An Evolutionary Psychologist's Take On Broken Dating Markets (Ft Geoffrey Miller)

Join us in this exciting episode of Basecamp where we welcome esteemed guest, Malcolm and evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. The conversation dives deep into the challenges of the modern dating market, the impact of dating apps, and the shifting norms on college campuses. Jeffrey shares intriguing insights from his experiences with university students, his thoughts on cultural and societal impacts on dating, and offers practical advice for parents on how to support their children in finding long-term partners. The discussion also touches on the future implications of AI in romantic relationships and the importance of maintaining close family ties. Don’t miss it!

Geoffrey Miller: [00:00:00] I've done polls of my, my undergraduate males in my sexuality classes, anonymous polls, right?

Mm-hmm. Through iClicker and stuff. Mm-hmm. Would you ever date a female student? Would you ever date a female student that you meet on campus about two thirds? Say absolutely not. Two, a third,

Simone Collins: what's the point of gonna go, oh my gosh, I, I know. And

Geoffrey Miller: then, right. So they're terrified, right?

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello everyone. I'm. So excited to see all of you here today because today I have both Malcolm and Jeffrey Miller on the podcast. This is really exciting because one, we admire his work a lot. Jeffrey Miller is an American evolutionary psychologist. He's also an author and associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches a course on human sexuality.

Among other things, he's also mixing with university students who are in the thick of dating, which is what we're gonna be talking about today. Dating markets are broken. What do we do to fix him? How can people find a partner if they actually want one? So we're really excited to get into this. Welcome to [00:01:00] Basecamp, Jeffrey.

Geoffrey Miller: It's great to be here and great to see you guys again.

Malcolm Collins: Great. And I wanna know that this isn't just like if you're a young person and you're like, oh, I'm interested in this for me this is also gonna be highly useful to parents. Oh yeah. Because any parent right now who wants their line to continue, one of the biggest challenges you're gonna have to overcome is how do you secure a partner?

How do your children secure a partner within this corrupted market right now?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. It's bad. It's dire. What are you seeing out there, Jeffrey? Like, do your students talk to you about dating at all or are they like, I'm not not gonna go there, or they're not dating? Yeah.

Geoffrey Miller: Well, they, they wanna be dating, you know, the guys want girlfriends, the, the women want boyfriends.

And I actually have a daughter who's 29 and, you know, active in the dating scene. And we talk a lot about what it's like out there. I talk a lot about. The current dating apps and their failures and their frustrations with my students. We have, you know, long discussions both in my human sexuality class, and I also [00:02:00] teach a course on effective altruism.

I teach courses on human emotions and motivations and, yeah, I've even taught a course on alternative relationships. It covers all kinds of unusual things, including, including traditional Christian monogamous marriage as, as an alternative relationship.

Simone Collins: So is though what, so we get this impression sometimes that younger generations are, in some ways moving in a more tra direction because they're like.

Malcolm Collins: All the other stuff actually. Are you seeing this, this trad movement within your students?

Simone Collins: Are you seeing it or is it just not?

Geoffrey Miller: I mean, what, and here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, everything is a little bit behind the curve. I mean, we're not in Brooklyn, we're not the Bay Area. So stuff comes here five years later, you know, after, after it goes everywhere else.

But I certainly see an interest in, huh. Getting serious about finding a long-term mate and people [00:03:00] talking about demographic collapse and people being aware of it as an issue. And certainly my, you know, 20-year-old students talk to their 40 to 50 ish year old parents, right? Who are also keenly concerned, like, we want grandkids.

When are you gonna deliver grandkids to us? And so, there's a lot of discussion about that, and there's widespread frustration with dating apps, right? A lot of, a lot of the kids are on Tinder and Hinge, and they find it an incredibly frustrating, demeaning, dehumanizing process in different ways, depending on whether you're a woman or a man, right?

But there's, there's widespread to satisfaction out there and particularly on college campuses, right? Which used to be. Epicenters of the mating market, which used to be wonderful places to meet people. A lot of that has been shut down, actually quite cynically and deliberately by college [00:04:00] administrators.

Simone Collins: What, wait, wait. Okay, so how,

Geoffrey Miller: talk more about this.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Geoffrey Miller: Okay, so about eight or 10 years ago, I was on our UNM College Committee to revise our sexual misconduct policies, right? And so this was setting the policies, rules, and norms about. Basically dating on college campuses. And I've talked to a lot of other faculty, other places who have been involved in this kind of thing.

And basically I would raise questions like, look there, there's, there's trade offs here. Like, yes, we want to minimize state rape. Yes, we wanna minimize sexual harassment, unwanted sexual attentions talking, that's all bad, but on the upside. It would actually be nice if our students could date each other.

Right? Yeah. And there are, there are trade offs there where like if you have a policy that absolutely tries to minimize all possible date rape, right? And that basically criminalizes. [00:05:00] People approaching each other, like with possible romantic intent, right? I said, if you're gonna do that, you're gonna stop the formation of couples on campus, right?

Mm-hmm. And everybody else on the committee was like. We don't care about the college campus being an effective mating market. We do not care. The only priority we have is to absolutely minimize unwanted, uncomfortable sexual attention, right? So a lot of campuses have gone in that direction and the net result is.

Like when I went to college in the eighties. Yeah. Like it was partly to find a marriage partner and partly to practice medium to long-term relationships and like Yes. Figure out what the other sex is like and how like this is so common that I

Malcolm Collins: even grew up was this concept of a MRS degree which is an MRS degree.

S degree. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Which meant that you were going college to find a husband. And this was a viable strategy. Many, many, many, many, many, I, I, I might even say it was a normative strategy for our [00:06:00] parents' generation.

Simone Collins: Well, and you went to college looking for a wife, Malcolm. And your brother and his wife, like freshman year.

Malcolm Collins: Freshman year, yeah. Both me and my brother went to college explicitly to find a wife in, in part,

Simone Collins: but now, wow. You know what you're saying, Jeffrey reminds me. It, it's like very similar to what happened, like it has been creeping up with. Parenting in general, where like car seat laws may be causing fewer lives to exist