In the spirit of Jane Goodall meets Bad Sex, DARWINIAN DATING tells the playful, passionate story of a thirty-something primatologist looking for love in the urban jungle, and sometimes the actual jungle.

Several years out of graduate school, Elissa Jacobs is struggling with both dating and the job market. When her perpetually single aunt gets critically ill from flesh-eating bacteria, Elissa flies into a panic as she fixates on the fact that her aunt hadn’t had a partner to notice she was sick. Elissa’s solution? She begins a frantic dating spree. However, it turns out that a decade of researching primate behavior has not prepared her for any of this: the testosterone-fueled displays, the flaunting of material resources, the red bottoms being continually thrust in her face. Elissa is supposed to be an expert on animal behavior, but when it comes to the human animal, she has to admit that she has no idea what she is doing.

DARWINIAN DATING combines Elissa’s knowledge of primatology and the biology of courtship to tell the story of her desperate quest to pair-bond and procreate, and maybe even find love.