An Excerpt from Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection
Modern media and culture have taught you a vast array of inaccurate ideas about dating and relationships. Scroll through Instagram and Tiktok, and you’ll inevitably see the influence of a buzzy new branch of science—evolutionary psychology— at play in videos, touting gender stereotypes and spreading a deeply flawed story about romance and connection. Evolutionary psychology claims that our minds have been shaped by primal drives that pit the genders against each other, from the myth that men are wired to be promiscuous to the notion that wealth, status, and beauty are the ultimate aphrodisiacs.
In Bonded by Evolution UC Davis psychology professor Paul Eastwick reveals that these stories bear little resemblance to how pair-bonding really works. While beauty and charisma factor into first impressions, their influence fades fast—after a few months, we barely agree on who's “desirable.” Drawing on pathbreaking research—including original experiments from his own lab—Eastwick explains that lasting attraction has, from ancestral times through the present, been built through gradual, often mundane moments that forge strong attachment bonds. Ultimately, he offers a liberating new paradigm for finding meaningful, exciting relationships.
By excavating the hidden history of human mating, Eastwick paints a radical new picture of the roots of enduring chemistry. Distilling evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology into accessible insights, Bonded by Evolution explains why we so often choose dating strategies that make us miserable and how to use a more evolved approach.
The excerpt below is adapted from Chapter 7: "Relationships as Creative Chaos."
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Relationships as Tiny Cultures
[R]esearchers who study couples often describe relationships as tiny, two-person cultures. Just like a culture, couples develop their own shared language. Customs like these—even the silly ones—promote attachment because they foster the feeling that two people are building something unique and irreplaceable. To quote Greta Gerwig in her role as the titular character in the film Frances Ha: “It’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about.”1
The tiny culture of a couple grows increasingly complex with time, and it becomes opaque to outsiders. If you’ve ever spent time as a third-party observer of someone else’s relationship, it can be as bewildering as being dropped into an unfamiliar civilization. Why did he get upset when she asked if he was really going to buy that? Why did she seem so deliriously relieved when he offered to take charge of the weekend plans? What was the significance of that lengthy story featuring lots of people you didn’t know? Other couples’ relationships don’t come with a guidebook, but it would be handy if they did.
Tiny cultures also illustrate why the reasons you are compatible with one person may have nothing to do with the reasons you are compatible with someone else. Also, if the tiny culture of a relationship somehow gets disrupted, expect trouble. From the outside, the customs and idioms of other couples might seem arbitrary or unnecessary to you. But to the couple members themselves, these norms are often practically and emotionally significant. I knew a couple who would read to each other any texts they received from exes. They developed this custom because their relationship began in a cloud of uncertainty as they slowly weaned themselves off their most recent ex-partners. Opening up their text lives to each other helped them to reduce anxiety, establish trust, and commit more fully. For some couples, this custom might have had the opposite effect, but for this couple, it worked.
The best way to foster a strong relationship is to build a culture around the things that you and your partner appreciate about each other in light of your own specific history together.
. . .
Tiny cultures work, but that doesn’t mean they can remain forever frozen in amber. Over time, patterns can cause problems, and sometimes, routines get stale. The sexual fantasy that you two enacted when you first got together was hot, but on the twentieth rerun, it’s not nearly as thrilling. Any activity that is initially exhilarating will eventually become comfortable, and sometimes couples get so contented with comfortable that they forget to rekindle the excitement. Family-systems therapists spend an inordinate amount of time helping couples to recognize the patterns they have created and how those patterns are harming the relationship or limiting each other’s ability to grow.2
In some cases, outside factors force existing patterns to change, and couples may not be fully aware of how the pattern had been serving them. To fix a broken pattern, couples must identify what is implicit, make it explicit, and be willing to rearrange the pieces for the sake of the relationship.
Tiny cultures—the patterns, practices, and pet names that comprise couples’ day-to-day lives—are the main source of what works and what doesn’t work in a relationship. And these tiny cultures are staggeringly idiosyncratic, even if you were to observe the same person in different relationships over the course of their life. We like different people for different reasons, and these reasons usually do not translate from partner to partner. Similarly, inside jokes and callbacks can foster connection by providing a bridge between a relationship’s past and present, but they only work in the relational context that spawned them—by definition.3
That’s not to say that people are wholly inconsistent across relationships: Someone who provides support well in one relationship will probably be at least a decent support provider in their next relationship. But critically, the patterns that make two relationship partners compatible or incompatible emerge organically within the context of each
relationship. Relationships are what two people build together over time, and there’s not a good way to know what two people will create
until construction is underway.4
Relationships Are Sandboxes, Not Adjacent Cubicles
Humans evolved in a context where extreme prosociality became adaptive for group living, and natural selection layered this ability on top of a psychological system that was already highly attuned to others’ thoughts and feelings. So we became creatures who feel good when we share what’s on our mind; we genuinely want our close others to experience the same joy we get from a song, a joke, an idea, a vista, or a meal. Building and sharing a joint worldview with another person feels terrific—but not because we’re trying to “get stuff” from them. It feels terrific because these behaviors are the main way that people foster the closeness and security that have long been central to human attachment bonds. Happy relationships have more in common with kids playing together in a sandbox than co-workers putting in a productive day at the office.5
There is a challenge in being a species who mates this way: The construction of any relationship, good or bad, is inherently unpredictable. Some sandcastles seem initially promising and crumble unexpectedly; some look strange until the light hits them just so, and you wonder how you had missed the grandeur. Magnificent things emerge when two people find themselves in the right sandbox at the right time, induced to interact by serendipity, and compelled to continue because each interaction was a bit more enjoyable than the last.
And of course, sometimes two wonderful people bring out the worst in each other, and after they drive their relationship into a ditch, they call it quits and tell everyone who will listen that their former partner was an awful person. But that’s rarely the full story. Relationships are built, and despite everyone’s good initial intentions, some of those constructions are shoddy. After the collapse, we dust ourselves off and move on, and the ability to do so is part of the human mating condition, too.
If this is how humans form and maintain relationships, you know what would be a bad idea? It would be a bad idea to give people the sense that there are a ton of romantic choices for them waiting just around the corner—that a middling first impression is a cue to check out the next sandbox. It would be a bad idea to create a market that caters to the strengths of the ultra-attractive, reproduces the experience of playing a video game, and convinces people that good relationships come from landing the partner with all the best attributes.
It would be a bad idea to convince people that the way you form relationships is by hitting on stranger after stranger and unplugging from your existing networks of friends and acquaintances. These bad ideas would stifle the initial ingredients of fortune and coincidence while making dating and relationships needlessly depressing for a lot of people.
Thanks, Internet.
Adapted from Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection by Paul Eastwick. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
About the Author
Paul Eastwick is a Professor of Psychology at UC Davis, where he serves as the head of the Social-Personality Psychology program and the director of the Attraction and Relationships Research Laboratory. Thousands of undergraduate students have taken his course on attraction and close relationships, and he has published over one hundred scientific articles and chapters and won numerous early career awards. His research and writing has been featured in outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, and Scientific American Mind. He hosts the popular podcast Love Factually with his longtime colleague, Eli Finkel, where they analyze rom-coms and romantic dramas from the perspective of relationship science. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and his PhD at Northwestern University.
