Why do we take romantic advice from strangers? From Victorian etiquette manuals to TikTok dating coaches and Love is Blind contestants, Costly Signals reveals that our obsession with relationship guidance isn’t a modern quirk—it’s an evolutionary adaptation to our increasingly mediatized lives.
Drawing on evolutionary psychology, this book traces how courtship advice evolved alongside mass media across more than a century. Victorian chivalry encoded costly signals of male investment. Post-war dating surveys promised scientific compatibility. The self-esteem movement tried to therapeutically override biology, while reality TV exploited it for entertainment. Pickup artistry made the implicit rules of attraction explicit. And dating apps turned romance into an optimization problem.
Yet each era’s advice failed to address the deeper dysfunction: parenting. Using r/K selection theory, Costly Signals argues that secure attachment—not techniques or therapy—determines romantic success. The ultimate dating advice isn’t found in any book. It begins in childhood.