Bonded by Evolution

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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 wired for promiscuity. Such ideas have their roots in a branch of science called evolutionary psychology, and over the past few decades its ideas have permeated our culture and fuelled a narrative that inspires despair and anxiety – and, in its most extreme form, misogyny and violence.

But this narrative is unscientific. The truth about human attraction – and the way evolution plays out in our romantic lives – is much more interesting and optimistic.

Bonded by Evolution offers a radical new picture of the roots of enduring chemistry. Distilling evolutionary biology, anthropology and psychology and informed by his pathbreaking research and original experiments at the Attraction and Relationships Research Laboratory in California, psychology professor Paul Eastwick reveals how attraction is best depicted as a process of finding – and, often, creating – a compatible relationship. Once we understand how ancestral humans sought compatible partners in small networks, we can build a clearer – and brighter – picture of how attraction, sex and relationships really work.