Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty, live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Now, I'm about to fangirl again. You know, I do this every once in a while. I get somebody on the show who I'm actually a big fan of. And this week's guest is doctor Paul Eastwick. He's a professor at UC Davis. But get this, he runs a lab where he does research on all my favorite subjects, attraction relationships. But also he's cool because he's co hosting the podcast Love Factually, of.
Course, available on the iHeartRadio app. Hi, doctor Paul, how are you hi?
Very goodness, Thanks someone for having me on today.
You didn't know that I would be fangirling on you on live radio.
Yeah right right, Okay, I'm ready. I'll see if I can live up to this.
Okay, So what I want to talk about we don't have a whole lot of time. But what I like to talk about is your mate evaluation theory. But before we do that, I need to know this story behind Love Factually. It is such a brilliant title for your podcast. What is the podcast Love Factually?
Yes? So the basic idea behind the podcast is along with my longtime collaborator and now co host, Eli Finkle, we take the science of close relationships as we have understood it and internalized it over the years, and what we do is we talk about how various rom coms and romantic films reflect what we know in the science, either what the films are getting right or what they're kind of mangling.
Well, I'm going to tell you that I have always said what they get wrong pretty much one hundred percent of them is that they.
End at the beginning of a relationship.
That is is a fantastic point. There's so many of those films that classically do that right. You get what you're doing. You're seeing what amounts to something like the first ten percent of the relationship, and that's part is supposed to make it feel good and like send you home feeling happy. And look, sometimes they depict that early ten percent. Well, but we got to acknowledge that there's a lot left to come when the movies ends, when the couple gets together.
Right and they get past their limerins and move into intellectual commitment kind of love.
Yeah. Yeah, Now, we've covered plenty of movies that do cover the whole art, and it's actually kind of tough if we want to give the movies a break, it's tough to go from beginning all the way to the end. Right, are there anything? Lala Land is one that does it really well. Yeah, I mean right there the notebook, come on the notework, Yeah, right right, that is one of the view that goes from the beginning to end. Really the end the spoiler alert, yeah, really the end literally
the notebook. Yeah, but they're out there, and we like to give you know, you know, accolades to those movies that pull it off.
So, moving from the podcast onto some of your research. One of your most famous studies has to do with something called mate evaluation theory, and it basically talks about how people analyze, evaluate, make selection for potential mates.
And and I read the.
Whole study today because what I do is I turn it into language everyone can understand. And now I'm going to have you correct me if I say it wrong.
Okay, Okay, I'm ready.
I'm ready.
There are basically five ways that people evaluate a mate. Right, first, you talk about something called shared evolved mechanisms and cultural scripts. Is this David Buss's evolutionary stuff? I'm hearing that women like men who are tall, and men like men who are fertile and round himpt waste.
Yeah, really it is. It is definitely meant to encompass that. Right. So anything that's like agreed upon whether the reason for agreement is there something evolved in the mind that this is appealing to who we are as a species on average, or because I don't know, we've decided in this culture that you know, it's appealing if you can like make really great TikTok videos like actually, right, but this is attractive.
I mean, I will say I'm a woman of a certain age, and I've watched female body shape change over the years, and in the nineteen eighties it was the advent of the boob job, and it was very exciting to suddenly see breasts on everybody. And now it's all about but right, Yeah, So that's one example of a cultural script.
All right, Moving on number two.
Individual differences that affect how a perceiver. That's somebody who's attracted somebody views all potential mates. So is this like somebody's deal breaker list, Like this is my checklist, these are things I'm looking for.
I would think of this one as like this is like people's own personality. So some people are happy people, and honestly, they're going to be happy in whatever relationship you put them in, and some people not so much, and they're going to be kind of miserable in whatever relationship you put them in. So that's that's this component. It's kind of like just your lens that you take to the whole world and it doesn't matter who you're with.
Interesting because my new husband, Julio, he is a giggly Dominican and he's the happiest person.
I've ever met in my life.
There you go.
Then I'm met his whole family in Dominican Republic and they all giggle. I was like, wow, it's a cultural thing.
This is cool.
Yep, And they happy with anybody, even me. There you go and like, look, don't feel bad. It's a really good good thing to be to have a little bit of some rose colored glasses as you view the boys.
Oh yes, I have to reel him back in all the time. Is his optimism is a little too high?
Okay, moving out of the third one.
Individual differences that affect how a perceiver views some targets depending on the target's features.
So let me take a crack at this. Yep, So would this be correct?
Maybe somebody with an anxious attachment style might look at a partner's emotional passion and intensity as being really attractive. But if that person looking is avoidant, they might feel smothered.
That's a great example. Yeah, I mean this also would encompass the deal breaker list you mentioned earlier, the idea that I, like, I can't stand people who you know, like going to fancy seven course meal restaurants, Like I just can't be with somebody like that, Like that is, you know, too high falutin for me. If you have that kind of deal breaker, that's this third one that you're talking about.
No, yourself, do not invite Paul to dinner out, Okay, gotcha?
All right.
My guest is University of California, Davis Professor, doctor Paul Eastwick. He is also a researcher in attraction, relationships, interpersonal love, sex, the whole shabang. He has the numbers and the data on it. Okay, doctor Paul. Your mate evaluation theory, how people evaluate mates to be a potential mate. You say, narratives about idiosyncratic reactions to one particular target. Now, I
just got to admonish you on that is some psychobabble there. Okay, I had to think about that for a minute.
Okay, what we do?
So I would say this is like I think this is the exciting part because this is does this mean that if you have the sense that there's great meaning to this relationship to you in particular, I don't know, like there's something about this person that makes you go, oh, it's meant to be.
It feels magical.
Yes. And it's also about the things that you construct along the way. And this is the one that I think is if you ask the average person what is important in your relationship, they're gonna ultimately gravitate towards these kinds of things. The special rituals we have, the pet names we have for each other, the customs that we built, the values that we've created over time, and this stuff is huge.
So this is as a couple creating, or what an individual creates in their life and then says, wow, this person fits that.
It is really supposed to be what you are creating. I'll say like this, well, you're creating them in a context with this particular person. And the real idea with this one is the idea that like, I can't just take somebody else who like looks a lot like your partner and substitute them in. Like, the point is that this person was there along the way for the creation of these things, Like you have memories with this person, and that's that's what it's really about.
And I always say relationships are a living thing. They're like growing a gardener together. And having been prior to meeting my now husband, I was a single mom for twenty years with two little girls, and I did not want to risk exposing my kids to a poor romantic choice that I might make. But I knew that if I kept studying this stuff, by the time they got of age and old enough, I would find a person. But there is something now that I'm in a secure attachment where I really.
Feel like there's a living thing.
Like we're co thinkers, we're cod emotional you know. He does half the thinking, you know, and I do half the intellectual work. I mean, a great example, here's a simple, simple example, and I'm sure many couples do this. One of us will be working on an email and we will read it aloud to the other person. It might be an important and he will add more business language or analytic language to mine, and I will add more emotional language to yep.
So we become get a couple of emojis in there at an exclamation point exactly, and.
Now we're a team. We're thinking like one brain exactly.
Yeah, yeah, right, And it's this thing that people build together that you know, what we try to point out in this paper is we all kind of intuitively get that this that's really important, and we as researchers are actually not great at capturing it. And that's for a bunch of methodological reasons that aren't especially fascinating. But the bottom line is what we think the lion's share of compatibility is how well you create a culture to your
relationship and hip well, we actually just haven't. You know, there's a lot out there about that that still needs to be explored and understood, and just so.
That people understand what you just said, one of the problems with doing relationship research is a lot of it is self reporting. You can't like put people in MRI machines and just say, oh, there's love, although some attachment researchers are doing.
That right right.
Okay, so let's go to what made evaluation theory can teach us about dating. Now that we know these points, what, how does that help us make better decisions?
Well, I think where it can really help people is to recognize that there's some amount of curiosity that is important when it comes to being in a relationship with somebody. It's curiosity about how did we get to this point and are the patterns we set up early in our relationship still serving us well? You know, one of the challenges that often happen is that, you know, couples do things because they work right, and they keep those things
going because they were affected at one time. But it can be very easy for one or both couple members to lose track of what their needs are as they change over time, and to realize that the patterns they've set up might actually now be getting in the way, might easily even be stifling one of them. And so, you know, I'm a big believer that you know that many couples can make it work, but it does require some amount of curiosity about what the other person is
experiencing and how did we get here? Do we need to mix things up or not right?
I call it rewriting the relationship contract from time to time.
Yeah, there you go.
And also when it comes to choosing a mate, looking at some of these cultural scripts is a good idea for us to become aware of them and realize how they could be limiting us.
Yes, I mean, I'm a big believer in the idea that actually the narratives that you co create with somebody really begin from the first moment. Like a lot of times, what we think we're trying to do is assess things like how how good are you know this person's traits? Are they attractive, are they intelligent? Are they funny? But what we're really doing is trying to figure out are they funny with me? Right? Do they seem smart with me? Do they make me feel smart? Like it's relational from
the very first few minutes. I mean, we even see this if you look at you know, first impression research, and we've collected a lot of data on first impressions. But what people are trying to do is just find something where they both have a little bit of knowledge in common and they can kind of try to start scaffolding something together, something that they have in common, something that they can sort of bond over a little bit,
and then you sort of build up from there. So you know, everything is a construction, and it really happens from the very beginning.
So when I met my husband during COVID, during quarantine and lockdown, my rule was they had to meet me on a windy pier wearing a mask. Okay, And if they couldn't do that, then if they want to protect my health's not going to happen. And then when we sat down, for I only do coffee days, so it was only twenty minutes they got.
You got to leave them wanting more, you know.
And then I said, when we sat down, I said, look, you know, we could sit here and brag about the masks were off at this point because we were more than six feet apart and the wind was going. Yeah, And I said, we could sit here and brag about how great we are and how datable we are. But could we begin actually by each of us telling a story of why we think we're completely undateable.
Oh that's wonderful.
He said, Okay, you'll go first, and he had a much much more tragic story than I did. But it developed intimacy from the get go.
Yep, right, yep, it was that's great. Yeah, it's spot on I love to plug art Aaron, and you know the grade thirty six questions. Oh, yes, study love. Yeah, I mean right exactly. But really, what you're doing in that sixty and ninety minute period is you are getting comfortable and then talking about things that are interesting and deep and meaningful. And people can do this in short periods of time.
Oh yeah, And within ten minutes of our coffee coming, both of us had our eyes welling up with tears over our stories.
Yeah, and dealing with.
The shame of having to tell the story too, right, yeah, So, and so I wanted to ask you one more question before time is so tight in radio.
I'm sorry.
The last question has to do when it comes to this study with these sort of these models we have in our heads for what we're talking specifically heter rich sexual relationship. Here, for my example, an opposite gender parents role is in our model of love. So, for instance, with my husband, we will be out shopping somewhere and he'll be in the next aisle over and he will clear his throat and one hundred percent it is my dad. Everything about the sound, the tone, everything, And I almost
get startled when I hear it. Did I unconsciously choose him partly because of that.
Oh, I don't know. I mean, there is a little bit of work showing that, yeah, that people can be unconsciously primed with images of parents, and you know, they feel a little bit more safe. And so maybe if that you know, is coming from somebody of your you know, preferred age and gender, that you just find yourself a little bit more attractive with that person for that reason. But this stuff is going to be really really subtle. These oh yeah, any unconscious effects are going to be
very very small on the whole. But it's possible that you know, things like what you mentioned there, sort of the way that he clears his throughout her might be a small thing that carried over from those unconscious leaning.
Which might have been important to me and my trauma is that my parents both died of cancer in the same year when I was young, and so interesting enough, his mother, who's eighty six years old, I love.
So I got a dad and a mom back with this marriage.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, I'm quite sure. Paul.
It is a delight to have you on the Doctor Wendywall Show here on KFI. We are going to have your co host Eli Finkel next week, I believe, so we'll make sure that we cover love factually as much as we can. Thanks so much for being with us. My guest is doctor Paul Eastwick, a professor at the University of California Davis. You've been listening to the Dr Wendywall Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app Newsroom