Dr Andrew King’s coming book describes today’s Tinder-dominated dating scene as an unholy blend of anxiety projection, the distorted politics of self-esteem, and impersonal algorithms. As a result, modern dating is wholly inadequate for solving the age-old problem of mate-selection.
It’s not every day that I ask a man about dating advice, especially not one who resides in central Bangkok. Fortunately, I’m speaking to a PhD-holding former journalist and not a fugitive sex offender in a Singha beer vest and elephant trousers. Of course, it helps his credibility that at no point during our interview does he ask me for money or talk knowledgeably about STDs – so you know you’re safely above the average expat.
As he talks – eloquently – I start to suspect this isn’t sneering pickup artistry as I feared, but a timely addition to the literature on our current cultural problems. If you’ve found Jonathan Haidt’s books required reading, you should add Dr King’s to your list. In a world paralysed by cultural relativism, a historical study feels almost radical.
Cultural Representation
He says: “My PhD was about indigenous people being seen as sexy in the media. If you’re seen as sexy, you become marriageable. You’re not another race to be avoided – you’re people you can have a relationship with.
“After I finished my PhD, all the funding used government money to solve worthy social problems – having more women play football or better dating apps for gay guys. There were committees and groups who had guidelines for non-traditional research outcomes – this whole area of not-publications, not-peer-reviewed articles or books. It was: ‘What value does that add to the community?’ Academia was how can we solve problems that don’t really exist.”
Asking himself whether he wanted to get good at extracting money from the Australian Government, he realised: “Academia was full of bullshit. A PhD was useless. So, I thought: ‘Okay, I need some real skills.’”
He spent many years working as a journalist in Myanmar, speaking with people free of what he describes as the imagined social problems occupying so many of his scholarly peers. He found writing about the pragmatic concerns of subsistence farmers and pagoda-enthusiasts more rewarding.
Background
Andrew King was born in Northampton General Hospital in 1976, and to put as much distance between them and the shoe trade as possible, his family moved to Perth, Australia in 1990. Tall, handsome, you’d easily imagine him riding a surfboard if you grew up watching Neighbours. He has a taste for flowery collared shirts. No trace of an English accent remains.
He doesn’t strike you as the sort who’d need self-help guides to win a mate. Yet, after a break-up, he says he read Models: How to Attract Women Through Honesty by Mark Manson. His current journey started there.
“I was sharing a house with a guy with Asperger’s,” he says. “He was very good at picking up women but not great with relationships. Simon Baren-Cohen looks at how men and women’s brains differ, talking about men having systematising brains, while women are better at identifying emotions and facial expressions. That made sense when I considered my ex-girlfriend – who was extremely keyed into others’ emotions. My Asperger’s flatmate was terrible with emotional cues, but great at remembering the exact place you put the milk in the fridge two months ago.
“I wanted to know more about those differences in people between these two extremes, what that means for attraction and relationships, and how much the culture and the education system had completely lied to me about it.”
Researching the Dating Scene
This led to a serious read of dating advice going back centuries.
“In the 1800s dating was ritualistic,” he says. “Etiquette was the main thing and that was more about chivalrous public displays – costly signals that took a lot of time to develop. Learning French, Latin, traveling, having knowledge of foreign culture was something that a man could display as cultural capital to attract a woman. Women were encouraged to show themselves as being a worthy mate by taking care of the home.”
He says urban life introduced a recognisable consumer’s dilemma into this Jane Austen Mr-Darcy-needs-a-wife picture. “Suddenly people have more choice, and relationships become more chaotic. People don’t know who to like because they used to meet through work, in their community, or just have an arranged marriage.
“Chivalry started to break down around 1900. The ideal at the time is to take care of your husband and wife, and to overlook some of their foibles. He says the absence of men post–World War Two changed things and a more clinical scientific approach took over the advice manuals.
“There were so few men there, they basically had a match.com approach – fill out a survey. Who are you going to be most compatible with? Personality type wasn’t developed as much then, so it was more ‘What’s your profession?’ ‘What’s their class status?’”
The 1970s saw an explosion of swinging clubs, singles bars, and more opportunity for consequence-free sex. He says: “There was still a lot of shaming, but it was cultural capital that you could claim. If you’re a university-educated woman you could say ‘I want to go to these clubs. I want to hang out and have sex.’ You could have sex and then just move to the next guy, but you still had to have attachment to this person. The guy would be bored with these girls and move on. It created a lot of anxiety and stress for women.”
Pickup artistry developed in the 1980s. For males, advice was very mechanical and very science based. For women, it was all about feeling good, masking anxiety behind rigid rule-based advice – wait 48 hours before you can call him up, don’t answer straight away. He says trusted sources of advice were all about manipulation and displaced anxiety. The 1980s turned the dating scene into yet another commodity market. Lots of us went home with buyer’s remorse.
Today’s Grim Picture
He says dating today is broken. His is a dystopian vision of everyone getting high on a defence mechanism cut with unearned self-esteem and sublimated guilt. He points out current thinking fixates on solutions to social problems aligned with today’s divisive academic fads rather than obvious practical ones – such as keeping the species reproducing. You’d think failing to solve the declining birthrate would have alerted keener minds to academia’s cloud-cuckoo-land pretensions sooner.
“All the contextual cues that people in previous generations used to assess mate value have been stripped away and left to algorithms. Pickup artistry – which the mainstream is very hostile towards – contains some good advice, such as going cold turkey on social media and pornography. Such a return to Victorian-era abstinence reimposes scarcity that forces us to seek social validation and sex in the real world, with real people, not on the phone or internet.”
Ah, yes. Phones and the internet. Enter the current lost generation. What are we to do with Gen Z?
“Their fear of risk, wanting safe spaces and trigger warnings, seems to come from the therapeutic culture of their boomer grandparents who embraced the idea that everyone was special, rather than fostering connection, negotiation and meaningful conversation.
“Parents of each generation seem to outsource their parenting to education, nurseries, TV and now screens that often leave families – using Sherry Turkle’s phrase – alone together. Hence the anxiety about meeting people outside of your social group or circle.”
The implication is we need to get the kids in a room, talking and learning how to navigate a trauma-filled world if we are to produce a Gen Alpha and Beta psychologically – and evolutionarily – suited to a reality that isn’t getting any friendlier. Is there any hope for those lusty lonely hearts cruising the bars in Bangkok?
“They’re their own breed of weirdness,” he says with a groan. “They deserve their own book.”
Dr Andrew King’s book Costly Signals: How Evolution Shaped Centuries of Dating Advice will be published by Cambridge Scholarsin 2026.
Lee Russell Wilkes 