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What's the Best Way to Meet Someone You'll Click With?

Paul Eastwick says the way to meet someone you will click with is to keep up friendships and not cross people off from a description on paper.

He stopped treating the friend zone as something to fear, except when the friendship is a constant reminder of unrequited love. Often it means two people like each other as friends and can introduce one another to new people, so the network keeps changing. Among heterosexual men and women, having more friends of the other gender predicts a higher chance of starting a relationship over the following months and years. Those friends make the introductions, including friends of friends. That is how romantic relationships form.

He calls the habit an open casting approach. Do not write someone off for looking wrong on paper, including a different background, different interests, or different values. There are often other points of connection. Hunting a narrow type makes the search more frustrating than it needs to be. Someone who fits none of the two or three traits you would have listed can show you a preference you had not named. Good relationships help people grow and change, and a rigid idea of a finished self closes that off.

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How Love Really Works ·

Hidden Brain

More from this episode

  1. What Does Evolutionary Psychology Claim About Mating?Paul Eastwick, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, says the popular evolutionary account of mating, which he calls the evolutionary script…
  2. Why Does Agreement About Attractiveness Fade Over Time?Paul Eastwick says people largely agree on who is attractive in a photograph or at a first meeting with a stranger, and that agreement fades once they…
  3. Why Don't Dating Preferences Predict Who We Fall for?Paul Eastwick says the traits people name as what they want in a partner do a poor job of predicting whom they like once they meet face to face.
  4. Does Ambition Attract Men and Women Equally?Paul Eastwick says ambition attracts men and women about equally in the first minutes of a date.
  5. Why Do Dating Apps Make Women Look Pickier?Paul Eastwick says dating apps make women look much pickier than men, because the gap in who says yes is far larger online than when people meet face to face.
  6. Why Can't Machine Learning Predict Romantic Compatibility?Paul Eastwick says studies with psychologist Samantha Joel tested whether compatibility at a first meeting can be predicted from what two people report about…
  7. How Do Couples Create Compatibility?Paul Eastwick, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, says compatibility is tightly tied to history: the story two people share and how that…
  8. Why Do People Fall in Love With an Idea of Their Partner?Shankar Vedantam says people sometimes respond to an idea of a partner they created themselves.
  9. What Is Social Projection?Edward Lemay, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, says social projection is a bias where people assume others are more like them than they really are.
  10. What Is an Upward Comparison in a Relationship?Edward Lemay says an upward comparison is what happens when people measure their own relationship against one that looks better.
  11. Why Do People Project Current Feelings Onto a Relationship's Future?Edward Lemay says people project how they feel about a partner today onto the future of the relationship.
  12. Why Do World Beliefs Change How a Partner Looks?Edward Lemay says people use their beliefs about the world as a lens on a partner.

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