How to Train Your Boyfriend: An Evolutionary Guide to Great Relationships

An evolutionary psychologist’s guide to understanding your man by leveraging sex differences, so you can unlock stronger, more rewarding relationships

In the long history before antibiotics, 350-calorie ready meals, and flavored condoms, there was a word for women who couldn’t persuade men to help them: dead. In order to survive, our earliest female ancestors became experts at fine-tuning their “training instinct” to influence, entice, and maintain ties to the people around them.

In How to Train Your Boyfriend, evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman makes the bold claim that women are hard-wired to get men to do what they want. She’ll help you harness your Alpha, the bad bitch living in your head that’s devoted to training others, so that you can start getting what you want out of your relationships. Craving more attention from your man? Try rewarding him with a smile every time he makes sustained eye contact, or feeding him a french fry whenever he looks up at you from his phone during dinner. Through inventive rewards (yes, including sex), tailored punishments, teasing, and other techniques, you will learn how to get better gifts out of him, how to make honesty his default, how to manage your own jealousy, and so much more.

By tapping into your training instinct and getting to know your Alpha, you’ll become more conscious of what you want in a romance; and with Fleischman as your guide, you’ll apply your wits, strategy, and self-control to go out and get it. Once you understand the science behind your love life, you can unlock a better relationship for both you and your partner, ultimately achieving higher levels of intimacy, sexual chemistry, and mutual respect.