The arms race of signals
Not all dating advice is created equal. These articles examine popular guidance from relationship coaches, influencers, and self-help authors—separating evolutionary insight from pseudoscience and marketing.
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The arms race of signals
Peacocks, the pill, and the pickup artists: how courtship signals get made, copied, and thrown away.
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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.
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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 management professor in Rochester, New York, was doing something deeply unfashionable: treating dating like a business problem. Andrew J. DuBrin…
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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 of the industry she helped build. Today’s dating apps, she told Fortune, “are rooted in rejection and judgement [and] these…
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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 ideal of chiseled masculinity: square jaw, angular features, lean and broad-shouldered. Few in the audience knew he had built…
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Concealed polygamy: what a 1914 book reveals about situationships
Over 100 years of hidden harems Our monogamy is constantly varied by polygyny, or pseudo-polygamy, lacking the sanctions and responsibilities of Mohammedan plurality. That’s not a hot take from a controversial dating podcast. It’s from a book published in 1914, written by Walter M. Gallichan, an Edwardian sexologist who spent…
About the author
Andrew King
Author of Costly Signals: The Evolution of Dating Advice. PhD researcher with 500+ dating guides from the 1800s to today. Why do we take romantic advice from strangers? I have answers.
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Whether you’re a journalist, podcaster, or an event organizer, I’d love to hear from you. I speak on modern dating, evolutionary psychology, and a surprising history of dating advice.
© 2026, Andrew King