Pushkin.

As William Shakespeare once said, the course of true love never did run smooth.

And one of the unsmoothest parts of love is the initial attraction phase.

You see somebody across the way who looks kind of cute, but will that person like you back?

Will they think you're hot enough? Smart enough? Successful enough? Sometimes the answer is yes.

Cue all the hearts and fireworks. But at least some of the time, the answer is no.

The person that you're into isn't that into you.

Relationships and attraction especially, there can be a lot of rejection.

It can be pretty demoralizing.

And to some extent you can't skip that part, but I think it really matters.

Why was I rejected in this instance?

This is Dr. Paul Eastwick, an expert on the psychology of human mating.

And there's a whole set of ideas out there that suggests that you got rejected because

you're a three out of ten. And you're just going to need to settle for the other threes.

Paul is referring to a set of ideas he calls the Evo script,

the notion that human attraction boils down to the harsh laws of natural selection.

Under the Evo script, finding the right partner is all about finding someone with good genes.

Some of us, those so-called nines and tens out there,

possess a whole host of traits that signal those good genes. The rest of us, those so-called nines and tens out there, possess a whole host of traits that signal those good genes.

The rest of us, not so much.

You have a certain set of attributes.

They characterize who you are and they determine what you're going to get on the market.

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