In the United States, almost half of adults are single. A quarter men suffer from loneliness. Depression rates are rising. And one in four Generation Z adults – the so-called naughtiest generation, according to a study– I have never had sex with a partner.
In an age of endless connection, where connecting is a simple swipe and non-traditional relationship structures as polyamory is celebrated, why do people seem so disconnected and alone?
Chalk it up to changing social norms or changing generational attitudes about relationships. But the bigger issue at play, according to Justin Garcia, is that we simply don’t crave intimacy in the same way we used to. “Our species is on the brink 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 most powerful evolutionary motivator in modern relationships,” but that our thirst for intimacy “has been stifled 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 can actually improve with ageaccording to a recent report). He has held this position since 2019, and during this time he has also served as Chief Scientific Advisor to Match, where he provides expertise for its annual report. Singles in America investigation. In 2023, Indiana lawmakers voted to block public funding for the institute: State Sen. Lorissa Sweet, a Republican, falsely declared that Kinsey was studying orgasms in minors, but the following year the school’s board of directors voted to abandon plans to separate the institute into a nonprofit organization.
Garcia’s book covers many areas—the “cognitive overload” of dating apps, why humans are programmed to be socially monogamous but not sexually monogamous, the science of breakups—but its common thread is that “even in this confusing age, when moments of human connection are becoming increasingly elusive, the search for intimacy remains the most human of human impulses.”
Recently on Zoom, I spoke with Garcia about the biggest misconception about the sexual recession among Gen Z, the attack on sexual literacy in today’s 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. Research suggests that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Psychological loneliness is embodied in physical and psychological health. At the same time, some reports suggest that the numbers have not increased much when it comes to psychological loneliness. But it is clear that its impact is greater and that more and more people are paying attention to it.
For me, there is a bigger umbrella. We’re suddenly talking about loneliness, even though we’re all more connected than ever. That’s why I call it an intimacy crisis. We have more people at our disposal, especially through the Internet and social media platforms, but the depth of connections, the quality of connections, is not there.
You suggest that the intimacy crisis may lead to “unprecedented and serious biological consequences.” In what way?
We are in an age where the human brain takes in so much information and much of that information is threatening. This is what’s happening in the news, in Gaza and in Minnesota, with climate change, with the global economy – I mean, pick any article in the newspaper, it’s bad news. This takes a toll on our nervous system. Just as humans’ romantic and sexualized lives respond to environments in the way they form relational structures, they also respond to this current environment, in which many threats exist. When the nervous system prepares to respond to a threat, it is not conducive to social behavior and it is certainly not conducive to mating. If our nervous system detects threats from all of this in our environment, it has all kinds of effects on our relationships. And if we do not have the safety net of deep intimacy, we cannot weather these storms effectively.
So why are people so bad at practicing intimacy or being able to find it?
This is the heart of the question. We have new unpublished data that we just released last week: 80% of Gen Z say they want a romantic relationship, but about 55% say they’re not ready for one. We find that more and more people feel like they need to work on themselves before they can date.
We’ve screwed over an entire generation of people with this idea that you have to be overly self-actualized before you can have a relationship. But a relationship can be the container you find yourself in and make mistakes. You can discover who you are and what you want within the confines of your sexuality, your career, and your social life. We increasingly think this is something people should do alone, something our species has never done. We have a distorted idea of what we should bring to the table and what our potential partners should bring to the table.
Generation Z is in a sexual recessionbut you suggest that we are looking at the data completely wrong, writing that “the decline in frequency is not an indicator that today’s young people are allergic to sexual intimacy, but rather that they value it more.” How so?
We’re seeing even more datasets where sexual frequencies decrease across age groups and across different demographics. But for me, the first question is: is this really a problem? Is this really alarming? The question that interests me personally is not how many times you have had sex over the past year, but how good it is. Has your satisfaction decreased? You might have less sex, but maybe the sex is much better and more meaningful.
A fact that most studies have ignored.
This is the question we don’t really have data on: are there changes in terms of quality, satisfaction and impact? We need to understand why it’s falling. And there have been all kinds of arguments: estrogen disruptors in the environment impact libido, the average male ejaculate contains half the amount of sperm as it did a few decades ago. So something is happening on a biological level, and not just in terms of libido but also fertility.
So, is the sexual recession exaggerated?
There is just lots of nuances to which is included in the sexual recession. In one study, these were young people who did not enter the sexual market; there were more young virgins. There were more people who simply hadn’t initiated their first sexual event, so more zeros weighed down the average. Among sexually active people, it is not clear that the decline is not as precipitous as some claim.
Part of this goes back to what I suggested earlier: are people just more anxious and experiencing a physiologically threatening response? Is it because we can’t find the partners we want? Or are we not having the kind of sex we want, so you are having less?
How does the rise of adult content – our access to it on social media and the internet – factor into this?
We don’t have sexual literacy. There was this series of studies on non-consensual choking, particularly in heterosexual couples. One talked about heterosexual women and asked if they had ever been choked during sex. A very large number of respondents answered yes. And then they asked if it was consensual and if they had talked about it with their partner, the majority said no. But more and more people think it’s a sexual scenario, probably from pornography. Some think it’s associated with pleasure, although as a sexologist the notion of erotic asphyxiation means you really know what you’re doing. But we see a very high number of choking during sex. People said they thought it was part of the sexual scenario, but maybe it’s not the kind of sex you really want. Our sexual culture is so bad.
So the problem is sexual literacy?
A recent study We found at the Kinsey Institute that 44% of single adults in the United States say that if they had only received some sex education when they were younger, they would have healthier, happier romantic relationships today. The fact that almost half say, “I just wish I had accurate information” is a problem. Sexual recession is therefore in reality a symptom of a lack of sex education. On the other hand, measuring behavior may not be the most informative method about what’s going on in our intimate lives.
Do you worry that our sexual culture will deteriorate in this political climate?
I want to be careful how I answer this question. Sex education programs are increasingly under attack, and part of that is the question of where sex education should take place. Should it take place at school, at home or be freely accessible? The reality is that you can 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 or not sex education should be taught in schools. For me, when you look at the data, the problem is that it somewhat misses the point.
It’s what ?
If sex education is not available in school and sex education takes place at home, we know that most parents and family members do not have the knowledge or expertise – and in many cases do not have the comfort – to teach about sex, relationships and reproduction. In a study we did, less than 20% said they had ever talked about consent with someone at home. So where Are you having real, honest conversations? I don’t think it gets any better in the current political climate.
For what?
There is so much misinformation. In the absence of accurate information about sexuality, we create a mythology, and too many people follow that mythology about what a healthy romantic and sexual life can and should be.
One theory is that more and more people are relying on AI to have seemingly honest conversations and form relationships, romantic and otherwise. What does that tell you?
In our Study of Singles in Americawe found that 24 percent of singles have used AI in some aspect of their dating life. This doesn’t necessarily mean a chatbot; many people use it to find the right photos and improve their profile. Among Gen Z, it’s almost 50% – about half of them use it in their dating lives. But in the data, people also say they want to have an honest interaction. The whole point of dating early is to try to build trust, so if I get the feeling that you’re not really you, that immediately undermines it.
Completely.
If you use AI as training wheels, at some point you will have to remove them. So if you look at this as a long-term partnership replacing human interaction, that’s where we run into a lot of challenges. The first is how the human brain constructs intimacy. National data tells us that most Americans don’t trust AI. A subsample of people who truly understand AI trust it even less. So how do you build a relationship with a chatbot when you basically don’t trust it? It undermines our whole notion of human connection.
It is.
I fear that too many people view chatbots as long-term solutions. AI is not going to satisfy our emotional and psychological needs in the way we evolved and want. Some of the people who worry about reproductive decline are also very supportive of AI. Elon Musk guys. And it’s like, “Well, that’s not going to help.” I find it hard to imagine that we could get the same benefits from a chatbot as we do from real human interaction. AI is a supplement, and at some point you need a real meal.
