Why Humans Are Wired for Love but Struggling to Connect | Dr. Justin Garcia — EP 745

0:00The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports. Right now, the NBA is heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real-time scores, breaking news, and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment. Coming up next on Passion Struck. We know that from studies of fMRI brain scan of people who were recently romantically in love and people who were passionately in love, it is very much parallel to addiction in the brain.

0:41And in fact, romantic rejection, studies of people who have gone through breakups, the brain looks remarkably like someone going through with drug withdrawal, particularly cocaine withdrawal, which helps explain why breakups can feel so intense and emotionally, physically. It's why people feel physical pain with breakups. That I'm always a little cautious of calling it an addiction, but it is very parallel to addiction. And in part because we're so used to addictions being negative and love is a positively balanced one for the most part. Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters.

1:22Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter.

2:00Hey friends, and welcome back to episode 745 of PassionStruck. Throughout this Life Beyond the Script series, we've been exploring what happens when the assumptions we've lived by about identity, success, health, and purpose stop working. But there's another script most of us inherit without ever questioning it. The script about love, about relationships, about what it means to feel connected in a world that has never been more digitally linked, yet often feels profoundly lonely. Earlier in this series, we've explored how biology shapes resilience with Dave Asprey, how emotional strength influences physical health with Dr.

2:40Tara Narula, and how technology is reshaping entire systems of care with Dr. Robert Wachter. Today, we turn to something even more fundamental, intimacy, because beneath achievement, status, and productivity, most people are searching for one thing, to feel seen, to feel chosen, to feel like they matter to someone. My guest today is Dr. Justin Garcia, evolutionary biologist, executive director of the Kinsey Institute and author of the new book, The Intimate Animal, The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Live and Die for Love. In this conversation, we explore a provocative idea. Humans didn't just evolve to survive, we evolved to bond.

3:23Justin explains how pair bonding, touch, sexual desire, attachment, and connection are deeply rooted in our biology and why modern life is disrupting those systems in ways we're only beginning to understand. We discuss the evolutionary roots of romantic love and pair bonding. We go into why Gen Z is both craving connection and delaying relationships, how technology is reshaping dating, attraction, and intimacy, the underlying paradox between commitment and novelty, and why touch deprivation may be one of the most hidden crises of modern life. As Justin explains, intimacy isn't a luxury. It's infrastructure for human flourishing.

4:04Before we dive in, a quick ask. If this episode resonates with you, share it with someone who might benefit from it. You can also watch the full conversations on our YouTube channels. And if you haven't yet, leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify helps more people discover these conversations. Now, let's dive into my conversation with Dr. Justin Garcia. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

4:54Absolutely thrilled today to welcome Dr. Justin Garcia on PassionStruck. Justin, it's so great to see you today. How are you? I'm great. I'm thrilled to be with you. We're going to get to talk about a lot of important parts of what it means to be human. We're here today to discuss your brand new book, The Intimate Animal, The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Live and Die for Love. And when I got the book, one of the first things I realized is that it features a blurb from a mutual friend, Emily Morse. How do you know Emily? Everyone should know Emily. She's such a brilliant sex educator and has done such a good job at helping everyone of all walks of life and particularly the public really understand what we do as sex researchers and how we apply that to our lives.

5:42So she's a longtime friend. We've had some opportunities to do events together and someone whose work I really respect and admire. It's not easy to always talk about sex and sexuality in public spaces and to do it in a way that honors the complexity of our sex lives and treats it with respect. And Emily does that better than anyone. Well, Emily and I are both huge Michigan fans. So that's one of the tides for us. But I remember when she was telling me when she got her doctorate, it was one of the first doctorates ever in the study of sex or intimacy, which is really interesting to see over the past 15 to 17 years what she has done with it.

6:22So and it speaks to a larger, I think, pattern, even still today, so many people who study sex and sexuality. I have colleagues that they're only one in their department who studies sexuality. They're the only one in their college, on their campus that studies sexuality. We're in a really fortunate position here at the Kinsey Institute. I run up and down the hall, and we have probably the largest concentration of sex and relationship researchers in the world. And there's historians and psychologists and biologists and physicians. And we bring all this to some different disciplinary perspective to bear everyone with their own theories and methods.

6:56But it can be hard to study sexuality. It's hard, difficult to get funding, difficult to get jobs, difficult. So it's a still a complex and misunderstood part of the scientific arena. Well, it certainly is. Another thing I just wanted to throw at you is you probably don't talk to too many podcast hosts whose two siblings both went to IU. Oh, really? I hope you were celebrating the football game this year. My brother was at the semifinal game and we were definitely celebrating. And there's a lot to be said about relationships and connection and fandom. And so research questions somewhere in there.

7:36Justin, recently, because of what you were just talking about, I've tried to do a couple episodes that are deep diving relationships. One of these was Paul Eastwick and another one I was lucky enough to get Harry Reese and Sonia Lubomirsky to come on together, which was cool to have the preeminent expert in happiness and relationships come on to discuss it. but we went into kind of how compatibility forms in relationships and how responsiveness actually makes people feel loved. What I wanted to ask you is from an evolutionary perspective, why would the human brain and body be designed to depend so deeply on intimacy at all?

8:17I love John, you jumped right into the deep end. And I think it's such a big question. And for all of us, this idea that we understand the role of intimacy, of connection, of love in our lives, It's profound. People do intense things for our romantic and sexual desires and our relationships. People around the world live and die for love. But why? As an evolutionary biologist, the question is, why is that? And I think there's a couple of ways we can and should answer that as we unpack it. The one part of that is that a lot of researchers have argued that we have patterns of what we call social monogamy or pair bonding, that we're pair bonding species.

8:57So what that means is that we form these intense romantic bonds. When biologists talk about pair bonds, if we're talking about other species, we say mutual territory defense, mutual nest building, mutual raising of offspring. That mutual part is really important. You have a close partner that you're weathering life with. And typically, as evolutionists, we're thinking about survival and reproduction. So the evidence would suggest that our species, our ancestors, hominins, were engaging in pair bonding behavior for over 4 million years. And a little bit more, according to some anthropologists. And so for us, what that was about was survival and reproduction.

9:39And I think it's important to remember both of those. So on the one hand, on reproduction, we know that as humans continue to evolve into what we know as anatomically modern humans, that having a pair bond partner to defend offspring, to be, we gestate for nine to 10 months, it takes years and years for it to raise children to the time that they're able to do anything on their own. That is part of a natural history that pair bonds helped us to invest in development and growth. as a species. Only about three to five percent of mammals engage in that pair bonding behavior. So it's also relatively unique.

10:18That's the one lever is about reproduction. The other is about survival. And one thing I argued in the intimate animal is I think more and more we can understand that pair bonds also evolved to allow us to weather uncertainty, to respond to changing environments, social environments, physical environments. We had a partner, a co-pilot, to go through life with, to manage ups and downs and predators and resources. And in many ways, that's what's allowed our species to really dominate the globe. So I think there's a couple of different evolutionary pieces at play there. And then the next level is then we start to see the mechanisms, what's going on in the brain and in our physiology that all back up this idea that we have, that our deep sense of connection to others is biological.

11:04Yeah. Well, I love that, that topic because it's one that I've been studying myself now almost two decades. And I have my own book coming up, coming out on this in October, titled The Mattering Effect. But I really trace this, this loss of shared connection and its consequences and then go into kind of how do you rebuild it. But something I saw in your book, and something I've been studying really connected. I started looking at loneliness, helplessness, people burned out, people disengaged, people broken. And I said, there has to be something in common with all of these. And for me, that commonality is mattering.

11:51But you saw that a connection is also there with 40 % of US adults being single and these things on the other side rising globally. What's the connection point? Yeah, I love that. And I like this idea of mattering. And I think we're talking about different facets of the same diamond here, which is exciting that the part of, for me, intimacy is this idea of being seen and heard and known that sometimes researchers talk about the need to belong, that we have a pretty good understanding from biologists, psychologists, a lot of social behavioral scientists, that humans have a need to feel connected to others.

12:33We are a social primate through and through. We want to feel connected. But it's not just having connections. In many ways, we are more connected than ever before in our evolutionary history. We can log on to social media. There's thousands of people. We can be on a subway and interact with thousands of people. We can be in a restaurant and interact with hundreds of people. But we also have more people in our phone or on our social media. But it's the quality of those connections. And I think for me, the paradox in all of this, what you're talking about, John, on loneliness is how are we more connected, but we seem to be struggling with loneliness.

13:08So it's not how is it that people have psychological loneliness when they wake up in a bed next to a partner every morning or they have all these people that they're talking to on social media. That is, for me, an issue of quality. It's the nature of the relationships. It's the depth of the connections. I think to use a word that you just used, do those connections matter in their life to them? Do they feel like they are someone that you could actually rely on in a time of need? Do they feel like you're someone you can rely on in a time of need? Pair bond relationships, in the best case, when they're highly satisfying in terms of romantic and sexual satisfaction and relationship quality, our partners are people that we think are going to catch us when we fall, that we feel that there's a depth to those bonds and connections.

13:55That's what I think is our big issue. I talk about it as an intimacy crisis, but it's almost thinking of it as a level above this loneliness epidemic. It's, well, what's going on that we just don't feel connected to all the people around us? And that's my sort of entry point to a lot of that. I'm curious what you think, too. I can't wait to read your book. I've been trying to really get my arms around this because what I'm saying is that mattering is breaking down in our families, in our intimate relationships, in our work environments, in our communities. So it is a common throughput. And when I think about intimacy, when we say connection, that's what a lot of people think of mattering.

14:38But I recently had a really interesting dialogue with Rebecca Goldstein. I'm not sure if you're familiar with her. She's a philosopher. She just came out with a book called The Mattering Instinct. But she and I both believe something that's a little bit different than what most people are saying. When I think of connection, I'm thinking of the relational aspect that you have with someone else. When I am thinking about mattering, I think about our own human operating system. And what I think is happening is mattering is the foundation for connection. It is the foundation for meaning. But when people don't feel themselves like they matter, I think that's where this gap that I call the mattering gap starts.

15:27If you don't feel like you matter to yourself, if you don't feel like you are seen, et cetera, how are you ever going to feel that you could be intimate with someone? How are you going to connect with someone else? And so I think where this starts breaking down is in how we ourselves have lost mattering via a series, it's decades worth of micro collapses that end up happening to us. So it's not like we just wake up and we suddenly feel this. It's almost like burnout. It happens gradually. What do you think about that? Yeah, I really, I like that. And I think, and I'm gonna, if I can build on that, what I really like about that is this idea that if you're in a pair bond relationship, if you have a romantic pair bond, now you can also have best friends and family that romantic bonds aren't the only source of this but inherent to a romantic relationship is that you rely on each other you lean on each other you at times need each other and I think sometimes I hear folks say well I don't want a partner that needs me or that I need them and that's unrealistic that's the part of if you're in the long haul with a close romantic bond there will be days and moments that you need you rely on each other and you benefit from each other you grow from each other that knowing that there's a beauty but there's also a deep satisfaction satisfaction that comes with knowing that I could show up for my partner, that I, because I matter for them, it gives a sense of purpose.

16:56Now, it doesn't mean that you live only for serving them. Like couples sometimes joke about that. My wife and I sometimes joke about that. What's your purpose? It's just taking care of you, honey. And you don't want, that shouldn't be the only purpose, but to know that you're there to support, to be each other's best selves. Something you said, John, I really like, though, it makes me think of this new data we have. And I'm curious, maybe we can work, think on this puzzle on this together. We have a new study that we did in partnership with Match Group. We found that about 80 % of Gen Z say that they want romantic love in their life.

17:29But 45 % don't think that they're ready. They think that they have to work on themselves more. And then we ask in different areas, they have to work on themselves. And what I'm making of that, of what you just said in that news, this new study we have, I think somewhere what's getting lost, particularly for young people, is the translating, the how-to part of that, of saying that they think in order, I worry that too many people nearly have, think that in order to have that mattering, they need to just go work on themselves in isolation. And I don't think that's actually the answer. I don't think that's the path to get there, that we need to work on yourself, that relationships can be a vessel for figuring out who you are and what you want in the best cases and thriving together and experiencing the world together.

18:18So I'm curious, the jump between, I think you nailed it. There's this piece of feeling connected, of feeling needed, of having purpose. But I worry that too many, especially among the young, and I think this is where we're seeing burnout in relationships and dating, is they think they need to go solve this mystery somewhere on their own on the peak of a mountain. And in fact, dating and connecting with people are a place to learn that. Before we continue, I want to pause for a moment. One of the central ideas in the Life Beyond the Script series is that transformation isn't only about changing what you do.

18:52It's about understanding what you need as a human being. On the ignitedlife.net, I'm publishing companion reflections and articles for every episode in this series designed to help you examine your own life more deeply. because awareness creates insight, but intentional action creates change. If you want to explore the reflections for this episode, visit theignitedlife.net. And I also want to thank our sponsors for supporting the show. Their support makes these conversations possible. Now, a quick break for our sponsors.

19:26You're listening to PassionStruck right here on the PassionStruck Network. Now, let's return to the discussion with Dr. Justin Garcia. So a couple of things, I was not aware of that study and I find it interesting because I have two kids who are Gen Z. Okay. Both who find dating now very complicated, especially the older one who's 27. But it's really interesting because when we grew up, there was much more of you just jump into it and figure it out, right? Than trying to make yourself perfect. And I think oftentimes you get years into a relationship and then realize you need to do some of that internal work.

20:07But if you keep delaying it, because we both know how difficult it is for people to do that work, it often keeps getting put off until it's never done. It really does delay that inception point when you feel like you're ready to be in a relationship. Now, I can look at this from my own perspectives. I was married for over two decades and we ended up getting divorced. And I went through a phase where like many people, I dated a lot because I was trying to figure out what type of mate do I want to have in my life going forward? And I knew I didn't want the same thing I had before, but I reached a point where I realized I needed to take some time for myself to figure a few things out or the relationship I really wanted wasn't going to happen until I worked on a couple of core pieces.

20:57So I do think that had I not done that, I probably wouldn't be married today and wouldn't have met the woman that I have. So I see the need for it. But it does beg a real big question of if you keep putting that off, how long are you going to keep putting it off for? And where you do it, how we work on ourselves. I worry that particularly for the young, they don't see interpersonal interactions and relationships and dating as that. That's a context within which we work with ourselves in relationships. We grow together. You expect to grow together, not to just show up preformed and hit play. And that's it.

21:38Justin, one of the things that you describe in the book is a core paradox. paradox, we as humans are wired for pair bonding, but not necessarily strict sexual monogamy. How does that tension shape modern love? Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to talk about this, because I think it really is one of the key tensions that explain so much of the ups and downs in our relationships. So one of the arguments I make in The Intimate Animal, and my colleagues and I have made in academic articles, is that humans have this tendency for pair bonding, sort of what we call, so maybe let me take one step back.

22:12As a biologist, we don't, I don't talk about monogamy. We don't typically talk about a species that's monogamous in the same way that we tend to in the human sciences or in the public. And what I mean by that is we talk about two different pieces of monogamy. There's social monogamy, which is the pair bond. That's the relationship structure. And there's sexual monogamy, which is fidelity. That's your mating behavior. And that they actually have two different mechanisms in the brain. What's going on in terms of when we form a deep romantic bond to someone and our interest in sexual variety are different mechanisms.

22:44And in some ways, they're different evolutionary pressures, different levers in some sense, that we had this pressure, evolutionary selection pressure to form pair bonds is good for survival and reproduction. But then also pressure for sexual variety and diversity, because that can be helpful if there's disease or if you have more variation, it maintains levels of competition. The way I think of relationships is when people say, are we monogamous, it's a complicated question. We have a natural history, a tendency to form intense pair bonds, typically with one person at a time, although not everyone.

23:18There's interesting work on polyamory, for instance. Most people tend to form one at a time. And there's always variation. As a new evolutionary biologist, I've read and butter is diversity of traits, there's always variation. And then there's question of sexual novelty. And I think in many relationships, we can come to understand that tension as I have a primary relationship and then there's infidelity occurs, or I feel like it's going to occur, or I'm worried about it occurring, and all the management of jealousy and mate guarding and all the stuff that goes into this infidelity stuff. But in fact, what can happen, you're in a primary relationship, the drive for sexual novelty can pull us towards infidelity.

23:56Or for some people, it pulls them towards opening up their relationship. And we're talking more and more about that and publicly about different ways that people are expanding relationships or trying to open relationships, consensual non-monogamy, polyamory. And that's another way to address that tension. The other way to address that tension, and the one that I think when we understand we can harness, is we could say, okay, I have a desire for sexual novelty, but I also have this long-term pair bond. Well, we can take that desire for sexual novelty and pull it into our relationship. So then we say, let's do things in the context of our partner that are new and exciting, that activate the dopamine systems in the brain.

24:37And I don't necessarily need to be pulled elsewhere to get that. I can do it in my relationship, but it takes some effort and it takes understanding that, seeing it, and working towards it as a couple to do new things, whether that's in the bedroom, sexual novelty, or it's taking vacations, taking cooking classes, walking around a different park in your neighborhood. There's also this big range of ways that we can get our sense of novelty in our lives. It really is interesting, especially for someone with my background. I grew up in a very religious Catholic family, went to parochial schools for my entire schooling through high school and was taught since I could breathe that being in a monogamous relationship is the only sanctity of God.

25:24And I'm sure a lot of the listeners probably share some of that core, that core background I do. So how do you differentiate between spiritual core like that and what some people are now experimenting with that seems to be on the opposite side of that. I think the interesting thing about my work, what I really enjoy is that we can understand that we have evolutionary tendencies or motivational systems, but they're always subject to an ecology. They're always subject to social context, ecological context, whether that's religion or whether that's a particular country or culture. or so people structure relationships in very different ways around the world.

26:08Sometimes it's based on resources. Sometimes it's based on religious edict. For instance, there's multiple religions that allow people to have multiple spouses. But in there, you often see things about, so for instance, in the Quran, you can have multiple wives, but you need to be able to provide for all of them equally. So it's not that it's a free reign, it's a swinging party. It's actually a religiously influenced way that you can expand the family, but you have to honor that there's multiple families, there's multiple pair bonds, there's multiple children. So when you dig, when we dig into how different religions structure these things, I think there's often an interesting story.

26:47And for me, that's different from, I'm on the one hand thinking about the biology of love bonds, and then everything else is about how culture, religion, marital agreements, all of those things give us guidance on how to structure those desires, structure those. So in the cases of, I think in the cases of religious groups or that really hone in on marriage and monogamy, well, then the question is, okay, but where are we getting on? That's a great example of, okay, but are we cultivating a desire for novelty in that relationship? And at times when you turn the screws so tight about so much regulation in people's intimate lives, they sometimes can develop what my late colleague, Helen Fisher, would call frustration attraction.

27:31So you tell them they can't do something, you tell someone they can't do something, and we start to get more interested in it. So that there's paradoxes there. For instance, some of the highest consumption of sex toys and pornography is in the U.S. Bible Belt in the country. So the region characterizes the highest religiosity. I don't say that as a moral statement one way or the other. What does the data tell us about when you're very restrictive about information, sex education, thinking about people's diverse, romantic, and sexual lives? People start seeking it out, and they have almost a greater craving for that seeking.