I’m happily married, so I’m guessing we’re certainly not going to use Valentine’s Day to look for other partners.

[31:08] Andrew Keen: But for people who are lonely, who are looking for love, what advice would you give, Paul, not just on Valentine’s Day but generally? Avoid the apps, go out and sit in some restaurants, go to the bars, meet people?

[31:22] Paul Eastwick: Well, I’m not saying you have to throw the apps away, but I would like to see people reboot their old social networks.

[31:30] Paul Eastwick: And sometimes that just means like get together with that work colleague that you haven’t hung out with for six months.

[31:37] Paul Eastwick: And spend time introducing people that you know to other folks that maybe you don’t know so well. Imagine a dinner party, you and a friend each invite two people and none of those four people know each other.

[31:50] Paul Eastwick: Like bringing people together and forming new social networks, relationships have commonly formed through this strategy.

[31:59] Paul Eastwick: It’s the more democratic strategy, it’s the strategy that works well for more people.

[32:04] Paul Eastwick: The problem with those strategies is it can take a while. If your networks are stale, if you’re recently coming out of a relationship, you haven’t been hanging out with those work friends in a while, it takes a while to reboot it.

[32:16] Paul Eastwick: But I really would advocate that people find ways of meeting new people in person. You’re not planning on meeting the love of your of meeting the love of your life tonight or even next week.

[32:27] Paul Eastwick: You’re going to regrow your social networks, because eventually as people do this, they find new interests, new activities, they expand themselves and then what do you know, new partners come into their orbit.

[32:41] Paul Eastwick: So that’s the approach I advocate, it’s a longer slower process but it tends to be a lot less frustrating than just using the apps.

[32:51] Andrew Keen: In other words, be patient. That is the wisdom of Paul Eastwick who studies this stuff. Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection.

[33:04] Andrew Keen: Paul, a Happy Happy Valentine’s Day to you and your your wife, your ten. Congratulations on the new book and have a wonderful evening. Thank you so much.

[33:14] Paul Eastwick: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

[33:17] Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We’re on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I’d be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.