In the US, almost half of single adults. A quarter of men suffer from loneliness. Depression rates are to climb. And one in four adults in Gen Z — the so-called kinkiest generation, according to a study– never had sex.

In an age of endless connection, where hooking up happens with the ease of a swipe and non-traditional relationship structures as polyamory is celebrated, why do people seem disconnected and lonely?

Write it down to changing social norms or changing generational attitudes in relationships. But the bigger issue at play, according to Justin Garcia, is that we just don’t crave intimacy the same way we used to. “Our species is on the precipice of what I think is a crisis of intimacy,” Garcia writes in his new book, The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex, Loyalty, and Why We Die for Love. Garcia suggests in the book that intimacy—not sex—is “the most powerful evolutionary driver of modern relationships,” but that our hunger for it is “suppressed and mismanaged 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 maybe actually improve with agea recent report found). He has held the position since 2019, and during that time he also served as Match’s chief scientific advisor, where he provided 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 admitted that Kinsey studied 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 many areas—the “cognitive overload” of dating apps, why people are wired to be socially monogamous but not sexually monogamous, the science of breakups—but its bottom line is how “even in this confusing time, where moments of human connection are increasingly elusive, the search for intimacy remains the most human impulse.”

On a recent afternoon on Zoom, I spoke with Garcia about the biggest misconceptions about Gen Z’s sex drive, the onslaught of sex literacy in the current political climate, and why an AI chatbot can’t save your relationship. Everything is connected, he said.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: What is an intimacy crisis, and why, as you wrote the book, are we on the cusp 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 a day. Psychological loneliness is comprised of physical and psychological health. At the same time, there are reports suggesting that the numbers have not increased at all for psychological loneliness. But it’s clear that the effect is much more, and many people are paying attention to the effect.

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

You suggested that the crisis of attachment could lead to “unprecedented and severe biological consequences.” In what way?

We live in a moment where the human brain is taking in too much information and too much information is threatening. This is what’s happening in the news, in Gaza and Minnesota, with climate change, with the global economy—I mean, pick any section of the paper, it’s bad news. That puts a strain on our nervous system. Just as people’s romantic and sexual lives respond to the environments in which they form relationship structures, they also respond to the current environment, which has many threats going on. If the nervous system is tuned to a threat response, that is not appropriate for social behavior and it is certainly not appropriate for mating. When our nervous system detects threats from all the things around us, that has all the effects on our relationships. And if we don’t have the safety net of deep intimacy, we won’t be able to effectively weather these storms.