This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
No one likes online dating. Swiping through endless profiles, strategically curating one’s own, fielding awkward messages (or worse, none at all) seems to leave everyone saying, “There’s got to be a better way.” That, essentially, is Paul Eastwick’s thesis in his new book Bonded by Evolution.
Worn out by what he calls the “EvoScript”, that is, the way evolutionary psychology has been folded into popular science as regards dating, Eastwick endeavours to write a new one. He achieves this in three parts: debunking the EvoScript, laying out what evolutionary psychology actually tells us, and advising readers who are looking for love.
Whether you’re chronically single or happily married, the first two parts are an interesting and engaging exploration of how humans evolved to build relationships. It’s less about “mate value”, having the right traits to win the attraction of the opposite sex, and more about building compatibility.
Romance doesn’t depend on a chiselled jaw and a stellar opening line, Eastwick explains, but on the gradual process of getting to know a person. The ancestral environment would have involved prolonged exposure to a relatively small group of people with whom you would regularly interact over time, not a never-ending barrage of strangers’ photos coupled with clever little taglines that seek to encapsulate their entire essences. This is evolutionary psychology, properly understood.
Much of the ground Eastwick covers seems fairly obvious if one gives it a few moments’ thought, but the point is that plenty of people don’t — especially the ones most battered by the more insidious advice of the EvoScript.
Few of us would struggle to come up with real-life examples of happy couples who have very little in the way of common interests, but who have built up compatibility over time through repeated interactions as friends; the ultra-successful man with an impossibly beautiful woman on his arm, whose only attraction to each other is based on the transactional question of “What can this person do for me?”, doesn’t seem terribly prevalent in ordinary life.
Humans are instead drawn to humans that we know and like, and, as Eastwick explains, the more we know someone, the more we tend to like them.
The book serves as an optimistic rejoinder to common dating advice. Relationships aren’t transactional, with an alpha male swapping protection and provision for a perfect 10’s youthful beauty (i.e. fertility). Rather, they operate on a communal basis in which the score is only kept when things have gone wrong.
If this seems a little too optimistic, Eastwick describes the adaptive psychological processes which reinforce pair-bonding: demonstrated biases such as “derogation of alternatives” and “perceived superiority” help reinforce the sense that one’s current partner blows any other potential partners out of the water, and therefore one’s current relationship is as good as it gets. A little bit of self-delusion, it turns out, makes couples happy. Who knew?
Eastwick writes with genuine goodwill, approachable humour and legitimate — if not particularly profound — advice. His book reads like a heart-to-heart with an uncle who’s really looking out for you, kiddo: past the occasional inattentive nodding and a few polite chuckles is some wisdom, backed up with thoughtfully conducted research. He is at his best when he is talking about the stuff that interests him most: the science.
But, as with most of our relatives, there’s always some topic of conversation that makes you check the clock and say, “OK, uncle, that’s enough of that. Let’s change the subject.” For some, it’s cryptocurrency; others, microplastics. With Eastwick, it’s the manosphere.
The third part of Bonded by Evolution is easily its weakest, trading out citations of prestigious journals for the likes of Salon and Vox. With an entire chapter devoted to pearl-clutching over those insidious incels and Andrew Tate types, the book loses its focus and limps to the finish line with a final summation of the advice that has already been woven through the preceding chapters. Whether a subculture of angry men on the internet is actually ruining dating for everyone may be up for debate, but it doesn’t strengthen Eastwick’s case to wade into it.
Despite its lame conclusion, though, Bonded by Evolution is a useful summation of what evolutionary psychology actually says about dating and relationships, as well as a reminder of what it doesn’t. A thoughtful treatment of the research to date debunks many common assumptions about what can make dating miserable. Just as importantly, it validates those intuitions we have about why the whole romantic rigmarole is still worth it.
