Talking to them, learning their past, their character, their preferences, their favourite Tom Waits album, etc?
>You literally mention sex in the same sentence;
Which we've managed to separate from pure evolutionary urges to reproduce at least some millennia ago.
>this is the fundamental evolutionary (not teleological) purpose of courtship, regardless of how you dress it up.
You'd be surprised, billions manage to have sex with billions without having children -- in casual relationships and such. And an increasing number of people (like 20-30% in the US I've read?) even for life.
All of these things except maybe Tom Waits are indicators of reproductive fitness. Why do you think your brain is structured to prefer these characteristics in a potential mate?
> Which we've managed to separate from pure evolutionary urges to reproduce at least some millennia ago.
Hardly. We've only had effective birth control for a few decades. Society hasn't fully caught up to this yet, let alone our evolutionary programming.
> You'd be surprised, billions manage to have sex with billions without having children
What planet do you live on? In fact, billions of people have had children!
Why do you think different men/women have completely different preferences on those things? Except if "reproductive fitness" is subjective, which defeats the whole argument...
>Hardly. We've only had effective birth control for a few decades.
We've had romantic (and even platonic) love, annal sex, gay people, and tons of other things besides arranged marriages or fucking for reproduction since at least ancient Greece...
>What planet do you live on? In fact, billions of people have had children!
One or two or five. They've had sex 100s of times.