This review examines Paul Eastwick’s Bonded by Evolution (2026), a trade book that mounts a systematic empirical challenge to the evolutionary psychological narrative of human mating that has dominated popular culture since the 1990s. Drawing on two decades of research in close relationships science, Eastwick argues that mate value is ephemeral, that gender differences in revealed romantic preferences are substantially smaller than the EvoScript supposes, and that compatibility cannot be predicted from trait-matching but is co-constructed through repeated interaction. The review assesses the book’s contributions to the empirical literature on attraction and its implications for cultural understandings of sexuality, gender, and intimate life, while noting significant gaps in its engagement with structural inequality, the racial and class dimensions of romantic sorting, and the heteronormative architecture of much of its research base.
