We Studied 4,000+ Dates… Everything You Know About Attraction Is a Lie

Traction, ongoing relationships, it's all deeply relational. It's not like a project that you perform on yourself. Men will say they care about attractiveness more than women. Women will say they care about earning potential more than men. And you'll find these gender differences in basically every culture we've ever sampled. But that's a little different than what appeals to people when they meet face to face. What she tried to do was take all of the information about these people, to all of their traits and all of their values and all their preferences, to try to figure out who was going to be compatible with whom, and she could explain none of it. Zero. Nothing. It's a little daunting. Because what that means is that it's something that we're like creating in the moment. Something like 60% of romantic relationships that currently exist would describe themselves as friends first. Historically, a lot of relationships have grown from very middling first impressions. The average impression though is pretty middling. For people that may not have heard about your work before, what are they tuning in for? How will this conversation at the end help them with their dating life, long-term relationships, connecting with their partner? What's the value for them to be tuning into this conversation? Think what I'm trying to offer a reminder of is the simple fact that attraction, ongoing relationships, it's all deeply relational. It's something where you need to be thinking about the context around you, the social milieu, and if you're in a relationship about what you and your partner are building together. And so it's a little bit of a different take on the way we commonly think about these processes. God, and for someone that's just tuning in, maybe they don't know much about evolution, where it's a college, you know, in the traditional ways that people think about dating and attraction. What's the traditional way that a lot of these people talk about dating relationships and what people want in a partner versus your specific takes that we can give that counter-positioning? Yeah, I mean, look, evolutionary psychology has been around for a long time. It's been very successful. They were really the first ones to say, hey, social scientists, you need to be thinking about evolutionary processes when you're studying how people think and how the mind works. And it's so happened that a version of evolutionary psychology that got very big in the 90s focused a lot on a pretty grim view of human mating really focused a lot on things like competition, things like hierarchy, the idea that some people are just more desirable than others, and that a lot of our mating dynamics flow from that inequality. I take issue with some of those ideas. I think some of them are right. I think some of them are a bit overstated, and that actually we can get a better evolutionary view of human mating and human attraction by thinking instead about how humans are fundamentally creatures who attach to each other, that we form bonds, and there's actually a very good evolutionary ration now for why we do that. So I think that kind of nicely captures the distinction between the two positions. Right. So you're saying at the end of the day that dyad, Dyson, that you're talking about is still rooted to the survival of our evolution. It's just that people don't, people, within the evolution of psychology that refer to mating, they don't really put as much emphasis on this idea of attachment and the importance of that. Yeah. So the way I think about attachment and why it became so important, if we go back in time to the best that we can estimate, what was going on half a million or a million or two million years ago? What we saw was that human brains were getting much larger that required an enormous investment of calories. And what that meant was that human development became longer and longer. It took a much more time for young children to reach the age where they were going to be able to contribute back. I mean, it's actually kind of remarkable how long it takes even in hunter-gatherer societies for young children and adolescents to bring in as many calories as they require. So you have all of this investment. And what does natural selection do as a consequence? It basically builds these creatures that become very attached to their groups and very attached to their mating partners. And this was especially important when it comes to men and men's psychology that men became much more interested in bonding to one particular mating partner, investing in often her and their offspring together in lieu of pursuing as many mates as possible. That's not to say that people can't do that, but this bonding component became especially central. And yeah, that's a key part of our evolutionary legacy. And why did it become so essential at the end? Yeah, I think this likely became extremely important in part because of those caloric needs. Part of it, too, has to do with the fact that, you know, human men are a lot more than simply we contribute to offspring and we provide, you know, if you think about hunter-gatherers, I think sometimes our idea is like, oh, like they hunted. And that was their contribution. There's all sorts of socialization and skill development components of what fathers commonly do. And if you compare humans to our closest ape relatives, it's not even close to the amount of caregiving that we engage in. We lost the sharp canines that, you know, are typically associated with being aggressive fighters. You wouldn't want to trust a chimpanzee male around offspring that that wouldn't be a safe thing to do. But human men can be very, very good caregivers. And so you can think about the last few million years of human evolution. We're about females selecting the gentler kinder, actually smaller men who were going to be good around kids. And when you think about that as our evolutionary trajectory, it strikes me as a very different story and it's a very different way of understanding the human condition. So just to iterate the emphasis that most evolutionary psychologists and people take, I guess they're focusing more on the fact that for men, we really just look for visual cues. And that relates to fertility in a woman and women look for, you know, maybe resource allocation for the safety of their children. Is that somewhere? There are components of the story that I'm telling that are embedded in that, especially like on the resource side of things. What we see across the animal kingdom is that when you see pair bonding, and I would argue that humans are a pair bonding species, I wouldn't argue we're monogamous. I mean, we can get into that distinction if we want to. We're a species that we're mating partners commonly bond to each other. And in species that do that, the mating psychology of the males and the females tend to be pretty similar. So this is another point of departure between my perspective and the traditional evolutionary psychological perspective is that I don't see as many central gender differences as they do. For me, gender does not play as central a role in explaining how mating works. And actually the two things that you mentioned there, men being drawn to attractiveness, women being drawn to earnings and provisioning. These were actually some of the first gender differences that we examined in some of our studies going back nearly 20 years now. We conducted several speed dating studies where we wanted to understand what are the attributes that men and women actually find desirable when they're meeting potential partners in a real life date in context. And what we saw time and time again was that things like earning potential, yeah, people found it appealing when they were meeting each other for the first time, but there was no gender difference in that appeal. That was actually one of our first clues that, hey, we might be seeing a very different picture of the way attraction works when we look at people meeting face to face compared to a lot of the prior work which tended to use pretty simple surveys that asked people what they wanted within that space speed dating study that you've done. What were some of the key differences that you saw in the two different genders? Yeah, so when we ask men and women before the speed dating event, how much are you going to care about attributes like physical attractiveness and earning potential and ambition? Those are usually the two buckets that we're looking at the tend to be pretty gendered, but it's gendered when you ask people in the abstract. It's true if you ask them like what do you want in an ideal partner, but it's also true if you say, hey, you're going to go speed dating in a week. How much are you going to care about these attributes? And you'll find these gender differences. Pretty routinely men will say they care about attractiveness more than women women will say they care about earning potential more than men This is actually one of the studies that put evolutionary psychology in them on the map in the late 80s and early 90s that you would see those differences in Basically every culture we've ever sampled But that's a little different than what appeals to people when they meet face to face right here I'll kind of go through like a thought experiment. You can imagine yourself a going-speed dating and Let's say you're gonna be the number of women and Some of these women are pretty ambitious there likely to be doctors or lawyers or you know going to business and some of them are less ambitious So we can ask well, how much do you find the ambitious women appealing? That tells me not how much you say you like ambition, but rather how much ambition is appealing to you as it is Experienced across all of these different potential partners and what we'd likely see or what we see on average is that yeah Ambition provides like a 10% bump in your desire for these women But when we flip the genders and we look at how women react to men It's not like a 40% bump. It's not bigger. It's also about a 10% bump So that's what we mean when we talk about oh revealed preferences for these attributes are the same It means that you know when you meet potential partners when we look at the traits that inspire you to want to date this person rather than that person There tend not to be many gender differences there That's actually so interesting because it is so counter to what so much of the Literature talks about that women to care about ambitions and you when you talk to women Also, this is what they'll tell you well, I worry about this is that because when people are on the apps The apps are this funny case because well, I'm swiping and so you could argue well, what isn't that kind of like speed dating? It's just it's just a picture but Because the apps are so impoverished in the experience that you're getting you're not meeting a person You're looking at some information and so that also tends to cater to people's Ideas about what it is that they're looking for because if I think earning potential really matters to me I can easily set a threshold and like I'm not gonna swipe right on anybody who You know doesn't have an advanced degree or isn't making six figures. I can very easily do things like that um The problem is you're probably not making your dating life any better by doing that and then you have issues with the whole market We're now like well only the people with the best attributes are doing well on the apps and everybody else is struggling So so these are some of the challenges. I think that we've got to figure out a way around if we're gonna make dating a Better experience for more people. Yeah, and just around the study was this court of people What was kind of the age distribution was a fairly distributed because I guess I could see that Perhaps someone that is early 20s as a female may not care as much until you get to your late 20s or early 30s So how does that distribution work? That's a great point in those early studies. We were looking at college students. That's absolutely true But there've been many other versions of this study that that we've conducted and then many others have conducted over the years um Some folks looking at professional speed dating events, but it's also not just speed dating too We can even look at all like as people are initiating relationships like who are the people they tend to be drawn to to be they tend to be drawn to the people that they think are ambitious Or the people that they think are attractive, etc We conducted a very large review of this whole literature So now we're talking like 10 the you know tens of thousands of people of a whole wide range of ages And yeah, the gender differences still did not show up Well, when we think about it in this revealed way like does ambition appeal to men and women differently That's not to say that there couldn't be contacts where they would show up But you know, it's it's been You know 10 15 years now We've yet to to find cases where the gender differences reliably emerge That's fascinating Yes, even across different age groups. This tends to be the same I'll tell you the most wild one. I mean this one this one almost we just published this like a year ago And it's part of me that's even a little shocked by this so we looked at age Because in those early speed dating studies honestly, we didn't really look at age at all because You know all these folks they're between 18 and 22 that's not much of the range of ages And also the adage that that that man are attracted to younger women are attracted to older men like I mean that kind of applies in college But that's not really what people are talking about people are talking about it's 20s 30s and so on okay so we partnered Not with an online dating company is actually a matchmaking company And like professional matchmakers and so people sign up for their service and then they set them on blind dates So we have about 4,000 blind dates And what's also really interesting is that on these dates Um, you know you get set up with somebody they might be older than you they might be younger than you You can give the matchmaker a preference. They would try to meet it, but they couldn't always And we look to see do men and women differ in how they felt about their date Depending on how much older or younger the date was and It was true that men tended to like the younger women on these dates It's actually not a huge effect. It's it's not massive me Man, so let's give men a little bit of a break. They they queue into other things too But the women also liked the younger guys And that was especially surprising Um, that there was something about the appeal of these younger men and again You know when women are being set up with the younger men. It's usually a few years They're not you know nobody's being set up with anybody. He's like 35 year old right right right So right, but it's like I think sometimes we under appreciate we The potential appeal of youth right so you can imagine a 35 year old woman a 32 year old guy and like Nice younger than me, but I don't know he's pretty good looking. He's got other things going for him And this is kind of how people tend to react when they meet others face to face I think there's an evolutionary rationale behind this because when we were evolving on the savannah We didn't have tens of thousands of people to choose from You know you had like you know between five and ten Probably sure people that you knew and so I don't know all of this you know fancy like I'm gonna try to find the best person out there for me This is this is not traditionally how we've done things. This also kind of relates this idea that in many ways From when we have grown up we're kind of influenced by society media Friends what our parents wanted for us and it just kind of gets ingrained into our brain as well right and I guess I'm curious to know how much of that actually impacts What we want for the other sex or whoever wherever you're looking for so for men It could be you know find a young beautiful woman that can take care of your kids for women It could be find an ambitious financially successful man with status that is tall and you know Good-looking whatever might be and we that's just what we've been told yeah And this is kind of what we look for as we as we grow up So how much of that do you think has an impact versus what the actual evolution? Yeah, I think this is a big part of it and this is look I'm a psychologist so I think it's interesting to study what people think Even if what they think doesn't totally match up with what they ultimately do for exactly the reasons you describe like I want to understand How the outside world gets in people's heads and and why they might think they care about something when and you know if we use this other approach It says oh you don't care about it as much um I think many of the traits That we think about when we think about romantic partners. They are naturally a little gendered Some of that comes from stereotypes and I don't mean that in like the pernicious way I just mean it in the purely descriptive way So here's one example that I find clarifying when thinking about just the gendered nature of some traits So one thing that we can look at is differences in the appeal of The trait dresses well versus fashionable I'd argue those kind of mean the same thing and when we ask men and women how much uh they would want a romantic partner who dresses well and who is fashionable You don't really differ on dresses well all that much But they really differ on fashionable men say they'd want a partner who's more fashionable But fashionable is this more gendered term we use fashionable You Usually, more often, to refer to women than we do to men. So it's a quality that's more stereotypical of the other gender. That doesn't necessarily mean that you like it more to the extent that women are fashionable, right? It's disconnected from that revealed or experienced preference. But the nature of the trade itself has a gendered component. And I think that's part of where we're getting a little tripped up, especially with attributes, like earning potential. And that one's obvious, right? Like men do earn more than women. So that's also a little gendered doesn't mean that men like it any less than women do. Yeah. Even the side of like sense of humor, right? I've heard that men usually like it when men doesn't really, they don't care as much about when women are funny, but they care that woman think they're funny. They think they're funny. And then women or the opposite women would rather have someone that would make them laugh. Yeah. And then like these small things, obviously you both want each other to be fashionable and vicious, all that stuff. But it's just more about who cares more about which quality. Yeah. It's really tempting to slip into like, okay, how do I be funny? Like I want to attract women. How can I make myself, you know, the life of the party? How can I make myself more attractive? I mean, there's so much out there feeding into this idea. And that's not to say that there aren't things that people can do. People can eat healthy and they can exercise. These are wise things to do. But I think what we miss is that for a lot of these traits, people really differ in how they attribute these traits to the people around them. Like it's not uncommon for me to think like, oh, she's super hot and for you to be like, I'm not, I'm not sure I agree. Like this is, and that goes for everything. That goes for humor. That goes for intelligence, right? Because for so many things, we differ when we make these judgments of other people. I think that's kind of beautiful. I think that then opens up opportunities for more people to find somebody who's especially into them. But when we get locked into like, okay, I got to have attributes, you know, one through ten, if I'm going to be desirable, I think we kind of miss that like broader social context of the thing. But it didn't just mention something that was around a coin flip pretty much that one person, like I have a friend, let's say John, and it's really a coin flip of whether he would think that this person is beautiful. And I would think that person is my type as well. Yeah. Yes. Exactly. It's barely better than a coin flip. But the caveat there is that in a group of folks who know each other. So if you imagine like, I don't know if you've got like, you know, certainly when I was in school, like mixed gender friend groups. I mean, I'm heterosexual. I think many of these folks were heterosexual. And some of us dated each other. But within that group, if you'd pulled us and been like, who do you most want to date here? The agreement, like what you just described would be very, very close to 50/50. In that milieu, it's not obvious who's the most dateable and who's the least dateable. If we talk about first impressions, it's not 50/50. It's like 65/35, which I think is still less than people think. It's far from perfect. But 65/35, you feel that, right? You walk into a party where nobody knows each other. Yeah. The attractive people are going to get more attention. But I just kind of love this idea that actually as people spend time together, that attractive person at first, what that means is that some people are now starting to think that person is less and less desirable as they get to know them, while other people maintain that original high impression. So spending time together creates that idiosyncrasy. Yeah, because I think that's the more important thing to go into here is what does actually matter when it comes to short-term attraction, but also long-term attraction to have a healthy relationship and a long-term relationship. It's very challenging. I'm always talking about compatibility. Compatibility is the key thing that I want to focus on. And compatibility is key to being able to explain why some relationships do well and why some relationships don't do all that well. We see, even in speed dates, even when people are meeting for the first time, that people vary in how compatible they are. There's fit over here between these two people. They're chatting. They're having a great time. But if you took those two people and put them in other conversations, it's not going so well. And it's not attributable to these two being desirable people. It really is something about the fit or the connection between those two folks. So how do we create that in the first place? How do we foster it? And for a long time, we thought, well, it's got to be about your traits, like fitting together. It's got to be that you're similar on some core dimensions or maybe you just happen to match what each other is looking for in a partner. A few years ago, my colleague named Dr. Samantha Joel conducted a study using machine learning principles where what she tried to do was take all of the information about these people that they would have reported about themselves ahead of time. So all of their traits and all of their values and all their preferences to try to figure out who was going to be compatible with whom during those first impression situations. And she could explain none of it. Zero. Nothing. It was sort of a shocker that there's nothing that explains why two people get along especially well that can be found in their traits ahead of time. And so it's a little daunting, right? Because what that means is that, well, it's something that we're like creating in the moment as we are talking, as we are spending time together. I think that's intuitive for folks who are couples who have been together for a long time. But it's kind of wild that that might be happening sooner in the process than we think. How much of this, based on these studies, have the people that are in the studies been observed over multiple interactions? Because I'm curious. Within first dates, like I've had first dates where I was super awkward. I wasn't like myself. I was nervous. Yeah. You know, other vice versa, right? You know, you feel when someone's energy is very nervous as well. It's not really who they are. Yeah, right. Right. They take them behind their scenes and they're with their mom and they're with their best friends. They could be a completely different person. Yeah, exactly. So I wonder within these studies, how much of it is the match traits on these things? If that is actually showing in these interactions within this short term, speed dating or one-time interactions? Well, let's see. So in a number of these studies, we do catch people in multiple interactions. Like when they're going speed dating, they'll usually go on like 10 or 12 dates. That's kind of how we know that we can see you're clicking with some people and not clicking with other people. And it's not just that some people are smooth talker and other people are not. We can see, oh, like those two really hit it off in a unique way. I mean, look, I can give you one example. Because this is such a vivid memory that I think captures like some of the ridiculousness of where romantic attraction comes from. So on one of the speed dates, there was a woman named Erica and a man named Eric. We had assigned like numbers and letters to the various folks at the speed dating event. And he just happened to get the letter A. So his thing said Eric A and her name tag said Erica. So as he sits down, they think this is very funny. It is kind of funny. And that sparks a whole conversation about like other erics and ericas that they've known, which is not like the most like deep and insightful conversation, but isn't a bad way to start things off. They have a good time. They go on multiple dates and they end up dating for a while. So it's like sometimes it's like stupid stuff. Right? And these little moments and little bits of conversation, you kind of get lucky by finding things to bond over things to chat about and that that can sort of set you on your path. Now this is a long way from they did not go on to get married. They should not go on to have a long term relationship. But I think it's a useful illustration of how initial conversation can take people in a weird variety of directions. Especially if they don't get locked into like the, I'm going to share the facts and figures about myself. Sure. Yeah. Because this was my other question around long term compatibility within these studies versus the short term nature that comes with speed dating is, I wonder, you know, the characteristics that we say that we want, you know, for women it could be, as I mentioned, ambitious and financial stability, all that stuff. I wonder in the long run, if that does end up becoming the most important thing in terms of who they end up with in terms of whether it's marriage or just a long term partner versus more of a short term thing where perhaps ambition and the last that may not matter as much. Is there a disadvantage? distinguishing there. Obviously, there's no study necessarily to prove this. But yeah, no, it's important to consider. So let's take things like similarity and values like that should, okay, maybe that's not going to predict initial attraction. But in the long run, people who have similar values should be able to form a happier, healthier relationship. Now, the caveat here is that, well, it really matters that you think you have similar values. That's very important. Does it matter whether you actually have similar values? The thing is kind of not really. And I think the easiest way to understand some of this mystery is that as people form relationships, you really like this person. You want to spend time with them. You've had all sorts of good experiences with them. What people start to do is they'll change a little bit. Again, as a close relationship's researcher, I think that change is a wonderful thing, right? It's great that we get in relationships and we take on new identities and we take on new interests. And so what that might mean is that, okay, let's say there are some values that you don't share. What couples will often do if that relationship is going to go anywhere is they kind of compartmentalize it. It's not that core to who we are as a couple. We're going to build our relationship around something else instead. And there are a whole set of motivated, reasoning like biases that people start engaging in once they start investing in the relationship. So you, like if I'm trying to diagnose the health of a couple or how well this relationship is likely to go. First of all, I mean, that's remarkably challenging to do at all. But I wouldn't use things like similarity or other kinds of matching components to do it. What I would do instead is I would try to get a sense of how this couple had built rituals and patterns into their daily life. I'd want to know are they spending time together where they enjoy each other's company and they spend time with each other that they feel like they have a good partnership that they're not getting in each other's way. I mean, there's a million things that I would want to look at about that relationship. But it all kind of fits in this category of like, well, here's what we've been constructing over the last six months, six years. I mean, six decades. That is the thing that is going to be better at charting the health of where this thing is going to go. And that makes sense. I think that aligns to what you mentioned about this attachment, that special connection that you have that you form, whether it's inside jokes or whether it's values, routine. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, that type of relationship and connection makes that more rare. Yeah. Right. It makes it more scarce because you think, oh, can I develop that level of connection, chemistry or inside joke with someone else? Yeah. And that only generally that forms stronger as the relationship goes on. I think it's such a key thing. And honestly, even in the science, I think we've underappreciated this, that a lot of what relationships are are, I mean, it's like, it's memories of a particular person. It's stories. It's the history that you have with this one particular person. And then in many ways, it's that history that feels irreplaceable. You've been with somebody, I mean, even for a relatively short period of time, like a year, it feels like so much of your life now has been wrapped up in this person. You wouldn't want to lose that. You know, you'd want to try to maintain it. It can be very hard to imagine losing it, even when people tire of somebody when a relationship is going badly. For most people, it's actually quite hard to break up. And in part, this is the reason that like your lives are intertwined in so many ways. And even when there's all of this bad, there's like a real bond there too. And so this is why motivated reasoning and all these investments, it's such a double edge sword because right, it brings people together in the first place, but also often keeps people together maybe longer than they should be. Sure, sure, sure. When you kind of look back from talking to evolutionist psychology, taking us back to the hunters and gatherer days, like the characteristics that we look for in the person that has not evolved over time in a big way at all. Yeah, I'm sure that it has. Because I think that in many ways, when we're imagining what we're looking for in a partner, what we want our romantic lives to be like, we're kind of trying to project to what it's going to feel like to be with this person in a month, a year or 10 years down the road. And look, if every day we are fighting for our existence, and the calories that we're going to consume today are the calories that we're going to bring in today, I'm going to be thinking quite a bit about who is somebody that I can partner with to make sure that we're bringing in calories that are sometimes being shared more broadly with the group. That's often what's going to happen with things like large hunting parties and stuff like that. Also, how are we going to bring in enough food to feed our offspring and maybe some nieces and nephews in there? I mean, right, you've got these big extended families. So you're going to be thinking about your daily life in that way. Who's going to fit what I'm looking for? I also believe that all of these components related to attachment and that includes things like passionate love and the other components that come when bonds are forming in the first place. I think it's also very likely that whether it's 50,000 or 500,000 years ago that people were also experiencing those emotions when they made a real connection with somebody that they started to feel like nobody can replace this person and I'm going to do everything in my power to raise children with this person. Be a provider for this person. Help raise offspring and contribute to the broader group with this person. So I think all of these things have likely played a role. But of course, the modern context is going to change what we imagine our daily life looks like and people can really differ in what they imagine too. Obviously our brains are still millions of years old and it hasn't really adapted that much. But I wonder also how much of this does fluctuate. Like for example, in the 1970s, it was sexy to be a guy with hairy hair. Yeah, right. Instead, just like everywhere. That was like the sexy thing, right? Maybe back in the day or in certain developing countries, being a little bit chubby is the way to portray some sort of status and wealth. Yeah, that's very different here in these days in the developed the world. So I wonder how much of this has evolved. For women, let's say, throughout most of history, women were not working or did not have the same level of financial stability as men. And now that's becoming a lot better and that's certainly shifting what women probably want more as well. And that would also be adaptable for men as well. So I guess in the future, as these things change and as modern society changes, how much of this also will impact what we look for in different partners. Yeah, I think it will matter a lot. And I think of this whole process happening at two levels. There's going to be one that's kind of unconscious and one that we're more aware of. And what I was getting at earlier is a little bit more of the process we're aware of. Sometimes it's called like, you know, imagine future selves. That's like the nerdy academic jargon way for thinking about it. But it's like, well, I'd love to be in a, you know, if you imagine folks in their early 20s, well, okay, I want to be with somebody that I can have a professional career alongside and we can start raising a family, you know, five, six years from now and we'll be in a stable financial situation. Okay, what is it going to take to get that? Oh, and I still want to be able to like hang out with our buddies at the bar every Friday night. Okay, so this is, this would be one common vision. I think alongside that we take in information about what other people look like. We form that into a template of what we think is desirable. What we encounter frequently is what we tend to think is desirable. There's evidence that much of our, you know, unrealistic body images that we have for both men and women are formed by seeing the small number of people that have these bodies projected to us in a million different forms on TV and our phones, etc. And we take on those ideals even when it would be better if we didn't. So I think that's the unconscious level at what some of this stuff is happening. I think that can explain, you know, where you see shifts over time if the, you know, you know, very attractive bird Reynolds types are, you know, have that particular 70s look that will maybe inspire other men to do the same. So I think both of these components are going to be happening. And this is like, you look, we're a species that had to be pretty flexible that had to adapt. You know, this portion of the savanna was pretty good to us over the last few years, but the herds are moving and we got to pack up and move to a place that's quite different. And we got to figure out this new landscape, you know, we're We're pretty good at dealing with that level of unpredictability. And I think we've been built with a psychology that can handle that by flexibly desiring new things with each generation, certainly. Speaking to that, our ability to adapt things that we desire, things that we find attractive, whether it's propaganda or cultural things that have come through us through media, how much do you think of the evoscript that we talked about or the evolution of recycled rules? Do you think still applies today and where do you think it may not apply, just based on your research and opinion? The version of evolutionary psychology that I do find compelling, the one that talks about humans as being creatures who attach and we have a need to belong, I think that's still very much with us today. I think when people aren't getting their needs to belong that, we see that they have health challenges. They're more likely to be lonely, et cetera. And there are lots of things in the modern environment that are feeding into that. Then we have some of these components of the evolutionary psychological narrative that I think have become distorted. And that includes things like, well, we live in a hierarchy of desirability and there are the desirable tens that everybody wants to get with and that, and, essentially, they were the quote unquote best mates. And so, well, yeah, now we live in a world with social media and we see more of those folks, but really this is just tapping into our evolved psychology. I don't see it that way. I do think that the apps are presenting a problem, but they are creating a dramatically unequal market that is making us think that market based approaches to dating are the way to do it. And people can get by treating dating like a market, but I think it's pretty painful for a lot of people. And I don't think historically that's been the approach that has been most useful for a lot of people. Do you think dating apps favor women or men? That's a good question. My sense is that they're likely to favor whichever gender is less numerous. These are just data I've been told. I don't know this for sure, but if it is true that there are many more men on Tinder than women, then the apps are going to serve women a little better. But I think if you ask women, they're going to say, it's not serving me right. It's not super. But, you know, in part because when you get that mismatch and, you know, more of one gender, then you get a lot more messages by one gender. And then you got to filter you way through all of that. I think it poses challenges for a lot of people. Look, it does go things too. I mean, there are a lot of people who never would have met their partners. If it hadn't been for the apps, I don't want to get rid of the apps. I just want to supplement the apps with the forms of social interaction that are fulfilling in and of themselves. Like what would it be like if dating didn't feel like a job? What if it was like fun because really was I dating or was I just hanging out with my friends? I don't know. It was kind of both. Wouldn't that be nice? We used to do these things. Sure. That's kind of the way humans have been wired. So we're kind of going against, you know, one of the big things that I've seen, this includes social media, which is, I'm sure you've heard of Robin Dunbar. Yeah, yeah. The Dunbar number. It's very important. Just the idea, the optionality and the number of people that we have to keep in track is just not the way human brain has evolved. I think the number is 150 or something. Yeah. I think he's going to that. What's Robin Dunbar? Yeah. So he talks about concentric circles of familiarity. Right? So you'd have like a core group of people that you would see every day and then expands out to a larger and larger number. I think the 150 number, I think that would be like the people that you'd expect to run into on a fairly regular basis. There is a larger number, which is in the realm of like 1500. I think that's like anybody that spoke your language. Right? So anybody that you could communicate with in a friendly way, if you wanted to. Right? But even that is like, well, that's it. It's just 1500. But anyway, you weren't interacting with most of those folks. It's a much smaller number like 150. And so if you imagine that your dating pool is going to come from that 150, how many of them are even close to your age, how many of them are the gender you prefer, how many of them are not partnered already? There's not a lot of people. But you did have one thing going for you, which is that you were going to get to spend time with these folks. You were going to get to know them in various contexts. And each of your relationships with them would be unique. And they would all have unique relationships with each other. Maybe you are a nine or a 10, but it turns out that the other nine or a 10 nearby has this amazing relationship with somebody who's a six. And that's who she wants to partner up with. And she thinks he's the greatest catch. Like this is the kind of idiosyncrasy that would have mattered 50,000 years ago, 150,000 years ago. And that is what we see when we look at small groups of folks today too. Yeah. And do you think that's why dating apps for a lot of people is doing them as some sort of disservice because you don't get that nuance on a dating app. You're kind of just a number at the end of the day with, you know, maybe some fill to her on top. Yeah. You don't really get that connection, right? That you would. Right. Yeah. It's very hard to know who you're going to be compatible with when all you've got is a picture and a few little bits of information. There's nothing really to connect over. And like we were talking about earlier, there's no history. Like at least once you start talking with somebody, you have a history. I mean, you ever had that experience of like, it's the second, I don't know. If you ever interviewed somebody a second time because the second time, it just feels really different, right? It's like, well, now I have this shared experience and those memories have consolidated. And now I like think about you're like lodged in my head in this different way. And the apps don't provide that. And it's not like we could. It's not like we could have, you know, rich, deep memories of, you know, a thousand different people. We can't handle that. But I would rather see people spend that time and that energy getting to know a smaller subset of people very well and sort of having romantic possibilities emerge that way. Yeah. So just really go deeper, not wider. And this is probably why this trend of ghosting happens and people just treat someone not as a human, but just as another number because number one, you know, there's another option always on the other side. Exactly. And it's easier just not to respond to someone rather than being their face to face, you know, you're in the same community. Yeah. You know, family and commoner friends and common, all that thing that you just couldn't do back in the day. I know you're going to run into them. Exactly. We said to break up with people and we shared the same friends. Yeah. So you were kind of motivated to do it in the kindest way possible. So that wasn't going to create ongoing friction. I mean, and this is one of the risks. But I don't know, this feels like a deeply human risk like it prompts us to be a little kinder to each other at the end of the day. But you're spot on that when it feels like there's a ton of choice out there, it means that anything less than a stellar first impression is a cue to move on to somebody else. And the thing is historically, a lot of relationships have grown from very middleing first impressions. I mean, we have data that tracks real relationships as they've unfolded over time. We were trying to go all the way back to the beginning and look at how did you feel about this person when you first met. And these are mostly people who met before the age of online dating. But when they first met, yeah, some people are head over heels. I was love it first sight. The average impression though is pretty middleing. There's a good number of folks who are like, I was at rock bottom. I did not think much of you at all. But all of these relationships in our sample, they all get to the same place. Right? It's a sample of, you know, what their survivorship bias. We're looking at a sample of folks who made it. But ultimately, there's not a lot of predictive value in how you feel about the person at the beginning. If we're routinely cutting off folks who fail to meet some high threshold, it means you're throwing out all of these things that they could have been good if you'd had the time to get to know somebody. Yeah. It's just great so much pressure as well on the first day, which goes back to my point is that people are nervous. People are awkward. People try to present their themselves or retired one day after work. It's hard to put all that pressure in that first day. They got something else in their mind. I mean, you know, other things happen to work today that they're distressed about. And yeah, I wish the first dates could just all be Mulligan's, but that's not how people treat it. Some of the data that we looked at that's actually relevant to those trajectories I was describing. We look at, okay, when do people's impressions? stabilize because look, if you've been dating somebody for 900 days, day 901 is you're not going to feel too differently on average than you did on day 900. I mean, you might something dramatic might happen, but probably the change will be small. But the change between moment one and moment two with somebody, the first impression and the second impression, can be really, really big. If you're dating, my advice to folks out there, if you're dating, I would give people three chances because after three, it's stable for a while. And that like, again, people got to be efficient with their time. Like I get it. Like three days in three different contexts on three different days where different things have been happening, I would bet that that will be the best collective use of people's time if they could try something like that. I get why if a first date is especially disastrous, you don't want to do it again, but nevertheless, that's more or less what we see out there. You mentioned something interesting. So I guess one tip that you could be providing for someone is if you're kind of on the fence, obviously if it's horrible yes, do yourself a service. I can't honestly recommend that. But if you're in the day to do, but yeah, yeah, if you're on the gray area, you're saying give two, three dates, but it has to be in different contexts. Yes. It can't just be the same dinner or conversation. What are some of these different contexts for to be more action? Look, I like I want people to do stuff. I want them to go I mean, like if we live in the, you know, if you live in a major city, like go like some sort of event that's semi interactive, I mean, it's cliche like art museums are good sporting events are good. You know, anything that that entails some degree of interaction. I don't know when it was last time you saw the movie say anything a bit of an older film now, but the first date that they go on, it is a date like they are going on a date and the date is to a party like what a concept. And so what's so cool about going on a date to a party in the movie, they like kind of know a bunch of people at the party, but their acquaintances aren't totally overlapping either is that you're kind of floating in and around each other. And I'm seeing not just how you interact with me, but how you interact with me and somebody else there. I can kind of watch. How do you interact with people when you think I'm not, you think I'm not looking? You learn so much in a social situation like that. So these would be the kind of things that I would want to see people do more often and people should go watch say anything because it's a great movie. Yeah, I've done this before too, where I would bring a girl into this like this health and wellness like event or you would bring them to like a social gathering with friends playing board games or just for drinks or whatnot. Sure. And you can also get your friends opinions as well, right? Just because if you have, if you're like totally enamored by someone, you have these pink goggles on. You're not necessarily in the sound mind to make a decision, right? Right. Right. So having that different outside or opinion tends to also help. So I think that's a great one. Like having some sort of introducing them friends earlier on. Yeah. And look, what I wish the apps facilitated was this idea that, okay, let's see, meet somebody and you've gone on a couple of dates and you're not clicking and you both agree you're not clicking. It has to be mutual for this to work. Like, okay, so now let's be each other's wingman. I know people who have done this. We've been like, this isn't for me. I have somebody I need you to meet. And then they set that up and then that goes well. So like there's like a spirit of generosity that we could bring to some of this stuff too. Again, I don't think the apps are really exactly designed to facilitate that these days. But but I think I think there are innovations out there that are less about like, you know, how do I crush the market? And there are more about like, how do I build connections and interface with real people and like put the phones down? Right. So this is what I wanted to go into is if chemistry and connection, as we know, is so critical for attraction and and launch relationships. Yeah. Are there studies that we can learn from that breaks it down to a science of how you can actually build connection and chemistry with people? I think there was a study that was done with, it's like an AI detecting attraction where these LLM models could mutually predict whether someone could be compatible or not. What the models can do now is that they can like look at the information on the dates and they can they can basically do as well as human observers if not maybe a little better at saying like these two like each other, right? But that's that's different than can I take information about two people who have never met and predicts whether they're going to like each other when they meet face to face. I've never seen anything they can do that yet. Here's what would persuade me that this is possible. You'd want to have me meet a bunch of real people and see how I react to them. Okay. I mean, and again, I'm a simple psychologist. So I'm happy with yeah, I want to date these 10. I don't want to date these 10. That's enough of a measure for me, but it's got to be real people. And then you have some AI algorithm that figures out maybe there's something in the way the 10 people I liked different from the 10 people I don't like this about the way they present themselves or that something in their non-verbals maybe something in their voice. I don't know, but it's stuff they wouldn't self-report and I couldn't self-report a preference for it. And then the algorithm would say, okay, we've now gone into our database and now here are 20 people that we think you'll like given you liked these 10 folks, right? I think that could be possible, but I don't think anybody's attempted anything like that yet, to like use my dating history to try to gauge what's going to be especially appealing to me in the future, but in a way that like circumvents what I think I want. Right. I think that would be the key thing that we'd need to see. Unfortunately, we're not at the point where we can address your question of, okay, but how do people build compatibility? I'll tell you what the best tool is that we have. And it's like so low tech and so low five and it's from the 90s. And if I had two people and I need to figure out, I need to figure out like which two folks we're going to like you said the most, this is what I'd give them. And it's called the 36 questions test or the fast friends procedure. And it's a bunch of questions. It's sort of like guided icebreaker that gets people revealing things about themselves that's just a little bit more disclosure and vulnerability than we typically are comfortable with. You know, we might start with fairly low test things like if you had a crystal ball that could tell you anything, what would you ask it? But it escalates to things like what's something you've always wanted to do and if you've never tried what's something you've always wanted to tell somebody but you haven't and why haven't you told them to things like what is something you really like about the person that you just met 70 minutes ago? And like when people do this, you can see the only reason they go, you know, because it's uncomfortable. But I tell you, I mean, it doesn't, it's not like it works every time. But it's by far the best thing for getting two people to like each other. I mean, you know, and like, like, you know, be schools, use this stuff all the time. And my guess is like dating coaches use this stuff all the time. Because it's pretty well known at this point. But honestly, it's about the flow of conversation. It's about finding things to connect over and then leaning into those things. And look, there will be some pairs of people that can never find it. But I think many pairs can and that's kind of often where the magic is hiding. Because as you were describing that, my thought of why that works and builds connection would be because perhaps you're sharing things that you normally wouldn't share. So because of that, or more vulnerable and you feel there is a bit of this rare connection that you may not have. But you're saying it's really more just about finding commonality and going deeper into that too. I think it's both. My guess is that both components there are playing a role that when we look at the speed dates, it's just people kind of fishing around. For all the people. Yeah, what do you do? Oh, what do you live on? Do you know this person? Oh, no, I don't know that. Yeah, yeah. And would they like hit on something? Right? It's like, who cares that we both know Frank? Yeah. It doesn't make us more compatible. Sure. It feels good though. Like, it's like something we can like start to construct something around. But you're right that with something like the 36 questions, it is more about like this sense that somebody gets you. The opportunity to be a little bit of an audience for another person to be there as they disclose something and reflect that back. I think that does help to build connection. And I understand it's like, you know, it's like the classic, you know, then a miracle happens. And then suddenly you have like deep, ongoing, serious connection with another person. But I think if you think about it, like, look, it's just a 1000. instead process, that's all it is. And then we go on a second date and we build a little more connection and we find a couple other things that we have in common. And then we've gone another date and so on and so forth. And eventually what you have are these rituals and stories that you build your life around. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that I wanted to talk about is the common story that you hear. I mean, I can usually guide friends talk about this. I'm sure girls, I should have heard girlfriends talk about this as well, which is you have this great connection with someone. Yeah. You build this report. You share things that you may now have never shared. Things are going well. And then you get a text. Yeah. And you say, you know, I've been thinking and I don't think this is a romantic connection that I feel I think we should just be friends. Yeah. And it's a pretty common tale that has been told quite a bit over and over again. So my question for that is if the connection and the report and inside jokes is so important, how come there's so many people getting friends owned? This is a very important and very challenging question because it is true that there is something at the intersection of this like these report components and sexual desire in particular that remains a bit elusive. Now sexual desire too is something just like with, you know, how much you want to go on a second date with this person. Much of it is going to be compatibility. So it is not the case that the tens will be the most sexually desirable and everybody else has to test a struggle. So people find different things idiosyncratically sexually desirable. But my guess is that, you know, we're already pretty bad at, you know, kind of imagining what we'd want a future existence with a person to be like we're probably even worse at articulating what it is that appeals to us sexually in another person. That's 100% true. Yeah. And so that is probably where some of it comes from. Also, for what it's worth, the kinds of, you know, interventions that I've been describing, I'm like the things that build intimacy between two people. It's not like we've tried those things out in the lab to try to build sexual intimacy between people because that I don't think our review boards would like that very much if we were bringing it in strangers and trying to cultivate that kind of sexual intimacy. Might it be possible? Like I don't know. But I think that it's often a thing that people just kind of feel their way through. I feel compelled to point out too that, and especially I think this is maybe something where online dating gives us the wrong impression that our sexual feelings about somebody can change a lot as we get to know them. Commonly, it can be the case that you feel no sexual attraction for somebody at all the first or the second or the fifth or the tenth time that you meet them. And then on the eleventh, it's like something ignites. So is that common, by the way, the idea that someone can be friendzoned and then later on, you keep one of the. Yeah. Okay. This is important. This is important because like, and again, I'm out here. I kind of want to rehabilitate the friendzoned. I think the friendzoned Scott is kind of bad rap. But I don't advise people intentionally becoming friends with somebody that they are desperately in love with in the hopes that that person will fall in love with them. That is that route that I just described is not that common. It's not that it's never happened. I do not advise this. Is there a movie with Adam Sandler where he pretends to be a gay firefighter or something like that? Which one is that? Oh, for God. It was like a, it's like a classic older one. Two guys pretending to be gay and then. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I love the crowd. So you check and Larry maybe? Yeah. Yeah. I could be. Yeah. Just reminded me of that. Not that people be getting friends over or gay, but you know, not a movie we've covered on our podcast. We do a movie podcast, but we've not covered that one. So okay. So I don't advise the friendzoned as an intentional strategy in that way. Friends commonly develop feelings for each other, but it usually happens gradually without either party doing it intentionally as they spend time together. And this is true even in today's day and age, something like 60% of romantic relationships that currently exist would describe themselves as friends first. Yeah. The definition of friend is flexible here, right? Because sometimes people meet online and then their friends were like a month and then they get together and they call themselves friends first, but they saw this person as a friend for that month as they were kind of seeing where things were going. So again, friend is a flexible thing. But I think the key part here is that having a social network that's filled with people of your preferred gender and you're not so preferred gender that some of them you're into and some of them you're not and they're going to introduce you to other people. I think all of this is very healthy and very wise. And the hard thing is when you get hung up on somebody that doesn't feel the same way about you and there will be times where that will happen. And yes, it will be important to be able to disengage from that person to protect yourself a little bit because when you really feel powerfully about somebody and they don't reciprocate those feelings, you kind of don't want to keep keep spending time with them. And these are some of the very real risks there. But these like shifting networks over time, like just spending time around people is I think the most important thing that ultimately I want to be advocating for having women who are actual friends, you know, for young men to be able to do this. I think this is very important and I hope it's not becoming a law start. Right. I mean, I guess analytically that makes sense. You're giving more opportunities to see qualities in themselves that maybe you didn't see in the first interaction that of the things that we're looking for. I mean, to put a young young spin on it, he often talks about how the qualities are the person that we're looking for often mirrors the qualities that we have not fully developed in ourselves. Because it's really interesting. Which, you know, that's one perspective to look at, right? And spending more time on someone, whether it's good or bad, you can start to see those qualities mirror in yourself and have had that introspection perhaps develop those feelings. Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting idea. I mean, you know, we think a lot about this self-expansion idea that when people get in the relationships, they start taking on the qualities of the person that they're with. And this is part of why relationships are initially very exciting, right? It's actually part of where the passion comes from, right? I'm not it's not just that I'm discovering a new person. I'm discovering a new person and all the things that she knows and experiences and does and believes and this is this is all very ex-self-expanding is the term that we use. And it's it's part of the thrill. It's also part of the challenge too when you feel like, okay, now I've learned a lot about you. And I'm not growing in the same way. Well, what are we going to build from here? And yeah, a lot of relationships, falter, when the passion fades for exactly that reason. Because the thrill is there and now you're sort of left with, okay, now we've built a set of patterns and some rituals. Are these going to sustain us? Do these make us feel fulfilled and connected? Or is there distance? And, and you know, maybe this isn't something that I want. Yeah. This is, perhaps the other side of the table that we could go into as well, which is we talked a lot about the importance of some familiarity and spending time together to develop that attraction in the early stages. But do you think spending too much time together and familiarity can lead to something that leads to, as you mentioned, you know, fade and passion? Like how do you balance that? What are tips that we can provide for long-term relationships to keep that spark alive? So this is very tricky because there is like daily life can be, you know, at best mundane, at worst, very stressful. And that isn't conducive to romance, especially, you know, in cases where you live with somebody, but you got stuff to do. There are, you know, pets or children that need to be fed and clothed and bathed. And that's seven from the party. Yeah, right. And that is part of the thing. So the funny thing is it's like, well, is that familiarity? Because like you're around, but you're around like we're doing like stressful stuff. It's not familiarity in the way that it was five years earlier. And that I think to the same point of like, well, it's about spending time together, but maybe engaging in an act of discovery and self-expansion because I could nearly guarantee that if I take that couple who's stressed and they got a million things going on and I whisk them away to a tropical paradise, there's a really good chance that they'll get to spend the good kind of time together, quality time together. They'll, you know, remember the stories and the, you know, the in jokes that brought them together in the first place. the stress is subside and they can do, you know, novel and self-expanding activities and reconnect in that way. It's just daily life often doesn't facilitate that. Now, I'm not trying to be like two polyanna-ish here and be like, "No, I can always rekindle that initial passion." Like, of course, it's not quite like that. Like, there is something to the early phases of dating somebody that is very hard to replicate later. But I am always nervous about pinning it on familiarity. I think it has more to do with the fact that, you know, we, there are daily stresses and we sometimes lock ourselves into patterns often without realizing it, that actually don't facilitate intimacy. Like, "Oh, I've just regularly started staying late at work and now we don't have dinner together as often." Why did I do that? Ah, there was this project and then I just kind of kept doing it. I think being mindful of like these little unintentional things we do to build in distance and correcting those, I think that can be very helpful for people because I think we often don't realize how we let distance creep in in that way. Yeah, and it is really hard to replicate the inner stages of the relationship. I think part of the thing that makes the early relationship so powerful beyond the novelty and the fact that everything is new is that it's uncertain. Like, this person could go away at any point. It's not like you're tall, you don't have kids together, you're not married, you don't have a house together. And I think later on, you know that, "Oh, we don't go for dinner this week, "that person's always gonna be around." And that leads to a certain cycle of feeling monotonous and taking someone for granted. And I think that is something you can intentionally and consciously work on, which is the good news. Yeah, I totally agree that this is part of it too. That it just feels like, okay, like this person is somebody who is around. And look, there are deep incompatibilities that sometimes find their way into people's relationships where it feels like, you know, like my needs aren't being met. You know, I have these goals, I have these things that I care about and like you don't seem to be supporting these at all. And you know, once the negativity creeps in, I think that's when we get, it can cascade in our hurry. And I think that's sometimes like where the negative impression that people have of relationships comes from and the, you know, heterop pessimism that exists out there, you know, like, oh, like relationships are terrible law. Like, and I think, I think this is how it happens. It's, look, it is hard to coordinate your life with another person, especially if there are multiple people that need to be coordinated around being able to check in and not take somebody for granted in that way. I think it's helpful, but none of these tips and tricks are gonna work 100% of the time. - So I wanna leave some key takeaways for people to help them with their dating relationship, satisfaction and success. Based on this conversation that we've had and all of the research and studies that you've done, what are a few key things that both men and women, you can provide different advice for either, can take action on to ensure they're more successful in finding love or relationships. - I'll reiterate some things, we'll start with the attraction side. And regardless of gender, regardless of sexual orientation, keep the apps if you want, but please spend time socializing in small groups of, you know, if you're heterosexual, mixed gender groups, not because you're necessarily gonna befriend and then date those women, but because they might introduce you to people who introduce you to people, who introduce you to other people, and then you start dating one of them. Having mixed gender friends for young boys, especially adolescent boys, it's like one of the best predictors of whether they're gonna get a girlfriend. Like that would be the advice that I would want to give them, you know, rather than hitting the gym every day. On the initial attraction side, be out socializing again. On the ongoing relationship side, you know, we talk about these cultures that two people create together. And that's often where the magic comes from in the relationship. It's good to lean into your in-jokes and your stories and your rituals. And the things that make you feel like this person is totally irreplaceable because of the history we have together. And also be willing to interrogate some of the patterns that come out of that because sometimes it's easy to miss how those patterns lock us into experiences where we actually don't get to connect on a regular basis, where we don't spend time together doing new things. You know, I mean, the Netflix is right there. And it's very, very tempting to fall into our old patterns like that that are familiar, but maybe not so good at connecting to people. So those are the things I'd encourage people on the established relationship side to pay attention to. - Got it, got it. - We talked about the importance of connection, but do you think things like a self-improvement, you know, making sure that you're the most attractive version of yourself, all that stuff? Like, is that still important, but it's just de-emphasized based on the research? - Yeah, that's exactly how I think about it. It's de-emphasized or like if you're gonna do it, like do it for you. Like, man, I love taking on new hobbies and new interests and things. Like, I'm doing that for me because it makes me feel excited, it makes me feel invigorated. You know, I run a lot, but I do it for me because I enjoy it. This kind of self-improvement I think is great. The self-improvement that is to get likes and whatever the likes we are talking about, if we're talking about rightswipes, if we're talking about likes on social media, or even literal likes in, you know, going to parties and being the center of attention, it is useful to a point, but it becomes a trap. And just plain old socialization for the sake of socializing, I think is the way out of that trap. - Right, 'cause you do get into this, yeah, this kind of toxic cycle of constantly trying to satisfy not even yourself, it's really becomes more external. And that's where the trap is, I imagine, is that you're trying to fulfill or trying to impress people that they don't really actually even care about things that you're doing ultimately. And that never ends, that's never good enough. - Yeah, I worry about this a lot. I hope we can turn it around. - I hope so too. I'm really excited to recommend the book for people bonded by evolution, the new science of love and connection where can people learn more about you and the work you're doing? - Well, you can find the book wherever you buy books, you know, Amazon bookshop.org. And if you wanna follow me, check out the LoveFactually podcast. So that's where my co-host, Eli Thinklin' and I review movies, from Combs and other romantic movies and we talk about how relationship science, that's the science that I practice, how that's related to the movie. So pretty goofy, but check us out there. - Nice, maybe we'll have a Chuck and Larry as the next movie. - Yeah, I know. (laughing) - I definitely didn't realize that. I don't really forgotten about that one. - Paul, appreciate you. Thanks for tuning in. - Thanks so much for having me.