The “intimacy crisis” is what leads to the dating split

In the United States, Nearly half of adults are single. A quarter of men suffer from loneliness. Depression rates are rising. And one in four adults in Generation Z — the so-called kinkiest generation, according to one study — have never had sex.

In an age of endless communication, where hookups are easily achieved through a swipe and unconventional relationship structures like polyamory are celebrated, why do people seem so disconnected and lonely?

It comes down to changing social norms or changing generational attitudes about relationships. But the bigger problem, according to Justin Garcia, is that we don’t crave intimacy in the same way we used to. “Our species is on the verge of what I have come to think of as a crisis in intimacy,” Garcia writes in his new book. The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Die for Love. In the book, Garcia points out that intimacy — not sex — is “the most powerful evolutionary driver of modern relationships,” but our hunger for it “has been stifled and misdirected in today’s digital world.”

An evolutionary biologist and anthropologist who began his career studying hookup culture, Garcia is executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, a research laboratory known for its pioneering work on sex, online dating, and aging. (A recent report found that sex may improve with age.) He has held the position since 2019, during which time he also served as Match’s chief scientific advisor, providing expertise for its annual America’s Singles Survey. In 2023, Indiana lawmakers voted to strip public funding from the institute — Republican state Sen. Lorisa Sweet falsely claimed Kinsey was studying orgasms in minors — but the following year, the school’s board of trustees voted to abandon its plans to spin off the institute into a nonprofit.

Garcia’s book covers a lot of topics — the “cognitive overload” of dating apps, why humans are wired to be socially monogamous but not sexually, the science of breakups — but its broad outline is that “even in this bewildering age, where moments of human connection have become increasingly elusive, the quest for intimacy remains the most human of human drives.”

On a recent afternoon over Zoom, I spoke with Garcia about the biggest misconception about the sexual stagnation among Gen Z, the attack on sex culture in the current political climate, and why an AI-powered 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 feeling lonely is as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Psychological unity is embodied in physical and psychological health. At the same time, there are reports that the numbers have not increased much for psychological loneliness. But it is clear that its impact is greater, and that more people care about the impact.

For me, there is a bigger umbrella. We’re suddenly talking about loneliness at the same time that we’re all having more relationships than ever before. That’s why I call it the intimacy crisis. We have more people available to us, especially online and social media platforms, but the depth and quality of connections is not there.

You suggest that a crisis of intimacy could lead to “stark and unprecedented biological consequences.” In what way?

We are in a moment where the human mind is absorbing too much information and too much information is a threat. It’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 newspaper, it’s bad news. This overloads our nervous system. Just as human romantic and sexual lives respond to environments by how they shape relationship structures, they also respond to this current environment, which is that there are a lot of threats going on. When the nervous system is tuned to respond to threat, it is not conducive to social behavior and certainly not conducive to mating. If our nervous system detects threats from all these things in our environment, it has all kinds of effects on our relationships. If we don’t have a safety net of deep intimacy, we won’t be able to weather these storms effectively.