E141 | Are Dating Apps Ruining Love? (Modern Relationships w/ Prof. Viren Swami)

Professor Viren Swami is an international expert on attraction and body image and has written and edited several books on these topics. He is a chartered psychologist and associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and is ranked in the top 2% of the most-cited scientists in the world.

Viren is the author of Attraction Explained: The Science of how we Form Relationships, which deconstructed popular myths about attraction and relationships. 

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Before you can love other people, you have to love yourself. You have to understand how to love yourself. When you learn how to love yourself, you'll learn how to love other people. This is the problem with dating apps. They sell you a world in which there are literally hundreds of people who are just waiting for you, don't like person X.

Well, there's a hundred other people wasting for you. And it creates a sense that this really is a shopping exercise that you're going shopping. And if you don't like one product, you put it back on the shelf and you take a completely different product. And I think that creates a sense that these relationships are short term.

They're not meaningful, they're not fulfilling. They very quickly enter what we call a rejection mindset. They reject more often than they say yes. Even if someone fits what they're looking for.[00:01:00] [00:02:00] 

Welcome back everyone. As you know, from time to time, we like to discuss the labyrinth. That is love and romance and attraction and relationships such an important part of people's lives, and you know how well your romantic relationship is going, has a huge influence on the quality of your life. As a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist, this is something I see in my clients all the time with us to continue our conversation about romance attraction and other topics as well, is Professor Verin Swami.

He's an international expert on attraction and body image. He's written several books on these topics. He's a charted psychologist. Among his books, he's written, attraction, explained. He's a professor at Anglia Raskin University, and we're very pleased to have him with us today. Vian, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me. Something, you know, I, I like to shine a light on is the idea that [00:03:00] we, we tend to think unconsciously that the things, the way things are, the things they always were. And I think that applies to, to romantic relationships as well. So we're obviously living in a very particular time and we have very particular attitudes about romantic relationships.

I think if I had to summarize the attitudes in, in the West in 2025, it's something like, you know, your romantic relationship is very important. It's kind of essential part of your life. It's, it's based on romantic attraction and not necessarily pragmatic, you know, decisions. And there's this, this soulmate hypothesis.

You know, there's one or perhaps a few people out there that are like, really well mashed, trust us and it's our job in life to find them. That's one of the few really important decisions we have to make. But my question to you is how new is this notion of centering your life on a romantic relationship?

Is this a new thing? How, how, when did this come about? It's, it's fairly new. Um, I [00:04:00] guess it depends on how we're defining what we talk about when we talk about romantic love. 'cause romantic love itself. Hasn't always been conceptualize in the same way. I mean, if you go back 3000 years, for example, and you look at the ancient Greeks, the ancient Greeks believed that love was essentially a random act of God.

Um, they believed that it was caused by Eros or the Romans, new Eros as Cupid and Cupid was essentially a, a, a demigod who went around, um, um, shooting his arrows at people. And if you happen to be struck by one of Cupid's arrows, you would be lucky or sometimes unlucky enough to be, to, to fall in love. And that was a real conceptualization of attraction of love and what it meant and how, how it came about.

Later depictions of, of Cupid would often depict him as blindfolded. And the intention, if you've seen Primavera, um, botticelli's, um, painting spring at the top of the painting, you'll see, you'll see a depiction of of, of [00:05:00] Cupid and his, and it's blindfolded. And the intention there was not to say that he was necessarily blind, but rather that he was random.

He was blinkered. Mm-hmm. So the act of falling in love itself was, was, was, was, was an, it was something that would happen by chance. It wasn't a, it wasn't an intentional process by the middle, by the middle Ages. Love had an attraction and particularly been reinterpreted in terms of developments in optical theory.

And the, the basic idea was that light from one person would speed into your eyes, and your eyes would act as a sort of mirror and they would reflect the light down to your heart, setting your heart on fire. And now as your heart was beating and it was on fire, would somehow make a decision about whether or not you love this other person.

The basic idea here seems so completely different to how we would think about love now, even in the, even in the Middle Ages. Um, love wasn't even something that we would necessarily would be desirable. Um, love was often [00:06:00] viewed as a kind of affliction, something to be avoided. So like, it's almost like an illness.

Um, in the, in the middle Ages, for example, you have lots of people describing love as a form of melancholia, sometimes as a disorder of the womb, particularly for, for women. And you have similar ideas in China and Japan and India. Love was always something to be avoided. If you were unlucky enough to be afflicted, you would go and find a doctor or a, or a, or a or a, or a magician or a wizard or someone who'd be able to cure you of your, of your illness.

Galen, for example, famously said that the, the cure for love was to let out all your blood and to be re, re purified in that way. Um, there's also a famous poem by John Gower in the 14th century and the whole poem's, it's a, a long poem called Confess Mantis, the Lover's Confession. It's basically about this man who, who's so afflicted by love, that he says, I want to kill myself.

And he finds no solution until he goes to find Venus. And Venus says, I can see you are in pain and [00:07:00] I'm going to give you an ointment, and the ointment will will cure you. By the 16th century, Venus had been replaced by physicians like Galen, and one of the, the recommended, uh, courses of action for men in particular was to have they called therapeutic intercourse to go and have sex.

Uh, women were offered no such liberties, unfortunately. Um. So even in the Middle Ages, the conception of of love was very different. And really when the, the kind of starting point of, of our understanding of love begins probably in the 16th, maybe the 15th century, in what's sometimes now called courtly love.

In Western Europe, you had, um, a, a, a conception of what was termed courtly love, which emerged through nobility and through chivalry. Stories of knights, for example, often would show them going out on long adventures and to perform deeds for ladies of high status because of their courtly love. Probably the most famous example is our theory and legend.

You've [00:08:00] got Lady Guinevere and Selo, and Selo goes and performs all these wonderful deeds for the for for his love of Lady, lady Guinevere. So here for the first time, love isn't something that we feel because we want to advance our position or advance our family's position, but we do it because of our character.

We do it because we, we are devoted to someone. We are pious, we are, we are, we want to demonstrate our gallantry. And probably most important of all in terms of courtly depictions of, of, of love, we do it because of self-sacrifice. We sacrifice ourselves for someone else and for the needs of others. But the really important distinction here is that in, even in courtly love and the way it was a formalized courtly love, it wasn't something that we just go and do for the sake of it.

And we wanna demonstrate our, our, our love for one person. We do it for all people. We do it for all the people we come across. We show our respect. We show our care. We show kindness to all the people we come across, irrespective of class, irrespective of, [00:09:00] of any kind of, um, societal division. By the 16th century, this courtly love had become codified, and there were three important things that were codified in, in terms of how courtly love is depicted.

Firstly, love can grow and this is a big change from previous demonstr or previous depictions of love for the first time. Love is something that grows. It evolves, it becomes bigger over time. And secondly, allows for feelings of jealousy. I am now allowed to feel jealous if someone loves someone else, loves the person that I loves, I love.

And the third important thing is it forbids love for more than one person. We are expected now by by in courtly depictions of love, to demonstrate a love for one singular person. And the kind of implicit here is that that one person should also be of another gender, should not be the same gender as you.

And these kind of laws become codified over time. Um, and in essence, that's the starting point of what we consider to be romantic love today [00:10:00] By the 19th century, these kind of, the, these, the, the kind of ideas around love had become more or less formalized. Um, Howard Galin, the, the anthropologist, talks about the kind of formalization of love as we know it today occurs probably in the 19th century, early part of the 20th century as capitalism, um, becomes more entrenched in, in most Western societies.

And he says, one of the things that what capitalism does is it makes communa life more difficult. We become separated from each other. We become alienated, we become atomized, and we feel alone. And for Galin, he argues that one thing that capitalism then ensures is the way we find solace, the way we find peace, the way we find comfort is through these formalization of our relationships and our romantic relationships.

We find in a, in an increasingly disrupted world, we find solace in, in forms of, in forms of love. I think this is a very, very [00:11:00] important point, what he just said that I want to highlight, which is as we progress from the ancient world to the Middle Ages, to the renaissance, the modern period communal life lessons and becomes more and more diluted.

This is something I talk about quite a lot. People feel isolated and then a romantic relationship, which or romantic feelings, which it sounds like in the ancient world were considered kind of a nuisance and you know, in the middle Ages, perhaps an affliction of some kind. Now, romantic romance and romantic relationships become.

An essential source of like community and companionship in a more isolated world. And it actually resonates, it matches with what the relationship expert Este Perel talks about. She says, A lot of the problems in modern romantic relationships emerge from the fact that we put so much pressure on that relationship that we expect our romantic partner to be, not only our romantic partner, but also our [00:12:00] best friend, potentially our business partner.

All of these things wrapped up into one relationship, which puts a huge amount of pressure. Whereas in earlier parts of human history, you would expect, you know, someone's really gonna be raised by a village and have a much like richer, more community based life. I, I think it goes even, even a little bit further than that.

I think one of the things that, of, particularly in more recent history, how we conceptualize love, we often conceptualize it as a historical and. Absent of social structures. We don't think of capitalism as and, and, and kind of modern postmodern history as kind of imposing structures on how we love or who we love or why we love.

But it exists and that's the nature of our, our, of our existence now. But the other big change is how we think about love itself. Eric from talked about love, conceptualizations of love as being accidental. Look at the, the, the way we describe falling in love Now. [00:13:00] Falling in love is probably the most obvious one.

We fall into something we ex, we kind of become love struck as though it just occurs to us. And he talk and he uses this term accidental emotion. Our emotions are often not accidental. We are angry for a reason, for a purpose, or we experience joy because there's something happening in our lives. But with love, we give it the the past to say, it just happens and we don't know why it happens.

And we just experience it. And he kind of says, this allows us to absolve class and politics and economics and social history from our understanding of love. It becomes an individualized emotion that just occurs to us somehow magically. And. His starting point is the same as Howard Galin. He says, we are all separated under capitalism.

We are. We are kind of divorced from each other. We feel helpless. We're filled with shame, we're filled with guilt, and we carry all of that around. And the most important way in which we try to resolve [00:14:00] all of those issues and our separated is by seeking lasting unions with other people. So love is the solution, but from also goes on to say, look, the most important thing, it's that it's fundamentally not just an emotion, but an activity.

We have to practice love. We do love, we demonstrate love, not just as an emotion, but we show our love by active, caring for other people, active respect, active knowledge. And that takes practice. And I suspect a lot of the problems that you are talking about comes from this fact that we're all outta practice when it comes to love.

We don't practice The Art of love. From book is called The Art of Love. He talks about how we have to. Practice it in the same way that you would practice carpentry or art or painting or whatever it is you enjoy doing. You need to practice it. And he says, look, there are four things you can do to practice love.

You need to understand how to care for someone else, how to respect someone else, how to take responsibility for that person and [00:15:00] how to understand that person. But those are all things that are active. We do those things and when we do those things, we learn how to love other people. Um, bell Hooks another important philosopher.

She goes even further and says, look. The, you cannot talk about love in contemporary society. Without politicizing love structures in society, prevent love in certain circumstances. They say you're not allowed to love this person, or you are not given the full capacity to love this person because of poverty, because of class, because of, um, all kinds of things that occur in society.

So for her, you, if you want a, a society which allows full expression of love in all its forms for every individual possible, you first have to dismantle all those structures in society that prevent love and froms. Final point is he says, before you can love other people, you have to love yourself. You have to understand how to love yourself, and all those things he says about practicing in terms of loving other people like [00:16:00] care and compassion and kindness, you first have to direct it yourself.

When you learn how to love yourself, you'll learn how to love other people. Can you expand on that? Why, why is it so important that you, 'cause you, I mean, you hear this a lot and I've talked about this when I've talked about, you know, self-esteem, and I've written a bit about this, but why, why is it so important to love yourself?

To have a good relationship with yourself before you can have a good relationship with another person? Can't you just, you know, despite your own difficulties with yourself, find that capacity to have to love someone else? I guess this is where it comes down to what we, how we define love as well. I guess you can start from a point of view where your love for other people.

Is predicated not on love for the self, but just on love for other people in general. And it's possible you can learn to care for other people and be responsible for other people, but why not start by showing those things for yourself? Because it affords you the greatest capacity for [00:17:00] growth. It allows you to become the fullest expression of, of who you are.

But I also think what, once you learn how to care for yourself, once you learn how to be responsible for yourself, once you show respect for yourself, and I don't mean these things in the kind of simplistic form, like in a self-help kind of way. I mean truly introspecting and truly sitting with yourself in your difficult emotions.

And sometimes might only be done in through, through therapy. It might not be able to, you might not be able to do it on your own. But being able to sit with those emotions and understand who you truly are provides the foundation to love others. And I mean this in two different ways. When you have the capacity to know who you are and to respect yourself and to care for yourself, it allows you to love other individuals.

But it also allows you to treat love as an activity, as a doing. And what that means is that you then get to understand that love can be demonstrated in lots of different ways. You don't have to find that one soulmate out there that's special to you. You also could [00:18:00] demonstrate love for your community, love for your nation, love for humanity in general, all of which exemplify the same forms of things that you would do for one individual, the same care, the same responsibility, the same knowledge, the same respect that you show you would show for one individual.

You also show for the rest of humanity. And that's the real love that we're talking about. But it only comes because you are able to say, I have done all those things for myself as part of a broader, um, group of human beings. Yeah, I mean, all of that makes sense to me. I'd like to share my point of view as a clinician, which is partly all heavily influenced by the book Neurosis and Human Growth, which was written by the psychoanalyst Karen Hona in the fifties.

And that point of view is if you don't have a good relationship with yourself, you really leave the door open for, for like three categories of things. One, a kind of narcissism, anger, vindictiveness. Two, [00:19:00] a kind of excessive self-sacrifice, like totally sacrificing your needs for someone else, which does not really make for a good, long lasting relationship.

Or three, a sense of resignation of like, relationships are too difficult and I need to abstain from them entirely. If you don't sort out your relationship with yourself maturely, again, not in a superficial way, as you said, but in a real way, like, what do I need? Do I respect for myself? Do I respect myself?

Do I have a basic positive self regard that narcissism, anger, vindictiveness, that sense of anxiety or need to sacrifice oneself or that resignation? They obviously hugely disrupt all of our interpersonal relationships and obviously our romantic relationships as well. I absolutely, and if you think about genuine love and being able to love, not just ourselves, but being able to show that capacity to love ourselves and then others.

It's the foundation of [00:20:00] everything we do, how we engage with our families, how we engage with our partners, how we engage with our communities. The difficult thing though is that learning to love in this way often feels difficult. It's the most difficult thing to do to introspect and say, this is the darkest part of me.

But I've looked at it and I've understood it, and I've found why it is that way. Then to come out and go, I can take that and put it aside and learn how to love other people. Now that requires us to accept who we are and then to shine the light of it and, and go, I'm okay with that and I can learn to love other people.

Now, it strikes me that I'm curious because you have such a rich knowledge of the historical context. I'm really curious what you might observe in modern culture, you know, as it appears in popular media and, and popular trends. It strikes me that this, the Eric from View of Love that you mentioned, you know, that, that love is a practice, not just a practice, but an art form that has to be cultivated.

That doesn't seem to [00:21:00] be present in the popular culture at all. What, what I see in the culture is a sense that love is primarily a function of finding the right person. Again, there's the soulmate view. You know, if I can just find the right person, then everything more or less works well on its own, and therefore when people encounter relationship problems.

Their first thought is, I simply haven't found the right person. Is this something you see in the culture as well? Do you, do you feel that the, the, the from view of love is largely absent? Yeah. And as part of the reason why I'm often keen to talk about from in his view, but not just from bell hooks as well and others have kind of re re popularized this idea.

I think it also goes hand in hand with what I sometimes call the ification of love. The idea that love is essentially just something that occurs in your brain or as part of, uh, neurotransmitters that are occurring in your body somewhere. And that's all that love is and it's such a [00:22:00] popular view. This idea that love is basically a series of hormones that are circulating in your bloodstream and they trigger reactions.

And I suspect a lot of the reason why we favor these kind of biological explanations of love is 'cause it feels easy. It goes back to this idea of kind of love as an accidental emotion. If it's just something happening in my brain, I have no control over what's happening. I can absolve my responsibility here and say, it's nothing to do with me, it's just something that's happening in my brain.

And therefore, whatever happens will happen. I do not have to take responsibility. Here, you see this, for example, in discussions of oxytocin. Oxytocin is primarily a, a, a neurotransmitter that's involved in, um, in childbirth. And we see a lot this in this. Why, for example, midwives will often advocate for skin to skin contact with a parent, um, immediately after the birth of a child.

It releases oxytocin that's been shown to be involved in pair bonding between the parent and the child. We also see it in, in, um, discussions of what love looks like. And a lot of times love [00:23:00] is, uh, oxytocin is involved in, in kind of, um, you see increases in oxytocin, for example, among couples who are who, who say they're in love.

But when we say love is basically oxytocin, what we are really saying is that it's just something that's happening in the brain and that we have no control over. Um, and what that does, it says you don't have to take responsibility here. It's just something that happens in your brain, and you can, you can do how you can behave however you want.

Um, the kind of more formalized version of this is that there's not just one neuro, but a whole series of things. But what it comes down to saying is that there are a whole series of neurochemical reactions that are taking place in your brain when you fall in love and you have no responsibility, no care for what's happening.

The analogy that I like to sometimes use is that when I walk from one place to another, there are a whole series of things that are happening in my brain. My brain is saying, move from A to B, and I'm telling my legs to move, and all kinds of things are being coordinated. I might have [00:24:00] memories about where I've been between A and B and how I've done this in the past, and why I'm thinking all of those things are happening in my brain.

That's not walking, that's in itself, not walking. Walking is the act of actually walking from A to B. And in the same way, I would say like all these things that are happening in your brain is not love. It occurs in your brain, but it's not love. It goes back to the idea of from when you kind of distinguish between the kind of accidental emotion of love and the doing of love.

And I think a lot of the time, a lot of the reason why this, why the kind of the active formal version of love has been kind of rendered invisible in popular culture is 'cause it's too difficult. It requires, like we've been talking about interception and kind of intercept, kind of focusing on yourself and therapeutic work a lot of the time.

But if you're not willing to put in that effort, then you rely on kind of simplified forms of love, kind of love that doesn't require work, which is a biological form or other forms of love, explanations of love [00:25:00] that don't require effort. Are there any, I mean, I'm sure you must, knowing all of this stuff, walk around in your personal life and it must be hard not to make observations about certain things that people do.

Are there any really common relationship mistakes that you see people making over and over again and what, what would you love that they might do instead? I, it's tricky 'cause I, I, I, I get this question sometimes and people tend to think that because I have this knowledge in my head that it's easy to apply.

And I've been talking about this as something like an advocating for other people to love fully and to love themselves. And it's a process. It doesn't just stop because you've gone through therapy or because you've done some introspection of yourself. It's a lifelong thing that you have to reinvigorate all the time.

And actually looking at myself, right? When I have conversations with people like this, like with yourself right now, I'll come away from this thinking, what have I done recently that's kind of helped me to love myself and to then be a better [00:26:00] partner, to be a better father, to be a, a better family member and so on.

And it reinvigorates these, these things in my head, but it requires constant repetition. So when I, when I, when I talk about, when you ask me like, what is the thing I hope for other people, you know, the, the simple answer is I hope other people take away from this, that being or finding a fuller form of love is possible.

It requires effort, but it is possible. And the most rewarding part is when you can come away from that process and you think I've, I've changed how I love other people because I've thought about it and I've gone through the hard work and I've come away as a better human being able to love other people.

For those people who have got to that stage. The reminder is that it's not a singular step, it's a process that has to be repeated over and over again throughout the course of your life. The flip side to this is that the rewards from being able to love are immense. And again, what I see in the culture is more of [00:27:00] love is seen as a commodity.

And increasingly, I think we can have a conversation about dating apps. I think dating apps contribute to this because dating apps influence us to think of other people as lists of characteristics. So now we don't think of, you know, Tom, the whole person, you know, with a certain X factor and flaws and strengths.

We think Tom six two works in investment banking earns X amount of money. I can't, you know, I, I do think human beings are very vulnerable to behavioral conditioning. You know, things, behaviors that we do over and over again, influence how we think and our mindset. So when I think of. Continually seeing, continually using dating apps, swiping, and basically looking at these digital pamphlets of ourselves that we create, where we reduce ourselves to 10.

So characteristics, I can't help but feel this has a very, very like reductive effect on how human [00:28:00] beings see each other. And do we need to start, I don't know how we would do this, you know, sometimes it's much easier to diagnose the problem than it is to prescribe the solution. But is this something you see, we need to start unwinding this commodification of ourselves.

I think personally on that personal level, having looked at some of the evidence, I think I'm a bit more ambivalent than you probably are. And I say that for a couple of reasons. I think you are absolutely right in the sense that I think dating apps have commodified dating. Particularly for young people today who are navigating the dating scene, it has become almost like an existential issue that they're facing.

To find a, to find a, a partner, and having to go through the dating process feels often soul destroying and it's soul destroying for precisely the reasons you talk about. It feels like almost like you're going shopping, like you're shopping for a relationship and, and psychologists have this new term now we call it relationship shopping.

And essentially what you're doing is you're [00:29:00] looking through all the criteria that people put up about themselves. And you're saying, I like that, I like that, I like that. I don't like that. I don't like that. And you're finding that one individual who, who find, who completes all the categories, all the things that you hope for, and you go through iterations of this process.

And often the kind of things that people say about themselves often don't turn out to be reality. And then we start again. And you go through this process again and again, and again and again. And dating apps will sell this as consumer choice. And on the one hand, they're absolutely right. One thing that dating apps has done.

Half done is they have. They've disintermediated relationships. And what we mean by that, if you look historically, the historically pre 20th century, for example, the people who would've found you a partner were typically your family or your local community. In the West, that local community typically would've been the parish or the local church.

They would've found you, your partner, and that would've been, that would've been it. And you would've married for the sake of family advancement or for wealth, or for, for social status or some other reason. But typically, you're not [00:30:00] marrying for love. That changes in the 20th century when people have much more agency and they begin, they be talked about looking for love as a, as a, as a form of solace within an increasingly, um, isolated world.

And here they begin making individual choices about who they want to love. But most relationships in the 20th century are still formed in workplaces at university, what we typically call closed spaces. You have to have some reason to go into that space. Um. This begins to change with dating apps. Dating apps come in and they completely disentangle where we find our partners.

In the uk, in Western Europe, in North America, between 40 and 60% of all heterosexual relationships are now formed online. They are the now the number one way in which part in which young people today and most people are looking for, for, for a relationship and where they're finding their partners. And the reason for that is a very simple one.

If I was reliant on my family to find me a partner, I would've to give them information about myself, I would've to tell them I want this person and this is what I like and this is what I hope they like. And [00:31:00] sometimes it means also sharing personal information with my family or with my church or whatever, and saying, these are the things that I like sexually, or, these are the things that I like, hope my partner will be able to fulfill for me in terms of my life and so on.

I don't wanna share that information with my family. And a dating app takes all that out. It puts you in direct contact with this, the, the sometimes hundreds, possibly thousands of people who are all out there just waiting for you. But this is the problem with dating apps. They sell you a world in which there are literally hundreds of people who are just waiting for you don't like person X.

Well there's a hundred other people waiting for you. And it creates a sense that this really is a shopping exercise that you're going shopping. And if you don't like one product, you put it back on the shelf and you take a completely different product and you keep cycling through this until you find the one product that you truly, truly like.

And even if after a few months you don't really like that project or that product, you put it back on the shelf again and you go and find a new product. And I think that creates a sense that these [00:32:00] relationships are short term, they're not meaningful, they're not fulfilling in the sense that we would've taught thought about relationships historically.

And I think that's one of the big problems with dating apps. Having said that, I also do think there is a, a part that dating apps can play therapeutically. The first thing that most people do when they go on a, on a dating app is they have to start thinking about who they are. Uh, it's, it's forced by the app.

The app forces you to say, these are the, these, this is how I would describe myself using kind of self descriptors. I'm a smoker or not smoker. So you have to think about it in a kind of superficial way, and that gives you some space to talk about who you are and what you like or answer some questions about who you are.

It's almost like a form of therapy. It's like when do we get to sit down and think about who we are? To communicate how we want to disclose our identities to other people. It's so rare in society today that we have the time and space, and we're allowed to do it in a way that feels creative [00:33:00] or feels nice about ourselves to promote the positive about ourselves.

We don't get that space. So dating apps provide that space. Now, the fact that most people don't take it seriously and they kind of come up with statements. My favorite one used to be, I like going, I, I found my partner on a dating app by, by the way, just many years ago. But my favorite statement always used to be, I like going out and I like staying in, which is the whole gamut of things you could possibly do, but it just kind of gives you a sense that people aren't engaging with that process very well.

Mm-hmm. And that's again, partly a function of how dating has been kind of, it has been gamified. You shouldn't be on the flicking through all the people and don't invest too much time in how you describe yourself, because it's just a game and you come away from it and it's done. I mean, I should say I'm not anti-D dating app particularly.

I think dating apps can be a very useful tool if you're conscious of your relationship with them and you know you're intentional about it. Okay. You are using it as an introductory tool, that's all fine. But I do think important to point out the [00:34:00] subtle ways in which dating apps influence us. And one other way I'd like to point out is what I would call the difference between hard reject, hard rejection, and soft rejection.

People forget that one of the revolutionary things about Tinder when it first came out was that it felt a lot more frictionless in that you just say, you know, I like a bunch of people. You swipe right on lots of people and you only get the matches. So instead of having to ask someone out in a more organic way, let's say you meet someone at a bar, you have to ask someone out and you have to deal with that awkwardness of what if they say no?

All that stuff. They're the, the nos are kind of just taken off the table. So you don't have this hard rejection, which I think the ability to confront hard rejection, forthright, forthrightly, makes you psychologically stronger. So I believe that as a psychotherapist, you could say it's a form of exposure therapy.

I'm anxious about being rejected. I am rejected. You know, I ask someone out, they [00:35:00] say, no, I, it's not the end of the world. You know, I don't break into a million pieces that actually makes people, in my view, as long as you have the right mindset and you're reasonable, I think it makes people stronger, more resilient, less anxious, and might help them have a better relationship with themselves, actually.

But I think the soft rejection of dating apps, which is, you know, I've swiped right on a hundred people. I get either no or very little response, and then I have a few conversations which trail into nothing. My view is that's actually quite soul crushing. I think it makes people feel invisible, worthless.

I don't think it particularly is good for their, for their mental health. I'd love to get your thoughts on that. Do you see this, this distinction between hard rejection and soft rejection? I, I think all rejection hurts. I, I, I think, yeah, some forms of rejection are more painful than others, but I, I think the difficulty with dating apps is that there are different forms of rejection on dating apps.

One is the most explicit form of rejection where someone says no [00:36:00] or they don't respond, or there's no connection between people. But you've also got kind of longer term forms of rejection where you've had a conversation with someone and they explicitly reject you, or you go on a first date, or you go on several dates and they reject you.

Then those are all incredibly painful. And I guess that's the difficulty with dating apps. The ultimate point is to that you want to meet someone. And dating apps do facilitate that, but there is probably, for most people, no one's going to find their partner on a first date that that first time you go online you, it's not the first person you see that you're going to, that you're going to fall in love with and form a relationship with.

It's going to be a process. But I think a lot of people go into kind of, because of how the narrative has been spun, particularly in popular culture, but also specifically by dating apps themselves, that there is one person out there waiting for you, your soulmate. And they do this in different ways. They talk about soulmate.

This term has disappeared from language in English language, at least for a long time. But it's come back into use primarily because of dating apps. And [00:37:00] this idea that there is a singular individual who is your perfect, your companion. Um. Dating apps sometimes do this with a numerical value. They will tell you a hundred percent connection or 98% connection.

And the implicit idea being here that the a hundred percent connection is the better partner for you algorithmically, which is nonsense because there is absolutely zero evidence to suggest that these algorithms work. The best evidence that we have tells you that the algorithms don't work and that people are, people are better off or just as likely to find a romantic partner with a 50% match compared to a hundred percent match.

So the algorithms are a lie, but they sell it as this is your perfect partner. And so you get into the mindset that you have to find the the one perfect individual who's going to complete your life. But this goes into a broader story about what love has become in contemporary culture, that we are so empty [00:38:00] within ourselves that someone else will come along and fill that gap for us.

That's not what love is. And it goes back to the idea we were talking about before, that you have to be able to fill yourself first before you allow someone into your life. If you go into a dating app, hoping that that person, the person that you end up being in a relationship real with, will fulfill things in your life or complete the emptiness in your life.

It's an empty relationship to begin with. Yeah, and that's so important because again, I think the process of meeting people dating, that that's a process which you can use to develop yourself. To introspect, to learn about yourself and hopefully even if there are rejections, which can be painful along the way to become a better person along the way.

And this is, again, very different to the commodity point of view. You know, if you purchase a commodity, like you buy a cup of coffee, that that thing is expected to be a standardized unit of some kind of good, which predictably improves you [00:39:00] in some way or gives you some kind of benefit, whereas relationships, relationships are, are different.

I think relationships done well is a situation where the people have an effect on each other. The two people change as a result of the interaction with each other and hopefully for the better. Going on to some other cultural trends, you know, we, we see an increased prevalence of practices of like non-monogamy and many people might argue.

That actually humans aren't essentially monogamous. Some people have argued that monogamy actually is kind of a result of civilization, which is relatively new in human history. There's been a book called Sex at Dawn, written about this. We actually had the author on the podcast a couple of years ago. In your view, how essentially human is monogamy?

Would you say humans are a monogamous species, essentially, or, or is it true that actually we are inherently non monogamous and monogamy [00:40:00] only came about to the advent of civilization? I, I am generally of the opinion that. That there is a distinction to be made between human beings historically and evolutionarily and human beings.

Today, human beings in evolutionary history were typically non-monogamous. They, uh, it was typically a polygamous structure where there was one man who had multiple relationships with multiple, multiple women. That was in distant evolutionary history though, and any idea that you can use that as a framework for how we behave or should behave today is complete nonsense.

There is a trend, I think, in some scientific circles to take what happened many hundred thousands of years ago and say, that is the natural way for human beings to be, and they ignore the fact that evolution is an, is a, is an ongoing process that we evolve not just in our biology, but in our cultures as well.

And all the anthropological evidence, all the sociocultural evidence shows that at some point. About 10,000 years ago, once we shifted to [00:41:00] agricultural farming and and farming in place, there was a division of labor. And once divisions of labor occurred, gendered norms of of relationships also then became the norm.

And that was, and typically through a relationship between one individual and another. And that was reinforced in Western Europe through the Christian Church and through legal frameworks. And that's why you have the dominant structure of relationships today, being a heterosexual one between a man and one woman.

And that's how it has been for about 400 years Now, having said that, that genetic evidence suggests that some people do cheat. Some people are having sex with more than one person, and they're having children who are not their own, and they're raising that in that child as part of their family. And even if you are self-report, self-reported, um, ev or look at self-reported evidence of, of non-monogamy people who say they're cheating in their relationships.

50 years ago, the Alfred Kinsey reports put it at between 20 and 30% higher, typically in men. But 20 to 30% of people were saying, I'm not, I'm in a [00:42:00] outwardly monogamous relationship, but I have been cheating on my partner. There are all kinds of problems with the Kinsey reports. The most recent, um, national representative, ally representative surveys suggest that if through self reports between five and 12% of people are in outwardly monogamous relationships, but having, um, relationships outside their, their primary relationship, the genetic evidence puts it closer to about 2%.

So the best I suppose you can say is that as a species, human beings are probably what we would say is ambiguously monogamous. The social pressure, the cultural pressure, the legal frameworks that are in existence in most human populations pushes us towards monogamy. But not everyone is monogamous. If, if we came from a background of, uh, non-monogamy, albeit in our evolutionary past.

Does it not make sense to try and understand that evolutionary past to make sense of our current instincts? Because, you know, even though we [00:43:00] may recognize that monogamous relationships might be good for us, for all sorts of reasons, might be a good way of navigating the problem of relationships in the modern world, as far as I know.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, we are, you know, genetically, physiologically pretty similar to our hunter gatherer ancestors. And my understanding is that's why we likely have the same instincts, why people can be attracted to people outside of our partnerships. And as, as it's sort of, uh, discussed in Sex.

And Dawn, you know, just because you're a vegetarian, it doesn't mean that bacon doesn't smell good. You know, understanding our instincts can be a really useful way. You know, acknowledging them, confronting them can be a good way of actually living a monogamous lifestyle because I think all you know. When people don't do that, they tend to, we tend to repress our instincts and then they come out in unhelpful ways.

You know, we feel, oh, we feel ashamed. If we're attracted someone as sought our partner, we feel like it's a bad thing or a shameful [00:44:00] thing. So do you think it's, it's a good idea to at least say, okay, this is our evolution, our evolutionary past, this is where we've come from, and that's why we might have certain instincts, tendencies, predispositions.

I think my conclusion is probably the same as yours, but how we get there is probably different. I don't have a problem with understanding evolutionary history. I absolutely agree. We should try and understand all parts of humanity and all our history and, uh, inclusive, our evolutionary history. My issue with.

Looking at evolutionary history is that a lot of the time what happens, and this is true of what I've previously called evolutionary psychology with a capsule, ECAP P, a particular form of evolutionary psychology, which tries to naturalize certain human behaviors because of recourse to ancient history.

They will say, this is how a hunter gatherer ancestors behaved. Therefore, we also must be behaving in the same way. Or if we don't behave in the same way, it's because there are some limitations in how we are able to behave now. And often this becomes [00:45:00] a justification for things like rape and a lack of homosexuality and all kinds of other things.

My view is very simple. I think people should be free to find the sorts of relationships that work for them. And increasingly, we are seeing, and at least in the West, that that includes non-monogamy. Um, the best evidence that we have at the moment suggests that between one and 2% of people in North America, at least, that's where the best data comes from, are practicing non-monogamy.

And that includes all forms of different non-monogamy, ranging from a swinging lifestyle to established forms of non-monogamy. But that's an increase. And a year on year increase, even compared to 10 years ago. And I suspect this is partly a reflection of people challenging established norms about what a relationship should be like and what it should mean for them, but also challenging things, challenging norms around sexuality and sexual behavior and partnerships.

And all of these things are in flux. The one thing I would [00:46:00] caution is that I think there is a climate currently, not just in the, in North America and West Europe, but around the world increasingly so of formalizing and challenging and a backlash against these forms of experimentation and finding new forms of behavior.

And I suspect when people think, well, just because it's increasing doesn't mean it's always going to increase. And I think if we want to protect these forms of new forms of relationships, we have to also understand that there is, there are individuals and groups and organizations and structures in society, which will push back against all the advances that we've, we've made.

Yeah, and I probably worth also highlighting here that people are likely to have predispositions. So I, I would say, you know, from my understanding of personality psychology, it's highly likely that some people will just simply be more, much more likely to be satisfied with a monogamous relationship than other people.

Who may have more of an inclination to pursue multiple relationships at the same time. [00:47:00] Do we have any, is there any evidence as to, uh, how satisfying. People find monogamous versus non monogamous relationships in their lives. Are there any comparative studies that might look at that? Very few. Partly because the kind of rise of contemporary forms of non-monogamy are relatively recent, and I suspect the research is still, is still catching up.

What we do know is that people who are in non-monogamous relationships and primary North America, some data from Western Europe and Australia as well, they often experience a lot of stigma. Um, and that's partly a reflection of kind of challenging established norms in, in wider society. Um, there are all kinds of stereotypes that they sometimes internalize about how they are, uh, about their beliefs, about sex and beliefs, about relationships, and that that data is slowly catching up.

Finally, enough, there is data, a lot of data actually from the 1970s and 1980s focusing primarily on swinging and all the evidence from swinging couples. So swinging, just basically individuals who [00:48:00] are open to having consensual real sexual relationships with other people. All the evidence suggests.

Firstly, there are very few personality differences between swingers and Nons. Swingers, with one exception, swingers have more liberal sexual attitudes, which you'd expect, and they also have lower levels of jealousy. Again, you'd expect the weird thing may, maybe it's not weird. The wonderful thing about swinging, I suppose, is the impact it has on relationship satisfaction.

Swingers report some of the highest levels of relationship satisfaction in, in, in, in terms of, um, established relationships. They also report more romantic feelings towards their partners. In terms of individual wellbeing, they typically report greater sense of wellbeing, highest self-esteem. So all the evidence contrary to kind of the stereotype of what swingers and non-monogamy might look like, suggest that they're actually functioning better, not just in themselves, but in their relationships as well.

Okay, so I'm sure that will give our listeners something to chew over for a few days. Taking a step back from relationships themselves and just [00:49:00] going into attraction itself. How much do we know about what might make people, men and women, let's say, let's say, let's just focus on men and women for this attracted to each other.

Is that, is that predictable? How much has science revealed about the nature of attraction? I think there's a distinction between understanding and prediction. Um, this goes back to what we were talking about before, algorithmically if look if. As a scientist, if I could predict when two people will be attracted to each other, I would be able to create the most successful dating app of all time.

And the fact that you've got millions of people who are using dating apps and not getting very fast suggests that A, the algorithms aren't working or that the prediction is not possible. And I'm gonna give you the kind of, the, the short answer. The prediction is not possible because the data is always too messy.

The thing that you're putting into the, the, the, the, the, the machine, for lack of a better word, to try and predict an outcome, the data that's going in is [00:50:00] complex because human beings are complex. I like to give this example. So you go on a first date with someone and you spill your drink and your drink spills all over the table and the your partner thinks, wow, this person's really clumsy, and the the date doesn't go anywhere.

And the next week you go on another date. And again, the same thing happens. You spill your drink, but this time you, the, the person you are on a date with thinks, well that I don't mind that that was a cute thing that happened. We'll tell this story when we go on our fifth date, that is impossible to, or the, the, the outcome here is impossible to predict because that data is so individualized that there is no way in advance I'd be able to predict what's going to happen.

And that's the problem we have with a lot of relationship science. People want us to be able to say, predict in advance how two people are going to have what kind of relationship two people are gonna have. And you have to say you can't do it, it's impossible. You can understand processes and we know there are a number of things that occur and that will facilitate attraction, will [00:51:00] facilitate, um, more positive relationships.

Then to apply that and say I can predict in advance is where the, the science becomes misapplied or misused, right? So you can't predict in advance. And I had a conversation with Dr. Paul Eastwick in the U us uc Davis. He does a lot of relationship science and he spoke of the importance of something called motivated reasoning when it comes to relationships that people meet each other and they use the stuff that happens between them to create a story.

So I think your drink spinning example is really good. So someone might use that as a sign of, actually, I don't really like this person. Or they may say, actually, this is a wonderful, funny part of how we met. And people do this with everything that happens between them. And so even though there is this myth of compatibility, which is perpetuated by dating apps.

Dr. Eastwick at least, is very clear that compatibility doesn't really exist. What we have is a [00:52:00] constructed compatibility. You meet someone and you use the stuff that happens between you to either construct or not a sense of compatibility and narrative that, you know, you and I were gonna work together in this way, perhaps in a friendship way, perhaps in a romantic way, perhaps not at all.

And it's the story that's co-created. And to me that makes a lot of sense. Again, evolutionarily, because you wouldn't want, you'd want to minimize the extent, if you wanted to perpetuate the human race, you would want to minimize inherent incompatibility as much as possible. If two people met on an island, you'd want to maximize the chances that they can get along.

And I think often people feel like they can't get along or can't get romantically involved with someone because it's within a greater context of an enormous amount of choice. Like two people meet in a city and they're like, why would I date this person? I could date? Thousands of other people on, on, on my phone.

Is that, is, [00:53:00] is your reading of the evidence the same, that there isn't this inherent compatibility, but rather it's a constructed phenomenon? Yeah. Paul's a colleague of mine, so I, I share his opinion. Um, I would, I would push it one step further, and I would say it's not just co-created by the two individuals who are having a date or more than two individuals.

Sometimes it's also co-created by all the stuff we bring into that date. And by that I mean gendered expectations. Expectations around finance, about economics, about politics, and all of that impinges on the date. And often it's invisible. Um, as a very simple example, who buys the first drink or where you go on a first date or what happens on the first date.

Even how you feel on that first date are all. Gendered and all managed in different ways by how you've done things in the past or what you've learned in a particular society about what to expect on a date. And so we reenact these things. Hollywood is probably the biggest purveyor of how we're supposed to feel and how we're supposed to understand [00:54:00] our experiences.

And even after you leave that date and you go home and you sit down and you think, how was that date? And you interpret it through lenses, borrowed from capitalism, borrowed from politics, borrowed from socioeconomics, and all of those lenses impinge on how you experience attraction. So I don't think it's just co-created by the two individuals, although that absolutely does happen.

It's also co-created in a much broader sense through. Negotiated ideals. Just coming back to this idea of choice, I, I think there is, there's a wonderful thing from consumer psychology, which is about the, the kind of the paradox of choice. What happens when you get given too much choice, and we find this with a lot of dating apps.

This is going back slightly, but I, I think it's an important point. Dating apps offer the, the, the, the idea or the semblance of choice. They say there are hundreds of people waiting for you, but all the evidence from consumer psychology tells us that when you have too much choice, people become paralyzed by choice.

And we know this from, from selling jam in the [00:55:00] 1990s and 1980s. The idea was that if you give people lots and lots of choices of jam, they will choose the one that they would like. Except in reality what tends to happen is if you give people too much choice, they go. I dunno what to do. This, this choice is too difficult for me to make this cognitive overload essentially.

Um, whereas if you give people a fewer choices of jam, say six different jars, they will make a purchase. And we see this with online dating as well. When you have, when you give people too much choice, too many possible, uh, partners to choose from, they very quickly enter what we call a rejection mindset.

They reject more often than they say yes, even if someone fits what they're looking for. Even if someone fits their ideals, they will still reject outright. Whereas if you give them fewer choices, they don't enter that rejection mindset, they're much more likely to enter what we call a joint evaluation mode where they look and compare different people and they go, this person is better suited to me than the other person.

So if you're going to design a dating app, don't give the semblance of choice, give [00:56:00] less. Choice is always the the kind of the winning strategy as it were. But perhaps that might not be the winning strategy for a dating app if the goal of the dating app is to get people to spend as much time on the app as possible, I suppose.

And so there's maybe something to be said for dating apps, somehow changing their own incentives so that like if dating apps were rewarded in some way. For creating successful relationships, then they might be designed in a very different way. Perhaps. I, I, I think the difficulty here is, is, is something Paul Eastwick talks about as well, is how do you measure success?

Because success in algorithmic terms is getting people off the app and going on a relationship. Or sometimes they might ma they might measure it in terms of how many people get married. As a psychologist, as someone who values positive relationships, just because you go offline off the app doesn't mean it's a successful.

Ending to the to the process. Mm. What you want is for people to be in positive relationships, [00:57:00] healthy relationships, but this is always an ongoing thing. So there's no real success as it were. It's an ongoing process of things. But even if you wanted to count some kind of a numerical value of what success looks like, it's going to change for different people.

My definition of what a successful relationship looks like will be very different to yours, will be very different to someone else's, right? And so the algorithm is always going to stunt and limit what we think of in terms of success. And like you say, I think there is a, there is a disconnect between what the developers of the app would like us to do, which is to stay on the app for as long as possible 'cause it's monetized, or to get off and find a healthy relationship.

And I think one thing we haven't really talked about in terms of apps is that often the apps themselves are reflections of what's happening in wider society. Things like sexism and racism and all kinds of other forms of discrimination and bias are inbuilt in the app because they're a reflection of what's happening in wider society.

And a lot of the time I think we kind of come away from these apps thinking, well, they're perfect places to find partners, [00:58:00] but a lot of the time they reiterate the forms of bias that we experience in wider society anyway. And I think what the apps, where I think the apps have failed is a lot of the time they push the policing of that behavior onto the consumer.

Mm-hmm. They say, if you find out that this is happening, you tell us and we'll take some action. And a lot of the time they don't do any action, but they don't challenge, they don't change, they don't actively manage active forms of bias and discrimination and sexism and racism because there's no inherent.

Push to do it from the app's point or the app developer's point of view, and this is why you have all kinds of people who are going onto other forms of social media to complain about racism and find groups of other like-minded individuals who have to challenge it actively. And it's only when it becomes viral that something changes on the app that, for example, they might, I forget which will, which of the dating companies did this, but one of them took out the ability to choose what racial category of [00:59:00] other individuals you're looking for, for example.

But all of those things only occur because people have to take active steps to challenge it. Yes, we, we've established that it's very, it's impossible basically to predict compatibility, but we do know that science has shed some understanding on how relationships and attraction happens. One principle I've already lent is what, you know, you, you described today the rejection mindset versus the co evaluation mindset.

Are there any other principles that the science has revealed that you'd love? A guy or gal to know if they're on the dating scene, if they're single and they're struggling principles that can help them be sort of maximally attractive. I, I, I write about this in my book. There are four principles, uh, can give you the kind of very quick overview.

The first one is something that most people don't even think about. It's geography. And I talk about geography in the sense that space and how we use space often brings us, often brings people together. [01:00:00] If you a anyone can do this, if you look back at all the places you visited over the past week and you kind of map where you've been and how you got there, the kind of roots that you took, you will find for most people that you've, you have used the same roots and you've gone to the same places and it's very, very rare that you would've out.

You've gone out of what we call the activity zone. So if you kind of think of your activity zone as all the places that you frequent on a daily basis, these are all the places that you are likely to meet a potential partner. Historically, this would've been the places where you would've found your partner because these typically more likely to be closed spaces like universities and workplaces 'cause that's where we spend most of our time.

The difficulty is that dating apps have taken us out of our activity zones and they said you can meet people outside your activity zones. But even then, even on dating apps, a lot of the time we kind of look and we kind of think, well. I live in London, for example, and if I was going on a dating app, I'm not gonna date someone in [01:01:00] Scotland because it makes little sense for me to do that because I ultimately want to meet that person.

And if I'm going to meet them, I can't. It's too far to travel to Scotland from here on a kind of everyday basis. It's too costly, too time consuming. And we all have what we call a pre-specified geographic area. And the pre-specified geographic area is the maximum distance that you are willing to travel to look to meet a potential partner.

And that varies for different individuals, and it will vary according to things like your preferences for time, cost, and, and then travel time and so on. And it would become more constricted in urban areas because there are more people in urban areas, whereas in, in, um, rural areas, you'll become wider because there are fewer people around.

But we all have a sense that we want to find someone who lives relatively nearby. And in fact, all the evidence suggests. That the majority of relationships are formed between people who really live relatively nearby to each other. It varies depending on the study, but most studies put it between about 10 and 15 kilometers as the maximum that we're willing to travel or willing, or where we find a particular partner.

The the other [01:02:00] way to look at this. It is the thing that across time and space, you, uh, if you are single right now, your potential partner, the person who you're going to end up meeting and falling in love with, and having a relationship with, you and your partner are moving closer and closer together in space and time until ultimately you get so close to each other that you will eventually fall form a relationship.

So if you are single out now, I think the kind of, I suppose the hopeful message of geography is that geography and space will ultimately bring you together with your partner. That person you haven't met yet is moving closer and closer to you, or you are moving closer and closer to them, and you will eventually meet.

There's another reason why we like geography or why geography matters. Um, it has something to do with, actually, if you tell me what your favorite letter of the English alphabet is, I'm, I'm gonna see this test works. What's your favorite letter in the English alphabet? I've never thought about it. I want to go with b.

Okay, this test has failed. It's called the name letter effect, and it's basically a test to see Most people [01:03:00] when they ask, what's your favorite letter? They choose a letter that appears in their own name. Well, I was, my instinct was to choose a letter in my name and I thought it was too egotistical, so it almost worked.

Um, so most people choose a letter that appears in their own name. It's called a name letter effect. You can test it out on your own, on your own, um, on your own people. Um. Basically we like letters appearing in our own name because it's self relevant. But there's another reason why we might like letters in our, in our own name is 'cause we see those letters more frequently.

And it goes back to this idea that was discovered in the 1960s by Robert Zs and he was a social psychologist who argued that when you see a novel stimulus for the first time. You like that novel stimulus more and more the more often you see it. So imagine you've never seen, I dunno, a pen before you, you dunno what a pen is, and I show you a pen for the first time and you go, it's all right.

But if I keep showing you the pen over and over again, repeatedly over the course of a day, say for example, science predicted that by the end of the day you would love the pen more than at the start of the [01:04:00] day. And all the evidence supports this idea. And it also helps to explain why we typically like people who we see more often.

If you see someone more and more often, you like that person more precisely 'cause of mere exposure. You are seeing that person more, therefore you like that person more. And geography helps to bring people into that same space and essentially like people who we see more often because they're in the same space as us.

Yeah. So I guess the really actionable tip from that is it's probably unwise to make a, a judgment about someone based on a very short amount of time, say one one hour coffee date. May simply be insufficient time to decide whether or not you like someone enough to form a relationship with them. And I guess that's what you hear about a lot is, you know, I met them for coffee, we spent an hour together, I didn't like them.

I'm not gonna see them again. But actually, based on what you're saying, these principles, people should actually spend some time giving each other more of a chance, I guess spending more time with each other, which will hopefully [01:05:00] allow more of their attractive qualities to emerge. Sort of. So I, I, I guess the difficulty with a lot of kind of first date scenarios is that we're often biased in terms of the information that we're using.

And all the evidence suggests that on a first date within a second, or sometimes less than a second, we've already made a judgment about someone's physical appearance. And we've made a decision about whether we like that person physically, and we are swayed by that information, partly because society tells us that visual information and what a person looks like is the most important thing about that individual.

And it's just a, a fallacy. We value a person's physical appearance over their real competencies. And part of the reason why we diminish that the value of competencies is because that stuff or getting to know that stuff takes time. Like in a conversation with you, I get visual information much more quickly and it can make judgments about what I think you're like or what I think you might be be like based on your visual, based on your, your appearance.

But if I wanted to know what you're really like, I have to have a long-term [01:06:00] conversation with you. And if I want to know what you are really, really like, that takes a lot longer. 'cause I'm not gonna know your true, what we call the true self in a single date. It's gonna take multiple dates before I get to that point.

All the evidence suggests that on a dating app we value physical appearance more than anything else on a first date. We value physical appearance more than anything else, and we make implicit decisions and implicit judgements about a person very quickly on a first date. And that sways everything else that happens on that date.

But again, doesn't that point to the same advice, you know, for the individual, you know, wanting more success in dating? Doesn't that also suggest, you know, you should probably make, go on three dates with someone before you should make, make a decision? Yeah, I mean, I, I would generally agree the difficulties that people don't make those kind of rational choices a lot of the time.

Yeah. I, there was a very famous study, wow, that's many years ago. Um, which kind of jumbled up people's photos on an online dating site. Essentially you're going around blind date with lots of people. The test here was whether or not you would [01:07:00] find someone to have a meaningful relationship with, even though you didn't know what they looked like beforehand and all the EV or that that particular study showed that most people on that blind date actually form meaningful relationships because they had no preconceived notion of what the other person would look like.

I don't think that's necessarily the best way to go about things. I think I do think physical appearance and physical compatibility, for lack of a better thing, is an important part of any relationship. There's no reason to be ashamed about saying it. There's no reason to kind of diminish its importance.

If you want to have a physical, sexual relationship with someone, you have to be physically attracted to that person. And for most people, having a romantic relationship means having a sexual relationship with that person as well. And you find that out. If you, if you don't like the look of a person, then you should be okay to say, I don't think it's going to work out.

But even a lot of the language that we use just to say, I don't like how you look physically is coded, instead of just saying, I don't like the look of you physically, which is rude. We often use words like chemistry. We say, I don't have chemistry with you. And chemistry is often [01:08:00] in the research that we do is often a shorthand way of saying, I don't find you physically attractive.

But I can't say that because it's not socially acceptable to say that. But you're absolutely right. Look, if you're looking for a long-term relationship, physical appearance probably doesn't matter very much. May maybe the, the way I might put it is physical appearance is an important prerequisite, but it's not by any means.

Everything, uh uh and if you have physical appearance and you don't have. If you don't take into account everything else, you're dooming yourself to either a short term relationship that doesn't go anywhere, or a relationship that's very volatile or what someone might call a toxic relationship. You know, physical compatibility is not nearly enough and we need to be looking for other things.

Okay? Yes. Today basically passed the physical compatibility. Yes. Now let's give them a chance for other qualities to emerge. I, I think you're right. I, I think it depends on the relationship though. Like if you were looking for a short-term relationship and that was your goal, and both parties in that conversation are happy to [01:09:00] just have a short-term relationship and yeah, absolutely.

Physical appearance is going to matter more than anything else, right? But for that's, but that's not what we're talking about here. We are talking about long-term, stable, healthy, positive relationships. And all the evidence suggests that once social interaction begins, and by social interaction I simply mean having a conversation with someone once that begins, that information outweighs physical appearance.

We are looking for a couple of things. One thing we are looking for is the degree to which the other person is a good person. Now, I know in popular culture this has become a, a major talking point about nice people finishing last typically, and the argument is that nice people always finish last. They don't get their healthy relationships, the positive relationships.

All the evidence says otherwise. All the evidence shows that most people, what they're looking for in a long-term partner is essentially a good egg. They want someone who's kind, someone who's empathetic, someone who is a decent human being, someone who's caring, someone who's funny, someone who's confident.

But [01:10:00] all those things combined makes you a good person. And when you ask people to list all the things they look for in a potential partner, those are the things that come out top for irrespective of your gender, of your class, of your social background. Those are the things that come out top. A good person.

Mm-hmm. Second, yeah, physical appearance. You want physically attracted partners as well. And sometimes you want author people who are reputationally good or have resources and some other things as well top all the time is kindness. Good person. Yes. I mean, I think when people are talking about the idea of nice guys finishing last, I think there's a really important distinction between be, there's a really important distinction to be made between being nice as a coping strategy versus true kindness.

So I think when we're talking about the nice guy, in terms of the nice guy being finishing last, we're talking about guy, a guy who has never developed the capacity to be assertive. And I think true kindness comes from a play place of strength and the ability to be [01:11:00] assertive. And I think the ability to be assertive is also a prerequisite to being a good person.

And then from that position you can be kind, kindness from strength. Whereas I think a lot of people, and I do think, you know, a lot of men in the modern world have fallen into the trap of just being nice at all times. Just, you know, getting people to like me through being nice. I think that that lack of assertiveness can be quite a turnoff for, for people of the opposite sex, because again, it implies that perhaps as we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation, you don't have such a good relationship with yourself and therefore you can't be assertive.

But I think you're totally right then true kindness. Kindness from a place of strength matters hugely. When we we're thinking about our long-term relationships, and I think as well, there is a third variant, which is the individual who uses niceness as a strategy to get into a relationship. And it's often a mask for unkindness because they understand that no one's looking for unkindness.

[01:12:00] No one wants to be in a toxic relationship, no one wants to be in a relationship where there's lack of care, lack, lack of kindness. They put on the mask of kindness as a way of masking their deficiencies. And once the relationship has progressed, then that's when the masks comes, comes off, and you find that actually niceness was not a, was not a trait there to begin with.

I think a lot of this discussion as well. The problematic use of niceness is, is an issue because when we talk about niceness in this way, we're essentially saying it's a static concept. You are either nice or you are not nice, but first it's a continuum. Some people are nicer than others, but also it's not about the characteristic itself.

It goes back to Eric Frum's idea of not just love, but niceness is an act as well. We act kindly towards other people, and that's when we demonstrate niceness. If you're unable to be kind, and by kindness I mean unable to respect someone else, un unable to care for someone else, unable to be responsible and put other people's needs before your own, [01:13:00] then you are an unkind person and not nice person.

If you want to be in a healthy, positive relationship, if you can develop traits that are associated with kindness and good being a good person, those are all the positive qualities that will make sure you have a, not just a healthy relationship with other people, but a healthy relationship with yourself as well.

And I always, always say this, look, there's a, there's a reason why I tell people to develop traits of kindness. It's 'cause of a halo bias. So a halo bias in, in psychology is when one thing about someone becomes associated with someone else. And I often use the halo bias as an example of how if you want to look more at physically attractive than you are, you should also be kind.

'cause there are all kinds of studies which show that when a person is perceived as being good, when a person is perceived as being kind, they're also perceived as being more physically attractive than they actually are. Um, as a very simple example, say you rated me as a five out of 10 in terms of my appearance, the first time you meet.

But over the course of a conversation you learn that I'm a good person. I'm funny, maybe [01:14:00] I'm kind and I'm, I'm good hearted. Now suddenly I'm an eight out of 10, not because of my physical at attract, my physical appearance has changed. But because you're using that, the information from my kindness to. How to make a judgment about my physical appearance.

So simple answer of kindness goes a long way, not just for yourself, but it also makes you look more physically, app physically attractive. And I think people tend to be happier when they're kinder. As far as I know. The science suggests that people who are more compassionate and do more compassionate act, you know, selfish as it may sound, actually tend to be happier and have a higher quality of life.

Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. Um, compassionate people, empathetic people tend to be more, uh, they, they don't just have, uh, better, best psychological wellbeing. They also have better physical wellbeing. So all kinds of reasons to be, to be to, to try and develop kindness as a, as a trait. Right. Vien, we're out of time.

I had hoped to explore your other area of expertise, body image with you as well, but you were right. We did not have a chance to [01:15:00] explore it. We barely scratched the surface of romance and love and attraction, but nonetheless, I very much enjoyed exploring that l. With you, we'll have to have you back on to talk about body image at some point in the future.

Until then, where can people find you and learn more about your work? Um, if you want to find me, I'm, I'm, you can look at my university page, just google my name, you'll find me. Um, and if you want to learn more about attraction, I've got a book called Attraction Explained, which kind of goes through what we've been talking about today in much, in much greater depth.

Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you.