Dating decoded: Evolutionary insights on attraction
Welcome to my collection of articles exploring the timeless dance of dating and mating. Drawing from evolutionary psychology, cultural history, and real-world wisdom, these pieces decode the costly signals that shape attraction, reveal hidden patterns in modern romance, and offer practical insights to navigate love’s complexities. Whether you’re curious about biology’s role in courtship or seeking strategies for deeper connections, start reading and uncover what really drives human desire.
-
The arms race of signals
Peacocks, the pill, and the pickup artists: how courtship signals get made, copied, and thrown away.
-
Why 1950s experts thought wives cheated (and what they got wrong)
How a 1950s sex manual mistook constrained strategy for female pathology Chapter Six of Sex Vices in America bears the title “Why Wives Are Unfaithful” — but what it actually…
-
From ‘narcissist’ to ‘shrekking’: what five years of dating slang reveals about our attitudes to love
This article was published in The Spectator last month In 2020, TikTok users began diagnosing their exes as narcissists. By 2023, Oxford had declared ‘rizz’ its Word of the Year.…
-
Costly signaling and fidelity
In 1953, Shailer Upton Lawton framed a husband’s moral code as mate insurance. A wife who invested heavily created the conditions for him to want a firm moral code and…
-
What Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere misses
Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere is vintage Theroux: probing, well-crafted, quietly devastating. It also flattens a broad cultural spectrum into its most extreme fringe: the same conflation error…
-
Selling costly signals in 1879: Victorian visiting cards and the logic of modern dating
On calling cards, costly signals, and buying your way into polite society with George D. Carroll’s (1879) Art Stationery and Usages of Polite Society.
-
The 1973 dating manual that predicted Tinder: costly signals in action
Andrew DuBrin’s The Singles Game, and the application of management theory to dating advice In 1973, while the rest of America preached free love and “going with the flow,” a…
-
Death of the dating app: costly signals, rejection, and the return of real dating
This article appeared in Quillette earlier this month In mid-2025, Bumble’s founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returned to the company she had left two years earlier and offered a blunt assessment…
-
Costly signaling across a century of dating advice
What bowerbirds, a 1920 love manual, and brutal modern advice reveal about trust A 1920 dating manual, a book about animals having sex in a zoo, and a profane modern…
-
Sydney Sweeny’s older men: the evolutionary truth behind age-gap relationships
Age-gap relationships are only scandalous when men are older—and the data and hypocrisy prove it On April 7, Sydney Sweeney walked the red carpet at the Euphoria Season 3 premiere.…
-
Looksmaxxing: signaling to the wrong audience
Looksmaxxers think they’re attracting women, but the research says otherwise In February 2026, twenty-year-old streamer Braden Peters, known as Clavicular, closed a New York Fashion Week show looking every inch…
-
The brief rise of the sensitive new age guy (and why he disappeared)
The man who did everything right and still got it wrong In 1982, Bruce Feirstein published Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, a satirical bestseller targeting a new species of American…
© 2026, Andrew King