Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the many students, colleagues, and reviewers whose feedback shaped this book. Particular thanks to the undergraduate focus groups who helped develop the composite characters of Nadia, Sam, and Jordan — their candor about navigating attraction, identity, and courtship in the contemporary moment made these characters real.

We thank the researchers whose work we synthesize here, particularly those who have been willing to publicly engage with replication challenges, methodological critiques, and the hard questions about generalizability that the field is still working through. Science progresses through honest reckoning with its own limits, and this book is better for theirs.

We are grateful to instructors who provided feedback on draft chapters, and to the editorial and production team who shepherded this project from concept to completion.

Finally, we thank the readers — the students who will argue with these pages, who will bring their own experiences and identities to bear on the research, and who will leave with better questions than they arrived with. That's the goal.