In the US, nearly half of adults are single. A quarter of men suffer from loneliness. Rates of depression are on the rise. And one in four Gen Z adults—the so-called kinkiest generation, according to one study—have never had partnered sex.
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In an age of endless connection, where hooking up happens with the ease of a swipe and nontraditional relationship structures like polyamory are celebrated, why are people seemingly so disconnected and alone?
Chalk it up to changing social norms or shifting generational attitudes around relationships. But the bigger issue at play, according to Justin Garcia, is that we just don’t crave intimacy in the same way we used to. “Our species is on the precipice of what I have come to think of as an intimacy crisis,” Garcia writes in his new book, The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Die for Love. Garcia suggests in the book that intimacy—not sex—is the “the most powerful evolutionary motivator of modern relationships,” but that our hunger for it “has been stifled by and misdirected in today’s digital world.”
An evolutionary biologist and anthropologist who began his career studying hookup culture, Garcia is the executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, a research lab known for its pioneering work on sexuality, online dating, and aging. (Sex may in fact improve with age, a recent report found). He’s held the position since 2019, and in that time he has also served as the chief scientific advisor to Match, where he provides expertise for its annual Singles in America survey. In 2023, Indiana lawmakers voted to block public funding from the institute—state senator Lorissa Sweet, a Republican, falsely claimed that Kinsey was studying orgasms in minors—but, the following year, the school’s Board of Trustees voted to abandon its plans to separate the institute into a nonprofit.
Garcia’s book covers a lot of ground—the “cognitive overload” of dating apps, why humans are wired to be socially monogamous but not sexually monogamous, the science of breakups—but its throughline is how “even in this bewildering era, where moments of human connection are becoming increasingly elusive, the search for intimacy remains the most human of human impulses.”
On a recent afternoon over Zoom, I spoke with Garcia about the biggest misconception about the sex recession among Gen Z, the attack on sexual literacy in the current political climate, and why an AI chatbot won’t save your relationship. It’s all connected, he says.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: What is the intimacy crisis, and why, as you write in the book, are we on the verge of one?
Justin Garcia: We hear a lot about the loneliness epidemic. The research suggests that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Psychological loneliness gets embodied in physical and psychological health. At the same time, there are reports that suggest that the numbers haven’t increased all that much for psychological loneliness. But clearly its impact is more, and more people are paying attention to the impact.
For me, there’s a bigger umbrella. We are suddenly talking about loneliness at the same time that all of us have more connections than ever before. That’s why I call it an intimacy crisis. We have more people available to us, particularly through internet and social media platforms, but the depth of the connections, the quality of the connections, is not there.
You suggest that the intimacy crisis can lead to “unprecedented and stark biological consequences.” In what way?
We’re in a moment where the human brain is taking in so much information and so much of the information is threatening. It’s what’s going on in the news, in Gaza and Minnesota, with climate change, with global economics—I mean, pick any section of the paper, it’s bad news. That weighs on our nervous system. Just as humans’ romantic and sexualized lives respond to environments with how they form relationship structures, they’re also responding to this current environment, which is that there’s a lot of threat going on. When the nervous system gets tuned up into a threat response, that’s not conducive to social behavior and it’s most certainly not conducive to mating. If our nervous system is detecting threats from all this stuff in our environment, that has all sorts of effects on our relationships. And if we don’t have the safety net of deep intimacy, we can’t effectively weather these storms.
So why are people so bad at practicing intimacy, or being able to find it?
That’s the heart of the question. We have some new unpublished data that we just came out with last week—80 percent of Gen Z say that they want a romantic relationship, but about 55 percent say they’re not ready for it. We’re seeing more people have a sense that they need to work on themselves before they can date.
We’ve screwed up a whole generation of people with this idea that you need to overly self actualize before you can be in a relationship. But a relationship can be the container within which you find yourself and you make mistakes. You can figure out who you are and what you want in the borders of your sexuality, your career, and your social life. We increasingly think that that’s something people should do in isolation on their own, which is not something our species ever did. We’ve got this distorted sense of what we should be bringing to the table and what our potential partners should be bringing to the table.
Gen Z is in a sex recession but you suggest that we’re looking at the data all wrong, writing how the “decline in frequency is an indicator not that young people today are allergic to sexual intimacy but rather that they value it more.” How so?
We’re seeing even more data sets where sexual frequencies are declining across age groups and across different demographics. But, for me, the first question is: Is that actually a problem? Is that really alarming? The question I’m personally interested in is not how many times you’re engaged in intercourse in the last year, but what’s the quality. Has your satisfaction decreased? You could be having less sex but maybe the sex is a lot better and more meaningful.
A fact that most studies ignored.
That’s the question we don’t really have the data on: are there changes in quality, satisfaction, and the impact? We have to understand why it’s going down. And there have been all sorts of arguments: estrogen disruptors in the environment impact sex drive, the average male ejaculate has half the amount of sperm that it had a few decades ago. So something’s going on biologically, and not just to our sex drives but to our fertility.
So is the sex recession overblown?
There’s just a lot of nuance to who’s included in the sex recession. In one study, it was young people not entering the sexual market; there were more young virgins. There were more people that just hadn’t initiated their first sexual event so more zeros are weighing down the average. Among the people who are sexually active, it’s not that clear that the decrease isn’t as precipitous as some people are talking about.
Some of it goes back to what I suggested earlier: Are people just more anxious and feel a threat response, physiologically? Is it because we’re not finding the partners we want? Or are we not having the kind of sex we want, so you have less of it.
How does the rise of adult content—our access to it across social media and the internet—factor into that?
We don’t have sexual literacy. There was this series of studies on non-consensual choking, particularly in heterosexual couples. One reported on heterosexual women and if they’ve ever been choked during intercourse. Very high numbers said yes. And then they asked if it was consensual and if they talked about it with their partner—the majority said no. But increasingly people think this is a sexual script, probably from pornography. Some think that it’s associated with pleasure, although, as a sexologist, the idea of erotic asphyxiation means you really know what you’re doing. But we’re seeing really high numbers of choking during intercourse. People were saying they thought it was part of the sexual script, but it may not be the kind of sex you’re really craving. Our sexual literacy is so bad.
So the problem is sexual literacy?
A recent study we did at the Kinsey Institute found that 44 percent of single adults in the US say that if they only had some sex education when they were younger they would have healthier and happier romantic relationships today. The fact that nearly half are saying “I just wish I had some accurate information,” that’s a problem. So the sex recession is really a symptom of a lack of sexual literacy. On the other hand, measuring behavior is maybe not the most informative for what’s going on with our intimate lives.
Do you fear that our sexual literacy will get worse in this political climate?
I want to be careful how I answer this. There have been increasing attacks on sex education programs, and part of that has to do with where should sex education happen. Should it happen at school, home, or be freely accessible? The reality is you can go and find a lot of information about sex online, but it’s not always curated by knowledgeable experts. That’s the problem. Then there are debates about whether sex ed should be in schools or not. For me, when you look at the data, the problem is it somewhat misses the point.
Which is what?
If it’s not available in school and sex ed happens at home, we know that most parents and family members don’t have the knowledge and don’t have the expertise—and in many cases don’t have the comfort—to teach about sex, relationships, and reproduction. In a study we did, less than 20 percent said they had never talked about consent with someone at home. So where do you have real honest conversations? I don’t see that getting better in the current political climate.
Why?
There’s so much misinformation. In the absence of accurate information about sexuality we create mythology, and too many people are following that mythology about what a healthy romantic and sexual life can and should be.
One theory is that more people are relying on AI to have seemingly honest conversations and to forge relationships, romantic and otherwise. What does that tell you?
In our Singles in America study, we found that 24 percent of singles have used AI in some aspect of their dating life. That doesn’t necessarily mean a chatbot; a lot of people use it to find the right pictures and improve their profile. Among Gen Z it is nearly 50 percent—about half of them use it in their dating life. But in the data, people are also saying that they want to have an honest interaction. The whole point of early dating is trying to establish trust, so if I have a sense that you are not really you, that undermines it right away.
Completely.
If you use AI like training wheels, at some point you have to take them off. So if you’re settling into this as a long-term partnership in replacement of human interaction, that’s where we run into quite a few challenges. One is how the human brain builds intimacy. National data tells us most Americans don’t trust AI. A sub sample of people who really understand AI trust it even less. So how do you build a relationship with a chatbot when you fundamentally don’t trust it? It undermines our whole notion of human connection.
It does.
I worry that we are seeing too many people think of chatbots as long-term solutions. AI isn’t going to satisfy our emotional and psychological needs in the way that we’ve evolved and we want. Some of the same folks who are worried about reproductive declines are also very pro-AI. The Elon Musk types. And it’s like, “Well, this isn’t gonna help.” I find it hard to imagine that we are going to get the same benefits from a chatbot that we do from real human interaction. AI is a supplement, and at some point you need a real meal.
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