The Basic Drive That Humans Might Be Losing

After a newspaper profile of the “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, otherwise known as Clavicular, went viral last month, many critics focused on how divorced his nihilistic quest for beauty—he’d call it “sexual market value”—was from any pursuit of women, relationships, or even sex. I was especially flummoxed by this sad man because I had just immersed myself in The Intimate Animal, a new book by the evolutionary biologist Justin R. Garcia on intimacy’s starring role in perpetuating our species. From an evolutionary perspective, the handsome, muscle-bound Clavicular is, by his own accounting, a dud: He suspects that the testosterone-replacement therapy he takes to appear more manly has decimated his fertility, and in any case, he considers sex a waste of time, telling the reporter that it “is going to gain me nothing.” Garcia brings an array of expertise to The Intimate Animal. In 2019, at age 34, he became the executive director of the Kinsey Institute, the renowned sex-and-relationships research center, where he is also a senior scientist. As the chief scientific adviser to Match, the online-dating behemoth, he also consults on the company’s annual “Singles in America” survey. He has found that these affiliations encourage total strangers to tell him about their romantic lives. In the book, he enlivens reams of scientific research with charming anecdotes from friends, colleagues, and the strangers who unload on him—a guy selling him a sports car, the woman sitting next to him on a flight. Scaffolded by the story of Garcia’s own quest for a lifelong pair bond, The Intimate Animal coalesces into a persuasive case for the centrality of intimacy in the human experience—and arrives at a time when that seems to be out of reach for more people than ever. Garcia acknowledges this tension early on in the book. “Our species is on the precipice of what I have come to think of as an intimacy crisis,” he writes. Marriage rates have been declining for decades, and for a variety of reasons: Women have become more financially independent, gender roles have evolved, people are putting off marriage due to economic insecurity. But the number of adults without any partner at all has grown in recent decades. Today, more than 40 percent of American adults—up to 120 million people—are unpartnered, and East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea are witnessing similar patterns. The rise in singlehood has been accompanied by widespread loneliness. At first glance, the solution would appear to be straightforward: All of those lonely single people should pair up. Yet something about modern life is interfering with millions of years of evolutionarily honed instincts toward human connection, leaving a historically high number of us unpartnered—and unhappy. Any evolutionary biologist will tell you that humans are social creatures, with brains wired for touch, intimacy, and love. As small societies developed under conditions of food scarcity, prosocial behaviors such as sharing resources with the tribe and investing in other members’ well-being increased people’s odds of survival. Socially monogamous pair bonds, which evolved in pre-human ancestors about 4.4 million years ago, were especially crucial for reproductive success, allowing mothers to recover from birthing large-brained, big-headed, extremely vulnerable children. As a result, “one parent no longer had to wait until a first baby was more or less self-sufficient to care for another,” he writes. This pair-bonding pattern emerged around the same time as bipedalism, a trait that itself encouraged intimacy. “Face-to-face coitus was now possible,” Garcia writes—which rendered the act more vulnerable and sensual. “Sex could now become an expression of intimate connection.” [Read: The anti-social century] Things were relatively quiet on the pair-bonding front for the next roughly 4,388,000 years, until the agricultural revolution, which enabled the growth of human settlements and the accumulation of wealth; stable romantic relationships could help families gather and consolidate resources tied to the land. The next leap, according to Garcia, was the proliferation of the internet. Those two sparsely timed turning points, he argues, were “the two greatest changes to human courtship in the last 4 million years.” That brings us to the current era, when nearly four out of 10 relationships begin online—although, Garcia writes, “billions of daily swipes yield an average match rate of less than 2 percent.” He believes that the human brain is simply not equipped to process the onslaught of data we encounter online, a mismatch particularly ill-suited to online dating. Citing research by the University of Michigan sociologist Elizabeth Bruch, he points out that people tend to swipe right on those who are, on average, 25 percent more desirable than they are. Garcia has nothing against such “aspirational” dating. “We should all be choosy in courtship,” he told me when we spoke recently. An aspirational strategy might work well in a small dating pool with only a few top-tier candidates, but it’s less ideal for a scenario in which you can grab your phone and “swipe 3,000 people before lunch,” Garcia explained. “You don’t have a sense that you ever have to stop being aspirational.” App design also undermines the dating process by emphasizing physical attractiveness, even though research has found that the trait people overwhelmingly say they are looking for in a partner is “kindness,” something hard to discern from an image, even a profile photo that involves a puppy. I wonder if the problem is not merely app design, or the sheer amount of information on the internet, but the specific messages the online economy rewards. It seems plausible that online influencers such as Clavicular (or his buddy, the crudely sexist Andrew Tate) have, at least for some share of their millions of followers, shifted men’s norms by treating women dismissively at best. Women, in turn, declare their growing mistrust of men online, perhaps in reaction to #MeToo and the wide world of online misogyny. Many circulate “man or bear” memes or promote trends such as going “boysober,” “decentering men,” or any other spin-off of “heteropessimism.” A recent essay by the Gen Z writer Mana Afsari portrays a bleak Washington, D.C., dating scene made up of young women and men stewing in internet stereotypes about members of the opposite sex, and either terrified or nearly incapable of interacting with them IRL. These anecdotal tableaus, bolstered by decades’ worth of data on crashing birth rates around the world, suggest that a good chunk of our species has become unmoored from our evolutionarily honed instincts for connection and reproduction. [Read: The new singlehood stigma] Garcia is more optimistic. He assured me that millions of people still pair off each day, and I will concede that wedding announcements still appear regularly in newspapers. What’s more, he noted, influential researchers such as Brené Brown and Esther Perel, who focus on vulnerability and connection, have at least as many online followers as some of the scuzzy men I’d mentioned, although he acknowledged my point that the only people who have ever handed me these women’s books have also been women. When we spoke, Garcia lingered on another explanation for the intimacy crisis that he doesn’t mention in the book—what his friend Perel describes as “generalized anxiety.” A “small environmental stressor” can be shown to induce a baby boomlet, Garcia said, pointing to research on the surge in births that follows, say, a winter storm, or even a tragedy such as the Oklahoma City bombing. But humans today are responding to ongoing and extreme uncertainty rather than an isolated event, he said, as he reeled off a random sampling of crises in the news. In similar situations in the wild, animals tend to turn inward, conserve resources, and cool it on having offspring that might drain their meager holdings. And yet such difficult times are, according to Garcia, precisely when humans need each other most. People started pairing off because doing so “allowed us to master uncertainty, to not just survive but thrive in a world that is both rife with danger and filled with boundless opportunity,” he writes. (Gen Zers struggling to find entry-level jobs might quibble with the “boundless opportunity” part.) Instead of forming these nourishing bonds, though, many are turning to substitutes, most of them paid for or profit-driven, such as sugaring (ongoing transactional relationships), sex work, pornography, and, more recently, AI companions. Before speaking with Garcia, I’d listened to him debate the psychology professor Thao Ha on the question, “Could Dating an AI Be Better Than Dating a Human?” (Garcia was on Team Humankind.) At one point, Ha enthused about advances in virtual reality that could let people simulate sex with their AI, addressing the “touch starvation” that is often associated with the increase in loneliness. “Tactile technologies that are being developed are actually booming,” she said. I told Garcia that listening to the conversation had felt surreal; was this seriously a debate that needed to be had? “It’s so evolutionarily unprecedented, this idea that we’re looking for solutions when the solution is all around us—the solution is social connection,” he said. “We don’t need to innovate. Our species has done this for millions of years.” He still sounded incredulous over those “tactile technologies”: “Just hug a goddamn person!” [Read: The friendship paradox] One obstacle to that solution, from the point of view of the innovators, is that no one profits from that hug. Financial incentives seem to be aligned against the very possibility of human connection. This may be why Mark Zuckerberg proposed AI friends as a solution to loneliness, or why Elon Musk initially responded to criticism of Grok’s undress-a-child-or-woman capability by turning it into a premium feature (before relenting and blocking it in places where it is illegal). Garcia said he wrote his book in the hope that knowing more about why care and connection matter could help us regain control over our lives, instead of being “zombies pulled through the currents of technology and global capitalism.” If we can focus more on “finding the intimate animal within,” as Garcia put it to me, perhaps Team Humankind stands a chance.