And now, for a total change of pace…a recommendation from a podcast, technically (the excellent Love Factually, where two social psychologists (Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel) use the science of close relationships to explain romantic comedies). But it’s really a roundabout recommendation from the esteemed Dr. Lydia Emery, a friend of mine who’s also a professor of close relationship science at the University of Chicago and a veritable font of information for every type of dating and/or relationship question that anyone might have (and of which I have a lot).
The book is ostensibly billed as a look at the science of evolutionary psychology as it applies to relationships, but is in fact a point by point rebuttal of toxic masculinity’s impacts on gender norms in the dating sphere. I almost wonder if there was a different world in which this book was more openly positioned as a “everything you thought you knew about dating you actually learnt from Andrew Tate without realizing it” that would have led to it going more viral! But then again, I probably wouldn’t have been as likely to pick it up, as I am an Enlightened Modern Woman who does not ascribe to such nonsense, and then I’d have missed out on realizing how much of that weirdness has permeated from that manosphere into our daily lives.
A caveat that this is more dense than your typical popsci offering. I’ve been reading and learning about these topics via Lydia for over a decade at this point (wild), and I still found myself having to go back to certain paragraphs after realizing that I’d just read the words without comprehending their meaning. But that’s a minority of the book, and for some of the smaller, less impactful takeaways. Anything that’s fundamental to the argument that Eastwick is making is illustrated with a metaphor/figure/’case study,’ such that they stick out and help the narrative hold together well.
To illustrate one such example, which was so revelatory that I actually put the book down for a second despite it being really quite obvious–why is it that two social people who are equally keen can find or not find sparks (e.g., on a first date)?
By this point of the book, Eastwick has pretty thoroughly gone through the fallacies of objective attraction (e.g., attraction is a combination of factors, of which compatibility is the most important and grows in importance over time) and compatibility prediction (i.e., it’s almost impossible to predict compatibility ahead of time) which together imply that ‘mate value’ is nonsense. So knowing this, we have a case study of two characters: Julian and Lloyd.
Julian arrives at the bar, for a mutual friend set up. His opening salvo is a statement about a song playing by Adele: “I can’t believe they’re playing this song. My dog literally howls every time it comes on. Which is too bad, because I rather like it.”
Lloyd has three different responses–and crucially, all of them are equally logical.
1. What does your dog have against Adele??
2. When I was a kid, my dog would hide when my dad put on basketball shoes, maybe his issue was the sound of shoes?
3. I once worked at a terrible restaurant over the summer, and any song that used to play during that time stresses me out.
And then we go through, a la Sliding Doors, how each of these conversational salvos pan out. Turns out #1 and #2 start fruitful but ultimately dead end, and #3 leads to a deeper conversation (and presumably a second date).
A lot of words (by me) to point out this takeaway: that it’s hard for the “most socially skilled people to find an animating topic that generates mutual interest and connection” and it takes luck to find it. That’s a fascinating point and honestly one that I’ve never considered. I’m a socially skilled person who always finds something to chat about, but rarely finds sparks. I’m also a scientifically minded sort, so reading about this phenomenon in a science book makes me feel less out of place and confused.
Which is all to say, I hope this book reaches the people it needs to reach, because it’s genuinely a lovely effort to peel back a lot of the worst beliefs that we all have internalized. And at a minimum, listen to the podcast!
