Bonded by Evolution. What We’ve Got Wrong About Love and Connection - Paul Eastwick

What if everything we thought we knew about finding and keeping love was wrong?

We’re told that what men and women desire from relationship is different and at odds – he’s looking for novelty, she’s looking for commitment; he’s concerned with looks, she’s concerned with status. We’re told that we live in a hierarchy of romantic inequality, in which desirability is predetermined by a narrow set of characteristics and where some people are marriage material while others are only fit for hookups. Such ideas about attraction, love and human mating have their roots in evolutionary psychology, and over the past few decades they have permeated our culture and fuelled a narrative of human mating that inspires despair and anxiety – and, in their most extreme form, misogyny and violence.

But this narrative is unscientific.

The rigorous scientific truth about human attraction and relationships – and the way evolution plays out in our personal lives – is much more interesting and optimistic.

Bonded by Evolution is a radical new account of attraction and romantic relationships. Informed by his work at the Attraction and Relationships Research Laboratory in California, Professor Paul Eastwick reveals how attraction is best depicted as a process of finding – and, often, creating – a compatible relationship within a small set of romantic options. And by understanding how humans have historically sought compatible partners in small networks, we can build an alternative to the dominant script, and a clearer – and brighter – picture of how attraction and relationships really work.