In the US, almost half of adults are single. A quarter of men suffer from loneliness. Stress levels are rising. And one in four Gen Z adults—called the kinkiest generation, according to one study—have never had a sexual partner.
In an age of constant communication, where hookups happen with the ease of a swipe and unconventional relationship structures like polyamory are celebrated, why do people seem so disconnected and isolated?
Say it in changing social habits or changing the attitude of productivity in the relationship. But the biggest problem at play, according to Justin Garcia, is that we don’t want to be close in the same way that we wanted to. “Our species is at the stage of what I have come to think of as a relationship crisis,” Garcia writes in his new book, The Closest Animal: The Science of Sex, Loyalty, and Why We Die for Love. Garcia suggests in the book that intimacy—not sex—is “the most powerful evolutionary motivator in today’s relationships,” but that our hunger is “suppressed and misdirected in today’s digital world.”
An evolutionist and anthropologist who began his career studying dating culture, Garcia is executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, a research lab known for its pioneering work on sex, online dating, and aging. (Sex may improve with age, a recent report found). He has held this position since 2019, and during that time served as chief scientific advisor to Match, where he provided expertise to its annual Singles in America survey. In 2023, Indiana lawmakers voted to block public funding for the center – state Senator Lorissa Sweet, a Republican, lied that Kinsey studied orgasms in children – but, the following year, the school’s board of trustees voted to abandon its plans to turn the center into a non-profit.
Garcia’s book covers a lot—the “brain overload” of dating apps, why people are wired to be monogamous but not monogamous, the science of breakups—but the bottom line is that “even in this confusing time, when people’s communication times are getting harder, intimacy remains a very human desire.”
On a recent afternoon via Zoom, I spoke with Garcia about the biggest misconception about gender decay among Gen Z, the onslaught of sex education in the current political climate, and why an AI chatbot won’t save your relationship. Everything is connected, he says.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: What is the problem of intimacy, and why, as you write in the book, are we on the same edge?
Justin Garcia: We hear a lot about the loneliness epidemic. Research suggests that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Psychological loneliness is linked to physical and mental health. At the same time, there are reports suggesting that the numbers did not increase significantly due to psychological loneliness. But obviously its impact is huge, and many people are paying attention to the impact.
For me, there is a big umbrella. Suddenly we are talking about loneliness at the same time that we are all more connected than ever before. That’s why I call it an intimacy problem. We have a lot of people available to us, especially through the internet and social media, but the depth of communication, the quality of the connection, is not there.
He suggests that this proximity problem could lead to “unprecedented and strong biological consequences.” In what way?
We are in a time where the human brain takes in too much information and too much information is threatening. That’s what’s happening in the news, in Gaza and Minnesota, with climate change, with the global economy—I mean, pick any section of the paper, it’s bad news. That survives our nervous system. Just as people’s love and sex lives respond to environments in the way they build relationship structures, they also respond to this current environment, which is more of a constant threat. When the nervous system is primed for a threatening response, that is not compatible with social behavior and certainly does not encourage mating. When our nervous system detects threats from all these things in our environment, that has all kinds of effects on our relationships. And if we don’t have the safety net of deep intimacy, we can’t weather these storms.
