1334: Justin Garcia | Why We Live, Cheat, Break, and Die for Love

1334: Justin Garcia | Why We Live, Cheat, Break, and Die for Love

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Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional drug trafficker, arms dealer or mafia enforcer.

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It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're talking with Dr. Justin Garcia, evolutionary biologist, sex researcher, professor at Indiana University and chief scientific advisor to match.com as well as author of The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Live and Die for Love.

And we're starting in a place that sounds like a deleted scene from a bachelor party documentary, a legal brothel outside Las Vegas. Justin is there as a scientist, of course, looking at a menu of sexual services and the most expensive thing on the menu, 20 grand and up, doesn't necessarily include sex.

It's the girlfriend experience, cuddling, attention, the feeling of being wanted, a very expensive simulation of someone looking at you like you didn't just spend a mortgage payment or 10 to be held by a stranger. Which raises a deeply uncomfortable question, what are human beings actually chasing? In this episode, we'll get into why humans are built for pair bonds but not always built for effortless sexual monogamy, why dating apps can make you feel like you're shopping for humans [00:02:00] during a carbon monoxide leak, why falling in love can look suspiciously like anxiety with better lighting, why passion dies in long-term relationships and why it doesn't have to, and why heartbreak can feel less like sadness and more like your brain going through withdrawal from a person who still owes you a hoodie.

So if you've ever wondered whether you want sex, love, validation, novelty, safety, revenge,

Justin Garcia: a text back or just someone to hold your hand while you slowly become your parents, this one's for you. Here we go with Dr. Justin Garcia.

Jordan Harbinger: Justin, I want to start in the least romantic place imaginable, which is a legal brothel outside of Las Vegas.

So, and you're there for science, just to clarify that for everyone. Yeah. Staring at, I don't know, do they have a menu of services? That, that's so awkward, I guess, but well, for me it would be, I don't know. And the most expensive thing on the menu, which is, like, 20 grand or something, is what? This girlfriend experience?

I don't even... I guess I don't really know what any of this stuff is, so [00:03:00] tell me what that is. I don't... I... Girlf- she just pretends to like you? I thought they all did that. I don't know.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. Well, in some ways they do. That's sort of what's interesting about-

Jordan Harbinger: Okay ...

Justin Garcia: when you go to these venues. So there was an easel in the main lobby, and there's different things, and some of the things are what you would expect in a legal brothel.

Yeah. There's an oil massage, there's two women, there's kink and, uh, different fetish rooms. But the most expensive thing, you go through that list, and what people were willing to spend the most money on in a legal brothel was this date, this girlfriend experience. And you get a bottle of champagne.

Actually, I think you got two bottles of champagne. You could have a meal. You were at a table. So you could choose the leather mattress and covered in oil, but if you wanted to really spend a lot of money, you picked the bistro table.

Jordan Harbinger: Hmm.

Justin Garcia: And you sat down And acted like it was a date. Now, you're right, the part of, for many people, is this feeling of connected.

We did a study years ago in a, in a strip club. We were taking biometrics, and someone turned to me and said, "I think she really likes me." I thought, "Well, that's ... You're supposed to feel that way."

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. And, [00:04:00] but you're right. This idea that couching our sexual experiences in this date, what feels like a date, or that you're having a deeper connection, that's what people were so driven for.

That's what they were willing to spend the most money on.

Jordan Harbinger: That, to me, is... I mean, there's a lot of things that are surprising about this. For example, I'm pretty sure that if you don't want the sex, you can take a woman out to dinner for free any time that you offer to do that. You just have to use one of those apps where you're guaranteed, sort of.

I mean, isn't that one of the chief complaints about dating apps? Like, "I'm getting played by women. All they want to do is they, we go out for this nice meal, and we have a great conversation, and they ghost me." That's what this is, except maybe, you know, there's some sex at the end at the legal brothel. But you've got to go out to outside of Las Vegas.

It's a little bit far for most people. Yeah. So it's kind of surprising of, like, you could pay somebody to like you for the cost of a meal. 20 grand is a lot of dinner dates where they ghost you afterward. I mean, that's, like, hundreds of them. Oh, gosh. Right?

Justin Garcia: Yeah, and what I remember when I was dating, I used to, like, love just to get out and just to connect- Yeah

and just to be. And I think you really hit [00:05:00] on what the issue, though, is, is for so many people it's that combination of saying, "Well, I want to know that I'm going to go out to dinner, but there's something sexual, physical," or, "I want to have something sexual and physical but also feel like I'm connecting." And it's the trying to get both, the sort of love and sex, the best of both worlds.

That's where people were struggling, and that's where people were willing to spend.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's a simulation of being wanted, basically. That's wild

Justin Garcia: to me. And people get into it. I mean, you really can... I mean, if you're across the table from someone, and you're making eye contact, and they're complimenting you.

And you feel... It is a simulation, but it, you can feel a lot of those things that you would in a, in a relationship.

Jordan Harbinger: I wonder, and we'll get to this later, but I wonder if AI is going to take a bite outta that because it, it's going to be a lot cheaper. And people will go, "Well, AI's totally fake." I'm pretty sure she's also acting when she pretends to laugh at all your jokes during this dinner that you've paid 20 grand for.

I mean, it's like, what's the difference? You still have to suspend disbelief or whatever the term is in order to make it feel real enough. Like, y- you're like, "Oh, she really likes [00:06:00] me," but then it's like, yeah, but I also paid 20 grand and she would never do this for free, so that's not really what's going on here, you know?

Mm-hmm. And she said she had a hard out at 8:00 because there's another guy doing the exact same thing, and she has to-

Justin Garcia: Yeah ...

Jordan Harbinger: eat again, which is, you know, now how do th- the logistics of that work, I guess, I don't know.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: But,

Justin Garcia: yeah. And, and so much of relationships are what we call make special, wanting to feel- Yeah

making something special. You want to know when you complimented my blue eyes, are you complimenting someone else's blues? When you compliment my laugh, are you complimenting someone else's laugh? You want to have... It's why we often do things like romantic baby talk and we do all these things in relationships, and they're often about something unique about a couple or a relationship.

But you're, you nailed it. When we have this idea that, you know, you're doing that with everyone else, and when that happens in a real relationship, when you're like, wait, you say that to the other boys? You went did that with the other girls? It can feel like the world's crashing in.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I, man. So why open a book on love and intimacy in a brothel, though, man?

Justin Garcia: I, I, it's funny because I went back and forth obecause story to open with. Sure. And I found [00:07:00] that one, in part because for me it was so interesting. So we were initially in Las Vegas collecting hormone samples in a legal sex club. I was in a different kind of venue. Mm-hmm. I was collecting testosterone and estrogen samples.

Jordan Harbinger: Um- How do you... Wait, how... So is that spit based? Because I'm guessing you're not like, "Hey, let me jab this needle into you while you're, I don't know, at a sex club." That's like-

Justin Garcia: Yeah ...

Jordan Harbinger: that's a level of kink that they only allow in Europe- ... is from what I understand.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was, we were doing it at salivary levels.

Okay. And actually funny you say that. The title of the academic article we published from it was, like, Salivary Testosterone and Estradiol Following Sexual Activity in a Non-Laboratory Setting. A colleague of

Jordan Harbinger: mine- You can say that again. Yeah.

Justin Garcia: A colleague of mine was like, "Really? Just say what it is."

Jordan Harbinger: Ironically, the club was a fake laboratory. So.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. It was my favorite method section, though. We wrote, samples were collected between 11:00 PM and 5:00 AM. And people think that we know a lot about what happens to testosterone and estrogens, the sex steroids, with sexual activity, but there's a lot of disagreement in the academic literature on it, particularly the role of estrogens, which might be more important for fertility and egg implantation and not a direct [00:08:00] sexual response.

So we were doing a study about that. That's what brought me to Vegas. And then we said, well, we're here. We're the sexologists. We should go to the legal brothels that are an hour out in the desert. My whole career I've been asking questions about intersections of love and sex. I used to write a lot more about hookup culture and how people, even when they were having casual sex, they were spending the night and cuddling, or it was turning into a romantic relationship.

Mm-hmm. So I've always been interested in that tension. But we went out to this legal brothel, and we get this tour, and I was really just gobsmacked by th- that people were spending that much money on this date-like experience that typically involves sex, but not always. So partly, I opened The Intimate Animal, the book, with that story, because for me, it was this moment of just, wow.

It made sense. It made theoretical sense to me, but just, wow, this is what's going on, and this is what people are really willing to put their money, uh, behind.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, this is, for me, I guess, there's a lot of questions that I have about this. What did it tell you that the most expensive sex product didn't necessarily center around sex?

And it, when [00:09:00] you say people are buying intimacy, I guess then what are they buying? Attention, touch, safety, fantasy, sex? I mean, it's all, it's not quite the same thing people imagine when they think legal brothel, at least for me.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And when I use the word intimacy, and throughout the book and in a lot of our work, I think of intimacy as not a euphemism for sex.

As sexologists, we don't like euphemisms. But really thinking about being seen and heard and known. And so it's not just that you've connected to someone, but that you feel a connection to them, that you can look at them across the room and kind of understand what they're thinking or what they're wanting, and trying to build that.

And now, when you're sitting across the table from a sex worker, they're, should've joked before- Mm-hmm ... they're doing a good job of trying to make you feel that way- Yeah ... feel at ease. It is psychological safety. It's psychological connection. And yes, so people are willing to spend money on just a sex act, and that could be fun for a lot of people.

But this idea of couching it in a relational context That's what was most enticing to so many people, at [00:10:00] least based on what they're willing to spend.

Jordan Harbinger: 20 grand, I mean, that's, there's a zero on the end of that that I didn't think was going to be there for something like this. I don't know. That's just entirely, it's just so expensive.

But it tells me since they price according to the market and people are paying that all the time, that shows you how valuable these feelings are, right? Because if you're just paying for sex that's really gr- like Las Vegas strip sex, which I know is illegal, but I, I assume that that's cheap. I don't know.

There's just a lot of competition and it doesn't last very long probably, right? And it's like you're drunk and everything. It seems to me, like I said before, you could probably get a real girlfriend for less than 20K for the weekend or whatever. Or maybe, am I delusional? Am I, or have I been lucky in the past that I haven't had to pay for companionship?

That pricing just seems astronomical and it seems like if you're loaded enough to drop 20K on entertainment for a night, you could probably just impress somebody who's kind of a pay-to-play kind of person anyway.

Justin Garcia: No, so what's interesting about that is that in some of those cases they [00:11:00] are for prolonged periods.

So in this particular case, it's brothel. You go there. You don't, most of the women don't leave with you. But it is, when we look around and in some of our own studies and we look in different places. So, you know, we talk about sex tourism, for instance, in- Mm-hmm ... Southeast Asia or Thailand, and often what happens in those contexts are, let's say you're in the parts of Bangkok where there's sex work and sex tourism.

You might meet a, a heterosexual man might meet a woman, and they'll go back to your hotel with you, but really what you're doing is picking someone up for a few nights.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Justin Garcia: And often they'll say, "Okay, what time is dinner tomorrow? And what are we going to do tomorrow?" Mm-hmm. And you might, in the go-go clubs, which is what we see in Bangkok, you might go to the go-go clubs, meet a sex worker, but you don't go straight to your hotel.

They'll say, "I'm going to take you to billiards before we go back to your hotel." Hmm. "Let's go get a bite to eat before we go back to your hotel." Now, you're paying for her- Mm-hmm ... typically, but it's to make it an experience. And we, there's a lot of cases of people who then it, it's almost kind of romance tourism.

And people will say, "Well, I went-"

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah ... "

Justin Garcia: to the go-go club and I was with this woman for five nights."

Jordan Harbinger: Look, I've been to Thailand with my [00:12:00] friends. My brother used to live there, and I remember my friends who were much skeevier than me because they worked on boats, okay? So they were like sailors, and I was like, "Guys, just so you know, I, I'll play along, but I'm not going to play along."

You know what I mean? And they're like, "That's fine. That's not how this works. It's pretty flexible here." And I was like, "Well, you've been here before." And I remember going and meeting the girls and they would be like, "Yeah. What do you want to do?" And I'm like, "I, w- I'm going to sleep in my bed." And they're like, "Okay, but do you want to go swimming?"

And I was like, "Actually, that sounds great." And I just remember like hanging out with them and their girls, and then when it was time for them to like go do boom-boom and I was like, "Well, I don't want my you know what to fall off, but you're very nice, so we can hang out." And like we basically just hung out, and she just went back to wherever she went back to.

And then I remember the second night she was like, "Can I sleep on the floor? Because you have air conditioning." And I felt really, really bad for her. I felt like, oh my God. The power imbalance was something I couldn't really deal with. When it hits you in the face like that, that's really like And probably you're

Justin Garcia: buying food and drinks, and so

Jordan Harbinger: it's also like- Yeah, but I didn't care.

It was so cheap, I just felt like, what? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It was like hanging out with a friend who didn't have a- enough money [00:13:00] to hang out. You're just like, "Whatever." I mean, it- I didn't have to... She didn't actually even... So here's the thing. Those guys were telling me what they were paying because they were getting sexual s- services from these women.

This is, like, 15, 20 years ago, so I don't remember the pricing, but, like, the girl that I had talked, she didn't even seem to care about that. She was more concerned with slee- like I said, sleeping, the air conditioning. She wanted to use the shower that I had, and she wanted to eat. Actually, that was one of the most, what do you call it?

Like a wake-up call where you're like, "This is really gross." The fact that they're- don't have enough money to eat and that they just want to sleep in the AC is, like, horrifying to me. This is going in a direction I didn't expect it to, but this- Yeah. I think this anecdote is interesting because I think a lot of people would argue, and we should do a show just about sex work in general, that the power imbalance is kind of crazy when it comes to this stuff.

Now, the- if you're paying 20 grand and the person's working legally and as healthcare outside of Las Vegas, it's a little different than somebody who's-

Justin Garcia: It's different. Exactly ...

Jordan Harbinger: who, who, like- Exactly ... you know, talking to these girls, I'm like, "Why do you do this? This is horrible and probably not good for you."

And she's like, "My grandpa's sick and I need to buy [00:14:00] medicine." And I was like, that could be a sob story or it could actually be close to the truth, and I don't really want to know, like, which one it is. Yeah. You know?

Justin Garcia: When we were in the legal brothel, the woman giving us a tour had been a flight attendant and then had lost her job during the economic crash.

But she was married, she had two kids, and there was a part of her whole experience that was, her husband knew what she did. But what goes on in the legal brothels in the States is a doctor comes on Sunday, does the STI checks, and your card is good for two weeks. But if you leave the facilities for more than a certain amount of time, like an hour, your card expires.

So you have to stay within the facility. And seemingly it's to protect everyone because then you make sure that they don't pick up an STI- Mm-hmm ... since they've been checked. But the other side to it, to your point, the, like, complicated power politics in sex work Is that it's a way that the house can make sure that you don't go down the block to a motel or to someone's house and make some money and cut the house out at the

Jordan Harbinger: brothel.

Yeah, I did not think about... Wow, that's, you're not [00:15:00] imprisoning them because they can leave whenever they want, but then they can't work, so you kind of are.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Justin Garcia: Really complicated power dynamics going on.

Jordan Harbinger: Huh. Uh, I don't, ugh, that's really uncomfortable. Yeah, I mean, like I said, after that I was just kind of like, how do people...

Look, I try not to be judgy, but when the power imbalance is that much, like when I hear about the Southeast Asia sex tourism stuff, I was just like, "You should Google that before you guys do that." You know? Like, that's not going to be, if you have a conscience, that's not going to be as fun as you probably think it is.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. More going on behind the party.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so for the listener who says, "Come on, people just want sex. This girlfriend experience thing is just a way for them to delude themselves into thinking that they're not paying for it," what are they missing?

Justin Garcia: I mean, I think that when we say delude, or what, and you're right, that's what people say, let's really unpack what that is- Mm-hmm

and what people are trying to experience. What I see in a lot of my work is that people are trying to find ways to navigate both their sexual desires and their romantic desires. It was the same thing that, as I said earlier, I worked on hookup culture and casual sex. We would see [00:16:00] high rates of people who said, "I had a one night stand, but I stayed the night, and I engaged in eye gazing, and we cuddled all night."

And it's like, well, that's not the deal. This is no-strings-attached sex. Aren't you just going to go home from the club and go home? Or we found one in three people had a hookup that turned into a romantic relationship. We found 51% of men and women, no gender difference, engaged in casual sex hoping it would turn into a romantic relationship.

So that tells me that when we peel back a little bit of the layers when we're looking at people's romantic behaviors and sexual behaviors, what I see in our studies, I mean, and what I'm looking for, is the ways that people are trying to get a little bit of both, that our romantic lives don't exist in isolation from our sexual desires, and our sexual interests often don't exist in isolation, even if you look at fantasies.

I mean, the number one fantasy that most people have, uh, according to Justin Lehmiller's work, are threesomes. And most often it's people in relationships. They're saying, "My fantasy is my partner and I and one other person." Hmm. So your romantic bond is in your sexual fantasy. It's just you're adding some other novelty to it.

So people are trying [00:17:00] to navigate a space where they can feel both of those things. Our instincts, our evolutionary urges for both of those things.

Jordan Harbinger: I feel like anybody who says that their fantasy is a threesome is somebody who's never actually tried to do that.

Justin Garcia: Sounds more interesting than it

Jordan Harbinger: is. Oh my gosh, yeah.

I mean, look, uh, s- uh, h- so I've heard, et cetera, et cetera, but like yeah, that's one of those things where like the logistics just ruin the whole thing, and then like it's... Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I

Justin Garcia: mean- Yeah. And you hope you're the one that's not forgotten in the,

Jordan Harbinger: in the

Justin Garcia: event.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Again, 20-plus years ago, I'm 46 now, I was probably like just gradu- maybe I wasn't even graduated from law school at this point, I can't remember.

But I remember being so excited, and then at the end I was like, "Well, never doing that again. Ever again. Ever." And break- telling everyone that that was terrible. Uh, that was it. Yeah. Um, it's just like-

Justin Garcia: Sounds good,

Jordan Harbinger: but- Yeah. Oh my gosh, that's like the, the peak sounds good on paper, uh, if- life event, I think.

So if, if you're out there and you're 50 years old or 40 years old, [00:18:00] you're thinking, "Wow, I've never done this. It's on my bucket list," just cr- erase it right now. You are missing nothing. Um, so where does our culture confuse Maybe sexual access with emotional closeness.

Justin Garcia: Hmm. Well, I mean, part of the challenge is that they are related.

So we know, I mean, if you have sex with someone, you learn an awful lot about them. Mm. You learn, I mean, if they're, uh, my colleague Helen Fisher and I, in our studies we used to laugh and say, "You learn if they're funny, if they're hygienic, if they're empathetic, if they're caring." But also you have a physiology of what happens with sexual activity.

We know d- we have dopamine activity, we have oxytocin activity. Mm-hmm. Particularly if it's orgasmic sex, if it's good sex, you see a spike in orga- in oxytocin. These are bonding hormones. It's neuropeptide actually that's associated with building a connection. So it can be hard to disentangle this idea that what's emotional and what's

I mean, when I used to teach a sexuality course, the students would ask me all the time, "Well, how do you know if s- if it's love or lust?" And that's not really an easy question to answer. It's, I think we often hear people have these kind of quick one-liners. When [00:19:00] we really get into the science of it, it's really not that easy because there is a lot of overlap between what goes on in the brain and behaviorally and socially with sex, and what goes on in the brain behaviorally, socially with romantic attachment.

Jordan Harbinger: Huh.

Justin Garcia: Now, when we talk about romantic love as a mechanism, there's different parts. And a lot of theorists, psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, talk about these sort of triangle models or triarchic models about love. And that says there's this part that's lust, that's sexual motivation, sex drive.

There's a part that's this feeling of kind of passion and romantic attraction, and then there's that friendship, that deep commitment. So that tells us that they're always both there in romantic attachments, both the connection and the sexual interest. Now, they wax and wane over time, as those of us in long-term relationships, or we were talking earlier about, you know, when you have kids.

And you go through chapters of life where you say, "May- I don't feel as connected to my partner right now." Mm-hmm. Or, "I don't really want to have sex with my partner right now." That's not necessarily a problem. That's responding to the ecologies, responding to our lives, and those moments [00:20:00] can wax and wane.

Not a problem if it doesn't persist forever. If it does, then it's a problem.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Have you ever seen, I don't know if you use Reddit, but have you ever seen the Dead Bedroom subreddit? Are you familiar with Reddit at all? It's basically just- Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. So it's got, you have, like, category discussion areas.

I'm not that old, Jordan. Well, some people don't even use it, right? Most, in fact, most people don't even use it. But there's a subreddit that's enormous and it's called Dead Bedrooms. And I don't know, this is, like, an area for one of your students probably to research, but basically it's a bunch of people venting or talking about strategies because they haven't basically had either not enough sex or no sex for just years.

Some of these people are like- Yeah ... I'm on year 25 of a dead bedroom. And it's, like, kind of sad. And I don't want to say pathetic because that sounds pejorative, but these people are really hard up. And then there's another one that was, like, high libido community versus low libi- or it's, it's basically high libido versus low libido partners.

A man or a woman will say something like they want it, I don't know, five times a week, but their spouse wants it once a month maybe, and that's if they're in, like, the perfect mood and have had three drinks. [00:21:00] Yeah. And it's Friday, and it's n- before 9:00 PM but after 7:30 P- you know what I mean? It's like they get aroused every, I don't know, summer solstice.

And the partner's aroused every three hours or every day- Yeah ... or something, and it's like, it screws everything up, man. The lesson I've taken just from voyeuristically reading those is, wow, do you need to make sure your stuff matches. But the problem is, you can match just fine, and then somebody has a baby or, like, gets sick or gets a lot of str- Yeah

work stress, and then you don't match anymore, and that can persist for a while, too, from what I understand.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. The technical term for that is sexual desire discrepancy. Mm. And when we look at that, that can happen sometimes always in couples, but we also know that a lot of it has to do with how we think about our arousal, how we think about our sexual desire, and often it's responsive.

So exactly as you said, you're going through a really intense moment at work or in your personal life or with your health or with your family. Many of us, men, women, all ages, we go through a season where we say, "Sex isn't really a priority right now." [00:22:00] That is adaptive. I actually think that understanding the biology of if you're really stressed, you shouldn't be wanting to mate all the time because your body is in, focusing on a, a different kind of response.

I mean, it's, there's a reason that two gazelle don't mate in front of a lion, right? When your physiology is in a threat response or a stress response, that's not conducive to mating. Right. It's not conducive to connection. I mean, I'll often say we don't stop in a burning building to have a conversation.

You also typically don't stop for a kiss. So

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I guess all the exhibitionist gazelles are dead.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. Well, a little bit. You bring that up. I'm glad you're bringing that up. A little bit of stress, like you're in your car and the park ranger might find you, okay, that could be exciting.

Jordan Harbinger: Huh.

Justin Garcia: But if you're in your car and the forest is on fire, you're like, "Let's get out of here."

Yeah. I don't really want to stop. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: that's a good

Justin Garcia: idea. So a little bit of stress can be good. Remember when I was, uh, in the classroom years ago, a student said, "Professor, why is sex in a car so, like, the best?" I remember thinking, like, well, it could be novelty, but also I'm over six foot tall, and speak for yourself.

Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: no kidding. I, that does not track for me at all.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. No. But a little bit of excitement can be. But when [00:23:00] we are in a stress response or a threat response, that's a very different experience. So that's our bodies adaptively responding to our ecology, our social ecology, our physical environment. That's part of the, our evolutionary story, and it is everywhere in the world when we look at people's romantic and sexual lives.

So we go through seasons, I think, that, uh, one way to think about it, that we want sex more or less. But the other part of that is that for a lot of people, arousal is responsive. So what can happen, what we see in the literature, is that people will go through a period, I was so stressed at work, we just sort of, so we had bed death, we stopped having sex.

But then what do you do to cultivate it? So in our studies on passion and long-term couples, you do things like you light candles, you play music- Mm ... you dim the lights. It's not the particular type of candle or the particular type of music, it's the intentionality. It's saying, how do you build a mood for your sexual life?

Sex therapists recommend 30 minutes of foreplay for the average couple. Most people don't do that. We know that from the data. Most people aren't engaging in 30 minutes of foreplay before intercourse. Yeah. No kidding. No, and especially

Jordan Harbinger: once you have kids, it's like, 30 minutes?

Justin Garcia: Oh, who's got time for that?

Jordan Harbinger: Where you guys, where you doing that? This whole [00:24:00] sex schedule was a 15-minute thing here, and we probably- Yeah, yeah ... don't even have that block.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: That counts parking the car in the garage beforehand. Yeah. You know? Like, what are you talking... And that's not a euphemism.

Justin Garcia: Yeah, we did a study on, at the start of the pandemic, what we, what we do here at the Kinsey Institute, we, we try to ask the question, like, the sex question at any particular moment.

And when the pandemic happened, we said, "Okay, let's ask the sex and relationship question." So we launched this multinational data collection at the start of COVID, and what we found is that overall sexual frequency had decreased. Masturbation had decreased, which suggested it wasn't just that I was afraid of kissing someone who had, you know, COVID.

It was that our desires were because, I think, the world was on fire.

Jordan Harbinger: Also, when all the kids are doing Zoom school and your wife is working from home, where are you doing this?

Justin Garcia: Where do you go? Exactly. Yeah. So we also found in that study, one in five people tried something new. And I was like, okay, so a lot of it was fantasies or talking, first time really talking to their partner about what they wanted.

But I remember a few months later interviewing a couple, and the woman said, "My husband and I started having shower sex during the pandemic." And I thought... You know where I'm going with this. I [00:25:00] thought, that's great. Mm-hmm. That's exactly what we saw, one in five. And she said, "It was the only time we had 10 minutes in the house by ourselves."

Yeah. Mm-hmm. And it was like, okay, it still works, it matches with the data. But it was responding to that particular moment.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I guess, well, we have to adapt or we would never, we wouldn't be here anymore.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Is the need for intimacy a biological drive? A lot of people say, "Oh, this is the same as sleep, hunger.

It's the same kind of thing." And other people will say, especially low libido people will say, "That's ridiculous. You're a moron for thinking that." Yeah. So but where does it fall in the human need hierarchy?

Justin Garcia: Yeah, so the actual term sex drive, if we're going to get technical, is sometimes contested among scientists.

So some scientists don't love to use the term sex drive because the idea, ex- as you're saying, is it, is it like water and food? If I don't get sex, am I going to explode or die? Mm-hmm. And no.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Justin Garcia: Evolutionists tend to use the term sex drive a little bit more because of the idea that sexual reproduction, well, we could talk about modern technologies, but for the most part, sexual [00:26:00] reproduction is important for getting genes into the next generation.

So if we're taking a evolutionary lens, then we would say yes, it's a drive. Some people call it a motivational response system. Mm-hmm. And different kind of technical arguments. But I would say what my argument was in my work and in The Intimate Animal and my frame of thinking about this is we have two drives, and they often are in parallel but at times are competing.

We have a lot of drives, but when it comes to our intimate lives, there's one for sex, and that could look a lot of different ways. It doesn't tell us about frequency or intensity, but we are motivated for that feeling of sex, eroticism in our lives. Maybe it's we experience it with ourselves, maybe with others.

How we satiate that drive, lot of different ways, lot of different answers. Mm-hmm. But we're also motivated for deep, intimate connection. In the broad sense, we talk about a psychological phenomenon called the need to belong, that humans want to feel connected to something. I think that explains a lot of what we see politically and socially.

Yeah. Definitely. We want to feel like we're part of something. [00:27:00] Now, as a social primate, our evolutionary story, that intimacy connection, feeling really close, someone... If we're talking about primates, we'll talk about licking and grooming behavior. But in pair bonds, in romantic relationships, we talk about things like mutual territory defense, mutual nest building, mutual raising of offspring.

Doesn't mean you have to have kids, doesn't mean you have to have a certain frequency of sex, but what that says is that most of us walk around with both desires for deep, intimate connection and desires for some kind of sexual out.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm.

Justin Garcia: And we try to get it in the same person, but in fact, those desires are, are sometimes in conflict with each other.

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Comes out just [00:30:00] about every Wednesday, an under two-minute read, highly practical, something you can apply right away that'll help you with your decision-making, relationships, or psychology. Jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now back to Dr. Justin Garcia. What would you say to somebody who has maybe plenty of sex but still feels profoundly lonely? Because I think there's a ton of guy- well, a ton of people like that. W- in my 20s and 30s, I knew a lot of guys like that, especially when I lived in New York, for example. Yeah. You'd meet these guys that would go out and meet women like, I don't know, three or four nights a week, and they had this crazy rotation, and I remember feeling, like, really envious of some of these guys.

But then you realized, oh, you can't actually hold a relationship. You're pretending you're enjoying this and having fun. The fact that you literally cannot ... They will not see you again because you're blowing it. Yeah. Right? Every time you like someone, they realize you're kind of a creep, and then you fill it with more women.

It's not going to work for you. These people are profoundly lonely, but I've never met anybody who had as many women as them, for example. [00:31:00] It's crazy.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. I remember we were going to do a study on athletes once, and this Division 1 athlete said, made a comment that his sexual life was great. Basically, I mean, there were times that he was on the road and, like, women would go be a- at the hotel waiting for him, uh, when he got back.

Mm-hmm. And at times, actually, he struggled with it because sometimes he's like, "I'm just exhausted, but there's, like, a woman at the hotel and I feel the need to play the part." But what he really wanted was like, "It would be cool to have someone who, like, could make me dinner or we could, or we could just, like, hang out and, like, put on pajamas and watch a show and have a home-cooked meal."

Mm-hmm. And that desire to have something a little bit deeper and meaningful, to feel that sense of intimacy. The example that you used, or I'm using, we know that people can have that where they maybe seem like they're getting some aspect, but they still have this psychological loneliness. And psychological loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day- Wow

according to the literature. And the profound question for me is how is it that there are people, a lot of people in a lot of different ways, that can have the sense of psychological loneliness even when they're not [00:32:00] physically alone? And that's the example- Mm-hmm ... that you're giving. That is about the depth of our relationships.

I think part of what we see is, okay, you maybe are going out with different people every night, maybe having sex with them sometimes, but do you feel connected to that person? Mm-hmm. Do you feel like you are, back to what we defined intimacy as, do you feel seen and heard and known? Do you feel like that person would take you to a hospital if you needed something?

Do you feel like they really ... Psychiatrists talk about be- wanting to be witnessed. Do you feel witnessed at all with this person?

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Justin Garcia: We need both of that, and that often, too often, I think in a lot of people's lives, and we see this especially with young people, that you kind of sacrifice one for the other.

You say like, "Okay, well, I'm going to get the sex," or, "Okay, I'm going to just be around friends," but then not have any- Mm-hmm ... of this more romantic connection. And what we see in study after study is that's not fulfilling. People still, they don't feel satisfied romantically, sexually, socially of trying to find that combination.

Jordan Harbinger: I think one thing that's interesting for me is I know a lot of athletes now that are, I don't know, in their 40s or late 30s, they're retired from the NFL or whatever sport that they played, [00:33:00] and they are the ones who are like, "Oh man, I'm so glad that I found my wife and had kids." So I, I just found it interesting because I remembered hearing their stories before and being like, "Oh my gosh, you're never going to want to give up this life."

But once they found the person that could fil- scratch, tick those boxes or whatever, they never looked back, which I found interesting. Because I thought, oh man, you're going to be with one person? You know, LOL, buddy.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: And they couldn't wait to make that transition. I thought that was quite fascinating.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Because if you're a 20-something-year-old guy, 30-something-year-old guy, and your buddy's a, on the New England Patriots- Yeah ... you know, like you would trade lives in one second with that person. Oh. But then also, like, maybe not really-

Justin Garcia: Yeah ...

Jordan Harbinger: when you get down to

Justin Garcia: it. You know, one of the things we find in our big Singles in America study that we do with match.com every year, we collect a sample of 5,000 US singles with my colleague Amanda Gesselman here at The Kinsey Institute, and we ask, "What is the thing that people want most in a relationship?"

This is a sample of national, it's a demographically representative sample of single adults. The number one thing men and women want in a partner is someone they can trust and confide [00:34:00] in. It's someone who's there to pick you up when you fall, someone that you feel... I mean, trust is really about are they going to be there to weather storms with me?

And I think you're right. I think when we really take a look at, on the one hand we could say, okay, who are the celebrities, who are the athletes who have, you know, unlimited sexual access? But when you look a little bit deeper, what are the people who are really successful, what do a lot of them want and need?

It's that they have someone who's there to pick them up if they fall, to help support them, to buoy them. I mean, not to disclose too much, you and I are both lucky. We have partners who are in the background and- Yeah ... uplifting our lives. Yeah. And, and that's what you see a lot in cases. And, and I think we tend to focus too much on, oh, the athlete who's got the new girlfriend every week.

Those are tend to be isolated cases. When you really look around at how people are structuring their social lives and what success looks like, what, whether that's reproductive success as an, as an evolutionist would count it, whether that's longevity, whether that's health and wellbeing and low mortality, low disease, that's a story about intimate connections that are supporting all of that human infrastructure.

Jordan Harbinger: So how does somebody [00:35:00] know if they're chasing intimacy or just chasing some kind of dopamine hit? You know, it, it's got to be pretty hard esp- I, I think for younger people especially, it's harder to separate sexual release from validation from novelty from, w- I don't know, emotional safety or relief from loneliness in some other way.

That's a tough audit.

Justin Garcia: Yeah, and it's partly because we don't have really great sexual literacy, is a term that Dr. Ruth Westheimer used to use, right? Mm-hmm. We don't, we don't really know, like, how to talk about sex and love and relationships and feelings. We published a study fairly recently that 44% of adults in the United States, this is an adult sample, said if they had just had a little bit more education around sex, they'd have healthier and happier relationships today.

Wow. That's a lot. Nearly half of people saying- Yeah ... "I just wish I had some information." So we do know that we can tend to pursue them and kind of get confused. The challenge can be that, yeah, pursuing love, you get a dopamine hit. Pursuing sex, you get a dopamine hit, so you can get that physiology. And I think the challenge that we see is that, I'm pausing [00:36:00] because I'm just trying to remember the numbers.

We were looking at some data about second dates. I'm a big advocate, as I wrote about in the, in the, in the book, that I'm an advocate for second dates because I think there's a lot that they can do. We found in our studies that in a national sample, about 70% of people have become attracted to someone that they initially didn't think they could be.

That's a pretty high number, seven out of 10 people. So we walk around with this idea that if you're attracted to someone, that that's the information, that you just know. Mm-hmm. You have this insight. That tends to be our sort of sex drive, really. If you see someone and you're like, "I have to have them," that tends to be really a sexual motivation But when you're looking for a relationship, when you're swiping on an app, when you let that guide your decision-making, you're forgetting that in real time, in the real world, 70% of the people around you have fallen in love with someone that they weren't initially attracted to.

That's a reminder that feeling connected takes time. It takes second looks, third looks, fourth looks. It takes having a conversation to see if it's someone you could trust and confide [00:37:00] in- Yeah ... which was the thing they told us they were looking for.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. I've got to ask you. Ma- I, I mean, I don't know how you're going to answer this.

You work for Match.com. I mean, don't y'all own, like, Tinder and stuff, and a bunch of apps where people go, "Huh, nah," based on f- nothing but a photo and whatever they're feeling in the moment? I remember friends ... I met my wife, who was my girlfriend, of course, before she was my wife, r- right when Tinder came out, so I had downloaded it.

I had it for maybe a week, and then I was like, "I don't need this anymore," you know? Good work. But I remember my, my friends were using it, of course, and we would be eating at Crif Dog or whatever, and they'd be swiping. And they would drop a little jalapeno off their hot dog onto the napkin, and they would look down and be like, "I, I'm just going to swipe because I've dropped my jalapeno and I'm done looking at this out of the corner of my

You know what I mean? Yeah. That's how much thought went into this. Mm-hmm. Like, I, I, whatever. I don't ... And I remember there was a guy ... One of my friends bought this ... It was like a fake finger that would spin on a motor just to swipe right on everybody. Yeah. Because he's like, "I don't care. I just want to see who matches with me, and then da [00:38:00] da da, and then we'll talk."

Match might not have loved the data that you found here that says, like, "Hey, don't judge people based on their photos."

Justin Garcia: Whoops. Yeah, and it's, uh, it's interesting. So I'm a, our ... In my role as scientific advisor to Match, and you're right, Match Group owns most of the market share. They own Tinder- Yeah

PlentyOfFish, OkCupid, Match. So what my role is is really not about influencing the product, but how do we understand who are singles? Who are the more than 100 million US single adults, and globally, and what do we understand about their attitudes and behaviors? So what I like about that role is it's, I don't have a corporate vested interest, but my interest is really, let me understand what singles are, and then they go do their thing.

And in fact, to their credit, one of the things that a lot of the companies have tried to do is- They've tried to change over time. So in fact, if you use a lot of these dating apps now, they try to slow you down. Hmm. So you'll see a picture, profile, picture, profile. That's pur- that's because the research was arguing that it was data overload.

It was cognitive overload. Sure. You're getting too much too fast and you weren't processing. [00:39:00] You weren't really making meaningful decisions. Or we knew that people wanted more stimuli for the brain. They wanted to know more about someone. They wanted to hear your voice, see your body language. So then they introduced short videos, or you could do video chats during the pandemic.

Jordan Harbinger: That's what YouTube started as, wasn't it? Just people uploading their dating videos. And before that, there was a place near my house growing up, I can't remember what it was called. But you would book an appointment, go sit there, and you'd record your video, but then you would watch VHS tapes of all of these other people.

And you can find some of those on YouTube now- Yeah ... where it's really funny. It's like, "Yeah, what's up? My name's Kirk. I love golfing. I love traveling. Just looking for the right girl." Like, flips his hair back, you know? It's-

Justin Garcia: Yeah ...

Jordan Harbinger: totally ridiculous and hilarious.

Justin Garcia: Yeah, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Then you think like, wow, that guy is like 60 years old now.

I wonder if he ever got married- Yeah ... or found anyone.

Justin Garcia: Um- I have a colleague that's in his, uh, 80s who met his wife through the personal ads years ago, right? And it's in a newspaper, in the local newspaper. And-

Jordan Harbinger: Wow ...

Justin Garcia: so we know that online dating is still the most common way that singles in the United States are meeting a romantic [00:40:00] partner, more than friends, bars, clubs, church.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, nobody has friends anymore, buddy. I don't know if you-

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: What are you talking about? You're showing your

Justin Garcia: age, Justin. Loneliness, I know. Those loneliness issues, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Justin Garcia: So we know that that's the most common way people are meeting, but we also know people are struggling with it, that they're reporting that there is burnout and challenges.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Justin Garcia: So I think the apps, the companies, a lot of them at least, seem to be trying to innovate and address that. They are aware of that. At the same time, we also see that matchmaking is on the rise. Like in person, actually I was just at the Global Love Institute, which is a, an annual conference of matchmakers and coaches, to give a talk on, like, what do we understand about the science of connection.

But matchmaking for the, not everyone, but some of them, it's a particular financial bracket to be in. I mean, some of these-

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. I was going to bring this up. I know matchmakers, and I know that they've done pretty well. My friend's, a kind of matchmaker friend, she introduced me to, I, I think at least two girls that I dated long-ish term, you know, 10, 15 years ago.

And my buddy met his wife through a matchmaker. But funnily enough, [00:41:00] his wife was just friends with the matchmaker. But it was these people, the good ones, they really spend time with their clients, and the client says, "I want this and this and this and this and this," and it's like, "Yeah, but I'm going to introduce you to this funny guy who doesn't check any of those boxes that also has a similar hobby with the diving thing."

And then those people, they click, and it's like, "I didn't know I even would like somebody like this." Yeah. So they're going along with what your science shows, which is just go out with them once and then do it again. Again. Just do it again. And again. Have that second date and then that third date where you talk about scuba and you think you're just going to be friends and then like dot, dot, dot, thanks for the wedding invitation- Yeah

because I thought this would work.

Justin Garcia: Because that all takes time. I mean, I think if you have a strong physiological response, like if you have a disgust response or a safety response- ... to someone, okay, yeah, don't see them again. Yeah. But for the most part, it's so much of what we want, both in our love life and our sex lives, it takes a little bit of time to uncover, and that's takes a second, third conversation.

That take ... I mean, we're also always, everyone's a little awkward on a first date. You don't know what to say. You're a little anxious.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Justin Garcia: [00:42:00] But taking that time, the data tells us, really helps us explore. And the other part of that, what you said, Jordan, that I love, is a good reminder that part of what happens when we have a lot of choices is we all have these long lists.

We say, "Here are the 30 things I want in my next date, in my partner, or maybe what I want in my current partner. Here's the 30 ways I want them to change." So we can think- Good luck with that. Yeah, yeah. And so what we, the only reason we do that, and in part it has to do with the apps. It also has to just do with the world, the internet world we're in today.

We have a sense of an unlimited resource. In fact, animals do the same thing. If you put a rabbit in a patch of carrots, if there's a ton of carrots, they're only going to eat the ones that are perfect. And what happens is, well, we're on the mating market, and we have a sense of an unlimited resource. You go on a date with someone and you say, "Well, they were great, but why'd they hold their fork like that?

I'm going to get back on the app. I'm going to find someone who doesn't hold their fork like that." Yes. Or, "Yeah, you hit 25 of the things on my list, but I can find someone who hits 30 of the things on my list. I'm going to go back on the app." So we live in this world of chasing this idea that someone out there is perfect, someone out there has [00:43:00] everything we want, and they probably don't, so you just spend years miserable constantly finding someone who you don't like how they hold their fork or whatever it is.

As opposed to saying, well, what matchmakers help people do is say, "Let's boil down to, like, the two or three things that are really important to you. I can find you someone who has those two or three things. Everything else is noise for now."

Jordan Harbinger: That I find interesting. Have you seen that video? This was viral probably a couple months ago, but it was a matchmaker talking on Zoom with a woman who was like, "He's got to be this, you've got to have this income, he's got to do this.

He's going to make protein shakes in the morning. He's going to go to the gym five or six days a week, also a runner. He's going to have competed in X number of events. I want him to be in these fields. He's got to be in this geographic..." And she goes on and on and on, and you think, is this satire? Because it doesn't really look like it.

And then she goes, "How long do you think it would take for you to find a couple of men that might fit that criteria?" And they go back to the matchmaker, and she goes That will literally never happen ever. Yeah. Yeah. And like, and then, and then the video cuts and, and everyone's like, "Wait, I need to know where this is from and what happened."

And basically, I guess the long version is the matchmaker was like, "You are totally unrealistic, and I'm-" Yeah ... "firing you [00:44:00] as a client."

Justin Garcia: And that happens sometimes- Yeah ... Because it's, they really do struggle. There was that, like, meme song on Instagram for a while, like looking for a guy in five, finance six five, um- Mm

and a trust fund. And, like, one demographer was like, "Actually, how many people are there like this?" I think there was, like- Right ... one or two in the whole country that met that description. Mm-hmm. But that highlights when we have a sense of an unlimited resource. Now, we do this anyway. A study by Elizabeth Bruch at University of Michigan said people tend to kind of punch above their weight in dating at 25%.

So you look for partners that have a 25% higher mate value than you have yourself.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see. They want to punch above

Justin Garcia: their

Jordan Harbinger: weight

Justin Garcia: when dating. Yeah, they want to. They, they- It doesn't

Jordan Harbinger: mean they can,

Justin Garcia: right? Okay. Exactly. Exactly. It doesn't mean that they can. So we get in this sense of like the grass is always greener.

We think that we can keep, just keep searching for this great partner that elevates us, that's more desirable, attractive, interesting than us. And what can happen is you just spend your time really being frustrated and miserable and burnt out. So people tell us that they feel burnt out or not enjoying their time on the app.

Well, what is their behavior? What are they actually doing when they pick up that technology?

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm. [00:45:00]

Justin Garcia: They're discounting a whole bunch of people that could be perfectly good dates.

Jordan Harbinger: I've introduced people to each other, and I've also have, you know, again, been around all my friends who are dating. And I remember one of my friends, she's divorced.

She was a little bit older. One of my other friends, also divorced, a little bit older, and I mean, like, in their 60s. I introduced them to each other. They both love ... I don't want to out anyone, so I'm going to be very vague here. They both love very specific things that are the same.

Justin Garcia: Uh-huh.

Jordan Harbinger: And we thought, "This is just an awesome thing.

They live in the same city. They love the same things. They go to the same events. I'm shocked they don't already know each other. They're both the same religion. They ha- run in similar circles. They're both the same financial status in many ways. They like going to the same countries on vacation." Me and Jen were like, "This is a slam dunk home run."

We introduced them to each other, and afterwards we emailed them separately like, "So what do you think?" You know what they both said? "They're a little too old for me."

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Like, are you kidding? You do realize that you're the same exa- Like, you were [00:46:00] within one year of each other's age. It's, uh, Jen looked and I looked at each other like, "This is a joke, right?"

No. They coordinated this response with each other to make us- ... roll our eyes and laugh? Un-freaking-believable. Yeah. Both still single, by the way. Surprise.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Um.

Justin Garcia: Relationship researchers have a joke that, uh, people often think the grass is greener on the other side when it comes to partners, but in fact, the grass is greener where you water it, right?

Yes. Where you really focus with someone.

Jordan Harbinger: Exactly. It, you mentioned something earlier about when we have unlimited choice, we, we get pickier, and online dating does that to people. Have you seen the research... I'm going to paraphrase here and possibly get this wrong, but basically, if you put a woman into a place where there's a lot of men, she suddenly becomes a lot more picky with the guys, and if you put a guy into a place where the ratio is very different, then the guy becomes more picky.

And so you see things like, at least back in the day, New York used to be, like, two women for every man, and that still counted a lot of guys who were not doing well, you know, financially, who would date a woman who bagged groceries at CVS. You know, they don't, we don't care. Mm-hmm. We're not [00:47:00] picky about that kind of thing.

So you'd see, like, this crazy dating ratio. So if you go there and you're, I don't know, a professional, you can meet a ton of women that are kind of out of your league, candidly speaking- Mm-hmm ... everywhere else in the country. But they're really interested in you because there's twice as many of them and there's a small number of, I don't know, like, Wall Street lawyers or something, for example, in the area.

That's, like, top of the heap. Mm-hmm. The dating heap. Have you seen the research on this? Because it seems like- A strategy would then be, if you can, move to a place where the ratio is in your favor, and then maybe, you know, go through the first dating thing, fall in love, and then get out of there.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

That's a very good evolutionary response. I like it. You're thinking like an evolutionary biologist.

Jordan Harbinger: There we go.

Justin Garcia: And-

Jordan Harbinger: I try ...

Justin Garcia: so we do. We talk about sex ratios a lot, and that has to do with particular environments. And there have been studies looking at ZIP codes or particular cities. One of the things we often do with some of our studies is when we do national samples is we'll do breakdown by region or ZIP codes or cities, and you see, like, these really different effects, [00:48:00] exactly.

Like, what's going on in Miami versus what's going on in rural Oklahoma. And one has to do with population size, so this sense of do you really feel like you're in a place of an unlimited resource, but then also sex ratios. And that plays out in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it plays out in competition. So if you have really skewed- Mm-hmm

ratios, like if you have a lot more women than men, the women start competing with each other. But also then it's easier for men to date. It also happens across age groups. So when you're... We see this when you're much older, like there have been studies in, like, assisted living communities or retirement communities where there's a lot more women than men.

Mm. In part because men tend to die at an earlier age and- Yeah, savage ... on average. Yeah. And so these single men who are, like, 70 in these communities, they sort of are like, "I have three girlfriends," or they or

Jordan Harbinger: they- Right ...

Justin Garcia: So it depends on all sorts of different environments we see the sex ratio thing play out.

We did a study years ago, too. We were looking at multiple campuses. It was a study of college students, and it was, like, hookups and dating behavior, and there was one campus that was a small liberal arts campus, and there were a lot more women than men. They had an art [00:49:00] school, and I think they had a conservatory A lot more women than men, and a lot of the men that were there were sort of disproportionately high number of gay and bisexual men.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Justin Garcia: So the straight men in particular on this campus, they had these stories of like, and the women would tell stories like, "Oh, if you go out to the bar on a Friday night and you see a guy on the dance floor, you've got to start dancing with him, and you have to start making out with him because he's not going to be single long."

Jordan Harbinger: Mm.

Justin Garcia: They were also ramping up their sexual behaviors as a way to compete with other women because they were trying to like-

Jordan Harbinger: Yes ...

Justin Garcia: get this guy's attention.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so I messed up what I was going to, what I said before. What I meant was not that it's just easier to date, I meant that the other sex that's in larger number becomes more promiscuous.

Yeah. So I've seen this, and I remember the study was going over different campuses as well. That's what triggered this. It was different campuses, and they even went to campuses that were religious. Mm-hmm. And they found that if there was a lot more women than men, women were way more likely to have premarital sex at this particular campus than other campuses that had no religious angle- Yeah

but had a more even ratio, and [00:50:00] I thought that was interesting. Mm-hmm. Because it's, they're basically saying not only is the culture of, you know, hey, we're a conservative place, that almost goes out the window- Yeah ... if it's like, yeah, but there's three times as many women than there are men, and it's like, well, you better start putting out, like you said- Yeah

with the women on the dance floor. It's like you see a straight guy on the dance floor, just shove your tongue down his throat if you want to get out of here with a boyfriend- Yeah ... Because you're in trouble. Otherwise, you're one- Yeah, because you're competing

Justin Garcia: with the other women.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: There's 50 women in here that want a piece of that, and you better go for it.

We should link that place in the show notes. I think there's a lot of people who want to apply to that university. Um, but that to me is kind of amazing because I think if you talk to the average man or woman, they're probably not even aware that they do this.

Justin Garcia: Yeah, and sometimes what we see is that, and there have been a series of studies of like what does that look like, what does that sort of sexual competition look like?

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Justin Garcia: And sometimes maybe it doesn't mean that you're having a one-night stand with someone, but maybe it means that you're wearing more revealing clothing. Maybe it means that you're spending more on a date. [00:51:00] Maybe it means that you are a little more forgiving of bad behavior.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm.

Justin Garcia: So what we see is that I think the question of like promiscuity as a term or as a f- as a focus- What we see in some of the work is that broadly, when you're competing more, when you're of the majority sex, it's like if you're a man and there's a lot of men in your community and you're heterosexual, or you're a woman, a lot of women and you're heterosexual, you reduce, you relax is the probably the right word.

You relax some of the things that you were really particular about. So maybe you say, "Well, I want to date a guy of a certain height." Then suddenly you're open to someone a little bit shorter. Right. Or you say, you know, if you're a guy and you say you're going to pay for a date, maybe you take it to a little bit of a nicer restaurant.

What it really does is it ramps up competition. Now, mating is a competition, and it's a competition with winners and losers.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Justin Garcia: And when you ramp that up, that can get expressed in a lot of ways. So for some people it's sex sooner. So people have maybe a one-date rule, three-date rule, 10-date rule.

Maybe you say, "Okay, I'm going to do less dates." Maybe it's how much you're spending. Maybe [00:52:00] it's how flashy you're dressing. Lots of different ways it can get expressed. And for different people they sometimes pick one or the other.

Jordan Harbinger: This is all, tracks really well. Again, when I was in New York and the ratio was supposedly two to one, I mean, I have no science behind that, just everyone said it back then.

Most of the women I dated were taller than me, and that's without shoes on. I mean, they were just tall, blonde or brunette women that were really pretty. And like my friends used to joke, "Wow, Jordan really punches above his weight." And the reason was because I had like a little bit of rizz, as the kids say, but also I was in New York City, and I just had like a really good slot on the social hierarchy, being an attorney that lived on and worked on Wall Street.

I was just able to punch above my weight in ways that I would just not get away with in other parts of the country at that time. Yeah. And the women would compete, too, because I remember like, "Oh, I don't want to date you if you date somebody else." And I was like, "Sorry, I, that's the mode I'm in." And I remember instead of being like, "Well, screw you, I'm not going to see you anymore," she was like, "Oh, I'm going to pursue you like a psychopath until you decide that I'm the girl for you."

And I remember being like, "I need to get away from some of these people. [00:53:00] This is, like, unhealthy." Yeah. Because competition is not always sane, right? It's a... It can get crazy

Justin Garcia: out there. No, no. It can feel charming at first and then it feels too intense.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Right.

Justin Garcia: And you brought up something that I think is so important when we think about the kind of complexity of our, of courtship and relationships and using this evolutionary framework.

It's that our relationships, our partner choices, it's the whole package. So sometimes I'll have people say, "Well, how do I know..." I talked to a group of wealthy men once, and they all said, "Well, how do we know if our partners are interested in us or interested in our money?" Mm. And I thought, it's the same thing.

If you have- It's the same thing ... if you're wealthy, then that's part of who you are. So maybe you're short, but are you also charming? And are you hygienic? And are, do you have a good job? And can you provide? And are you intelligent? So there's this whole package. And sometimes When we say things like, "We're punching above your weight because of your height or your weight or you're bald or you're-" Right.

Well, what that really means is you were able to get past the first date. Yes. And because we tend to do all this discounting on the first date, but then you start to know the whole person, you know that whole package, and that's what we bring to [00:54:00] the mating market. So when these guys were asking me, like, "Well, my partner's interested in me for my money," I say, "Well, they are, but that's not a bad thing."

And some of them would hide what their real wealth was or they, because they wanted- Mm-hmm. They said, "I want someone to really love me for me." I thought, well, part of you is that you're able to provide for a partner. That's part of the package.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. I've seen this a lot. I, I had a friend in the UK that he was some kind of investment banker, and he had made i- uh, 50-plus million dollars or something like that, and we were, I don't know, mid-30s?

Mm-hmm. Maybe even early 30s. And he brought a girl, and I remember she wanted to go to this event, and she was trying to convince him to go to this ball, and he's like, "It's 500 pounds to go to this ball," or whatever. Mm-hmm. And I turned to him when she went to the bar, and I go, "Don't you have, like, 50 million bucks?

Who cares about 500 bucks?" He goes, "Shh, shh, shh, shh." He goes, "I told her that my parents pay for my car and that none of the money is mine, and I'm not going to inherit it." And I was like Okay. And he's like, "Trust me. Please don't blow this up for me. I actually like her, and I think she likes me, too." And I was like, all [00:55:00] right.

This is an interesting strategy because you're still, you're lying about something that she's going to be thrilled when she finds out you're lying about, but also she's... You're still lying to this person. You know? Exactly. It's a weird sorta dance you're doing right now, man. And it

Justin Garcia: goes back to the thing we all want, someone we can trust and confide in.

Yes. So then you see, so like, well, like, this is great. This other shoe dropped and you have all this wealth, but can I really trust you?

Jordan Harbinger: What else are you lying about?

Justin Garcia: Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: Exactly. You know? But I do get it, though, because I... Look, the guys who say, "I want to make sure she's interested in me and not in my money," I mean, what they're really saying is, "I want to make sure she's not only interested in my money," right?

That's the only thing that she likes. But it really is hard to separate those things. I've definitely met couples, especially growing up when I was younger, where I go, "Dang, your mom is really fine and your dad is such a schmo, but, like, he's a great guy and everyone loves him and he's really nice." And you look at them and you go, "She really loves this guy.

Like, she really loves this guy." There's, you see them when they think no one's looking and she's dancing with him and playing with him, and they've been married for 25 years. Yeah. [00:56:00] They look really happy. Mm-hmm. And she just doesn't see the schmucky, overweight guy who's three inches shorter than her who trips over his own feet and ties his shoelaces together.

She loves this guy. Yeah. Maybe initially she was like, "Oh, he's loaded and has a nice car. I'll go out with him a couple of times." But, like, over time, this has worked out. Some of these parents, they're still married. I mean, I, I know some of these kids from back in Michigan. They're still together. If she wanted to leave and go start a new life, that ship sailed a while ago.

She coulda done it when the kids left high school. I mean, one of my friend's dads, he went to jail for something, and I was like, oh, man. And they still stayed together.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: And I thought that's the time she's going to bounce. Nah.

Justin Garcia: That's wonderful. Yeah, I think the surprise for some people in our relationships is you look at that whole person, and maybe you want someone who can afford to take you on vacation because you love to travel.

We bring a kind of com- mix of things to all of our relationships, to our romantic and sexual lives, and that's where often what we're looking for. You could be really good-looking, but if you're not intelligent or you're not funny or you're not empathetic-

Jordan Harbinger: Mm ...

Justin Garcia: that'll open up certain doors [00:57:00] in your relationships and your social life.

Or you could be really great in bed, but maybe you're kind of a jerk in other settings. And so you can excel in certain areas, but one way to think about our relationships and courtship is it's a market, and there's a whole bunch of cards that you bring to this game. Mm-hmm. And it's that combination of how those pieces fit together and how, for the person across the table, how their pieces fit together, what they're looking for.

Maybe they say, "I really want someone I can trust. I really want someone who's good in bed," or, "I really want someone who's attractive. I just..." Or, "I want someone who's creative." Now, many of us want all of it, but are many of us kind of more focused on one area than another? Yeah. And then we look for our person that we can have that with.

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It's that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Justin Garcia One of the guys that I knew who had the hardest problem dating was a super good-looking model who was also a male stripper basically. Mm-hmm. And I remember we would go out, and he was like a magnet. I've never actually seen anything really like this in real life other than when you're with, like, a celebrity randomly doing something.

You see people just... It's almost, like, subconscious. And then all these women would be around him. We loved going out with him because it's like, well, he can only talk to one or two at a time. Yeah. And, you know, the rest of them are waiting their turn. You know, I would shoot my shot. Yeah. But he could never date, and part of the problem was he was dumb as a box of rocks.

And, and he had... I've never met anybody who says the wrong thing by accident in a way that looks [01:02:00] almost on purpose. You know, he would just-

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: This guy had problems. Yeah. Like, he was not mentally all there. Yeah. And

Justin Garcia: when we look at how people rate what they want in partners- Yeah ... in our studies and other studies, one multinational study that looked at 53 countries, intelligence ranks higher than good looks, so

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, this guy was hopeless.

It was so weird because I- my friends and I were like, "How are you not getting any girls? You could beat them off with a stick, and there'd still be a line, but then you open your mouth." We're like, "Your thing is you should just say you don't speak English." "That's what you need to do." Yeah. And so that was his move for a while.

He was like, "No, I only speak Portuguese," and then he'd meet somebody from Brazil, and the jig was up. But whatever, he'd just go to the next one. I mean, we had to tell him, "Just don't say anything. Translate everything through one of us. We'll just do the talking for you." That worked for him, but, I mean, imagine how much work that was for us.

Yeah. Um, so all right, before we get too distracted- Yeah ... by that ridiculousness, you write that humans are wired for social monogamy but not necessarily sexual monogamy, and I would love for you to explain that probably carefully because [01:03:00] some people are going to hear that, and they're either going to panic, or they're going to celebrate.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. Well, that's... I'm glad that at least as long as they hear it, we can kind of think through what it means. And-

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm ...

Justin Garcia: so as a biologist, when I talk about monogamy, now I work with a lot of psychologists and social scientists and, and the public, and often we talk about monogamy in relationships, and we all think we know what it means.

If I were to ask people, "What do you think a monogamous relationship is?" But here's the interesting part. As a evolutionary biologist, and when we talk about monogamy, we talk about two different parts. So we talk about social monogamy, which is pair bonding, what we would call romantic love in humans. Only 3 to 5% of mammals have the capacity to form those pair bonds.

They even have the architecture in their brain, about 15% of primates. So we have this capacity to form these intense pair bonds, and we talk about mutual territory defense, mutual nest building, mutual raising of offspring, that mutual part, and that happens in pair bonds, but also feelings of focused attention, intrusive thought, obsessive thinking, what we would call romantic love.

So that's social monogamy. That's forming an intense pair [01:04:00] bond with a person, typically one at a time, sometimes lifelong. That is a different thing from sexual monogamy or fidelity. And when we're talking about the relationship structure and your sexual behaviors, too often we kind of put them together just talking about monogamy.

But in actuality, when we can understand that there's two different things, different mechanisms, different parts of our brain that are involved in helping us connect with one person to form this deep bond, and also desiring sexual novelty and variation, both being these adaptive levers and sometimes in conflict with each other.

When we can see them through that lens, that there are these two different levers that are involved in our relationships, the bond and the sexual behavior, and they're not always in sync, uh, for me, it just helps look at our rela- our romantic and sexual lives with an entirely new lens and understand those tensions.

So for some of us, you could feel deeply bonded to someone, but you can find yourself drifting because you get-- you want novelty and excitement. Maybe you get bored. Yeah. Maybe you cheat. Maybe you've-- you're interested in someone [01:05:00] else. Maybe you open your relationship and you engage in negotiated non-monogamy or consensual non-monogamy, it's sometimes called Used to be called ethical non-monogamy.

Researchers said, "Whose ethics?" Then it was called consensual non-monogamy. Yeah. Researchers said, "Who's consenting?" So now we say negotiated non-monogamy.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Yeah, because I was going to say I've never heard of the other ones, but those are complicated, man. Oh, yeah. I always feel like there's also... You know, you see these f- Reddit threads- Yeah

all the time where it's like, "Oh, my husband decided that he wanted to do this, and it just turned out he wanted to bang his secretary, and then I finally tried it, and I have 8,000 dates lined up, and then the guy wants to close things up because it didn't work out the sec-" It's like, oh, my gosh. Come on, man.

You see that every time. There's also... I think there's then a whole subreddit of, like, open marriage regret basically, where people go, "I should never have done this," and it's all these other people being like, "Yeah. Oh, here's another good story about somebody venting about how this blew up in their face."

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: So I don't know.

Justin Garcia: We found in a national sample, one in five Americans have at some point had an, some version of an open relationship. Wow. A lot of them, I think, were younger and testing, but actively in it is a much lower number, and I [01:06:00] think that highlights that some people structure their r- intimate lives in a way that it works.

But for a vast majority of people, it's a really challenging structure to maintain.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. How much relationship misery comes from pretending that the monogamy thing is both, just encompasses everything, sexual monogamy, pair bond?

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: How much relationship misery comes from just pretending that these are the same thing

Justin Garcia: basically?

Yeah, and I think it's a lot because when we can start to recognize that you can be deeply bonded to someone, but maybe you find yourself bored or wanting novelty or interested in someone else, what we do is we start to do what psychologists call the deficit model of relationships or infidelity, and we assume that, oh my gosh, there's something wrong with my relationship because I'm interested in someone else or something else.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Justin Garcia: Not necessarily. That's not necessarily true. What it means is that you're craving some novelty, so yes, you could follow through with this deficit model and just be bored all the time or upset or cheat or try opening your relationship, or you could do what we found in our c- study of long-term [01:07:00] relationships that were just characterized by high degrees of passion.

What we found in that study was these are people that they take that desire for novelty and variation, and they pull it into their relationship, and they say, "You know what? We're going to take a vacation. You know what? We're going to try a new recipe that we've never tried before. We're going to take a walk in a park that we've never been to."

You don't necessarily have to go to the other side of the world every three months for a vacation if you can't afford that. Lots of things you could do, but introduce novelty. Introduce variation in the context of your partnership. Maybe you try a new sexual position. Maybe you cook a new recipe. There's a lot of scope of what that variation and novelty is, but you do it in the context of your partnership.

And those are the people that had, they were intentional about watering the grass and of their relationship. They were intentional about finding things that were exciting. Those are the people that had high passion. So to your question, Jordan, it's the perfect question that we all need to be asking in our lives, in our relationships is, yes, we can find ourselves feeling pulled in other directions.

That's not necessarily bad. It's not necessarily a problem. The [01:08:00] problem is when we just ignore it- Yeah ... and we let ourselves feel pulled and pulled and pulled. We have the capacity. We have these big forebrains we also evolved. We have the capacity to make decisions about what we want our relationships to look like- Yeah

and how we want them to feel.

Jordan Harbinger: You've got a good exercise in the book, the me, you, us audit. We don't have to- Yeah ... go into it here, but I just want people to know there's practical stuff in the book where people can kind of go, "Okay, here's a question I ask myself or my partner or both," and I think that that stuff is quite useful.

So if, if this is- Mm-hmm ... resonating with people listening or watching, they can go and grab it, and the book is in the show notes, and please use our links, yada, yada, help support the show. Okay. You describe an intimacy crisis in the book. What's the evidence that we're not just complaining about modern dating but facing something deeper?

Justin Garcia: Yeah. I think when we look across all the evidence, this is, I opened up The Intimate Animal thinking about some of these issues. When we look across the evidence, we talk a lot about this loneliness epidemic, its impact on our psychological and physical health, even though we're living in denser arrangements than ever before.

For me, I want to take a, kind of a step back in thinking [01:09:00] about the social behavior of us as a social primate. Mm-hmm. And the reason I called the book The Intimate Animal is the animal within, how do we connect to our world around us? What I think we see is it's the quality and the depth of our relationships.

In many ways, we're more connected than ever before in our evolutionary history. We can go on social media and there's 1,000 people that are right there, for some people, many of us. But are those people that would be there if you need them? Are they there to hold your hair back if you're, have food poisoning?

Mm. Are they there to take care of you? Are they there to- really witness and listen to you? Do you feel seen and heard and known by them? That's what we see that people don't have. So for me, it's bigger than just loneliness. It's more about how we're engaging with technology, how we're engaging with socially, how we're maintaining and prioritizing and investing in our romantic and sexual lives, but just how connected we feel to the world.

We're all zipping by each other. You could be on the subway and see 3,000 people, but do you feel connected to any of them? That is what we need.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course we don't, right? I, I [01:10:00] think, man, this is, there's a lot we can dive into here. I've got to pick my channels. I would love to know what... This is, I'm putting you on the spot.

I feel a little bit bad, but what would dating app companies really rather we not think too hard about?

Justin Garcia: It's a really good question. The challenge is that it is the most common way people are meeting.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Justin Garcia: So I think depending on who you talk to at those companies, some will say, "Yeah, people are frustrated with courtship and dating-

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm

Justin Garcia: and they're blaming the apps, and the issue isn't really the app, it's cultural. It's that dating and culture are changing about our expectations." Others would say, "Well, the apps are gamified. Some of them are gamified, so we're feeling this pressure, like we're just swiping, swiping, and not engaging." That said, the apps are not monolithic.

They're very different. There's very different apps. They have different flavors. The average American is on three different dating apps at a time. So they kind of do different things, so I'm always a little bit cautious, not just because if we work with them and they fund our research, but because it really depends on what app- I see

what your goals are, what age you are. But we do know people do [01:11:00] struggle with s- so much data and so much information. But it also depends on what you're looking for. One of the challenges that we know that people have, and this comes up in courtship, it also comes up in maintaining a relationship, is what psychologist Eli Finkel calls the all or nothing marriage, or the suffocation model of relationships.

And that's that we're often looking for someone who can do everything.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm.

Justin Garcia: You want someone who can be my confidant and support me in my career and cook a good meal and take care of me when I don't feel well, and have a lot of passion and be great in the bedroom and hold my hair back when I'm sick, and also want to have sex with me the next morning after I was sick.

We have this expectation that our partners can do everything. Now, our ancestors relied on our social networks and broader social groups to do some of those things, not just your partner. So today, many of us look at our partners and we have just, frankly, unrealistic expectations of what a relationship is and can be and should be.

Jordan Harbinger: What do dating apps understand about our psychology that the average user does not?

Justin Garcia: Oh, that's an [01:12:00] interesting question. I mean, I think fundamentally that they understand that we are motivated to find partners.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Justin Garcia: And I mean, at the end of the day, they are really introducing apps, and I think that users often go on them and they think, "This app is going to pick my spouse.

This app is going to find me love." And none of the apps can do that. None of the algorithms can do that. We know that from studies. They just can't do it. What they can do, what they should promise to do, is find you people that you can then use your human brain to build a connection with. But if we think of them as introducing apps, as ways to initially sort through the noise and connect with people, they actually do that pretty well.

If we think of them as finding the love of our life, they shouldn't promise that because they can't deliver on that promise, and most of them don't. I would say most of the big companies don't promise that, but that's what a lot of us walk around thinking that they can and should do. But that's the human brain.

That's the dynamics of... And there's all this other stuff that goes into relationships. Sometimes it's timeliness. Sometimes you swipe on someone and you're perfect, and you say, "But I have to go to med school [01:13:00] for four years and I'm going to be out of the state," and we're just, the timing just doesn't work. So there's all these other factors that play in real time in relationships.

Jordan Harbinger: I think for guys, timing is, is a huge one. It, it probably is for everybody, but I, I remember early in my life, probably in early 20s, a friend's mom, I think, had said something, or grandmother had said something, like women are always, they're looking early for somebody they want to fall deeply into and it could happen with any relationship that they're in.

And guys have, like, an on/off switch, where it's like they're dating casually and then one day they're like, "You know, I should probably settle down." And it's like the next person they meet or the next couple people they meet and it's like, yep, okay, and they get married. And look, confirmation bias and stuff like that happening when you observe this, of course, but I feel like I've seen that a lot.

And for me personally, I really was, like, casual, casual, casual, casual, casual, casual, casual. You know what? I should probably settle down. Got married to my wife, like. You know, dated, started dating her, like, within three months. I met other women then, too, but within three months I had met my now wife. And it was like, [01:14:00] was that a coincidence?

I think I did have a mental shift. And one of the things she- Yeah ... said early on was like, "Hey, I'm looking for something serious. Are you going to casually date? Because I'm not going to waste my time. I don't want to waste your time." And I was like, "Huh, let me sleep on that." And I did, and I was like, "Nah, you're right.

I, I should probably settle down." And then that was it. That was really it. It was like flipping a switch.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. And often it's responsive to our environment. So often when those switches happen, it's often because we meet someone and there's something about them that makes us want to switch those switches. I see.

It's actually kind of similar to what you see with people with substance challenges.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Justin Garcia: And they'll say, like, "Okay, you'll quit when you want to quit, not about when your whole family or your friends or your employers want you to quit." Same thing in our relationships. Not saying that there's anything bad about...

I'm not a moralist about casual or long-term. There's different ways that people structure their intimate lives. But we can meet someone that encourages us to switch, switch, switch. Same if we just ask people today, young people today, "Do you want kids?" A lot of them say, "I don't know, probably not." And then they say like, "Well, I met someone and I want to have kids with them."

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Justin Garcia: So much of our reproductive lives, our [01:15:00] sexual behaviors and habits, our romantic intentions, they're responsive to particular people.

Jordan Harbinger: How do we separate genuine love from dopamine plus novelty plus, I don't know, whatever else is in there, in the mix?

Justin Garcia: Yeah, I don't think we can actually. Uh, therapists will often say that love is a verb, it's an action.

You have to treat someone kind.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm.

Justin Garcia: And I think that's cute, that's sweet. It's a good reminder to, like, go out of your way to do good things for people you care about, but it's also fundamentally, like, not totally true. So, so love is i- in many ways a neuropsychological state of being, and that is ... You could love someone and you could treat them poorly.

You could love someone and treat them well. You could love someone who abuses you. You could love someone who's, who is, you know, your best friend and confidant. But when we understand that it's a neuropsychological state, it parallels, I wouldn't call it quite addiction, but it parallels in the brain addiction responses.

And in fact, work by, talked about my long-term collaborator, the late anthropologist Helen Fisher, in her studies of fMRI brain scans of people who are romantically rejected, their brain looks remarkably like someone going through cocaine [01:16:00] withdrawal.

Jen Harbinger: Wow.

Justin Garcia: So there is a lot that goes on in our ... that parallels addiction systems.

All that dopamine stuff and oxytocin and feelgood hormones and peptides. Love, romantic love, passionate love, it's a whole body experience. It's psychological, it's biological, it's cultural.

Jordan Harbinger: What's a red flag that what feels like love is actually, I don't know, anxiety/obsession or some kind of intermittent reinforcement that's not really love, but a, a trick, an illusion?

Justin Garcia: Yeah. So not everyone experiences this, but when we talk about limerence, the early stages- Yes ... of romantic love and passion, some people get the really intense, like, butterflies. Actually, probably a, a majority do. Some debates on, on this in national samples. But you kind of get the butterflies, the clammy hands, the sort of hard time finding words, and not everyone gets that.

The, the challenge, I don't think in and of itself it's a red flag. I, I think it could feel great. It's intoxicating if you have that. What can happen, though, is it makes you overlook things. So when [01:17:00] you're really in that state of what can feel like anxiety, but more positively valenced, like if you had that feeling in an exam you would be like, "Oh my gosh, I'm having a panic attack."

When you have it with a romantic partner you could be like, "I feel alive." Mm. But it's physiologically similar. And it can make you overlook things because you just get that feel, you get that excitement and you're like, "But I didn't realize they were a little bit fresh to the server at the restaurant," or, "I didn't realize that they don't really let me finish my sentences," or, "I didn't realize that they focused on their own pleasure in the bedroom and not mine."

And so you can kind of overlook. So it's not in and itself a red flag. I love that you asked this, but it can make you overlook all the other red flags that are around.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. That's a good way of phrasing it. What is behavioral synchronization? What is this, and why does it feel like intimacy or the, at least it feels intimate, the be- that synchronization?

Justin Garcia: It is. It's something we see in a lot of species, and I actually love it. I'm, on the other side of my screen right now, I have a seahorses that friends of mine gave me. Uh, weedy sea dragons do this, seahorses, a lot of [01:18:00] species do it.

Jordan Harbinger: You have living seahorses or you just have

Justin Garcia: dead- No, no, no ... frozen whatever.

I've, I've-

Jordan Harbinger: Dried out

Justin Garcia: No, I have a pic- picture of them.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, okay. Not the ... You know-

Justin Garcia: I wish I did ...

Jordan Harbinger: the next flex for you is going to be a tank of seahorses in it, I

Justin Garcia: think. Now I want that. Yeah, man. I'm going to... I can't wait to hang up and run downstairs and be like, "Guys." It

Jordan Harbinger: beats a, beats a watercolor of waterho- or seahorses whatever you got.

Can I

Justin Garcia: get some seahorses in

Jordan Harbinger: here? Yeah. Or just put it in your, your contract when it comes up for

Justin Garcia: renewal. Yeah. I think they're hard to keep, but that is cer-

Jordan Harbinger: They might be.

Justin Garcia: But they're a great example of they do a mirror dance in their courtship process, and they move, they synchronize. Now, we also see it in big flocks of birds.

We do it. We do it on the dance floor, which is why we often think that dancing can be erotic. And it's when you can sync to someone else. It's also why, you know, when you're on a Zoom call or when you're on a podcast, you're in with someone and you're just out of sync with each other, it can feel just awkward or tense.

That happens to all of us in all sorts of social interactions. When you feel like you can sync with someone, when you're picking up the kind of give and take of when to speak, when to pause, you feel connected. You feel ... Now, that happens a lot in our romantic and in intimate sexual interactions as well. I mean, [01:19:00] when we're kissing, 50% of people have kissed someone and known instantly whether they had chemistry.

Now, I actually don't think it's a great measure, but 50% of people say that they know instantly.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm.

Justin Garcia: So s- behavioral synchronization is when we can kind of really sync with another. And I'm, as I'm talking, I'm rocking in my chair because I think of it's that give and take, whether you're dancing, whether you're talking, that you feel in sync with someone.

It's actually a gift. Some people are much better at it than others, what psychologists call super synchronizers. They're the ones that can really work a room or a conference or a, a meeting really well. But we look for that in our relationships, and when we're out of sync with someone, we're just like

Well, that's when we talk about chemistry. Oh, I had no chemistry with him on the dance floor. I had no chemistry. Based on what? What was your assessment? Mm-hmm. Often it's behavioral synchrony.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's interesting. So are there people that do this better than others with literally anyone?

Justin Garcia: There are. And that's some studies that have, psychologists have been looking at, that they can just master social, particularly groups, much better.

They can kind of synchronize. They know how to ... They're kind of more honed in on ... Sometimes we talk about emotional intelligence or- Mm-hmm ... there's something about [01:20:00] this super synchronizers. They just really can hone in. They're the ones that tend to be really charming on first dates when we're really kind of anxious.

They can just know how to interact with different people. They're also, like in my line of work, they're the people who are really good fundraisers. And, like, you can put them in front of anyone, and they just know how to make someone feel comfortable and connected.

Jordan Harbinger: I kind of feel like I have to do some of that on this podcast.

Justin Garcia: Yeah, you do. You do. That's what, that's what makes you good at it, right? You're able to talk to a lot of different personalities, a lot of different skills, and how do you pull something out of them? How do you connect

Jordan Harbinger: with them? Yeah. Having read the book helps. But also, yes, I, I f- In fact, I feel like when I was dating, I had to do a lot of this, and I had, when I used to teach some of the dating stuff back in the day with my previous career, I had to do some of this, right?

And it was like- Yeah ... okay, make sure you talk to the maître d' and, like, get a good rapport going with the server and, like, uh, go from the professional into a little bit more of, like, a friendly vibe, and then that'll make everyone relax, and you have to do all this stuff. Basically, I had to teach A lot of what super synchronizers probably do totally naturally without even thinking about it.

And I was like, oh, here are some of the things that they do. Let's practice these as [01:21:00] skills. And eventually it becomes a part of your personality because it becomes a habit, which I guess is fine. But yeah, it worked really well. I mean, it works super well.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: And it works extremely well in dating. It works extremely well when you're making friends.

It doesn't have to be romantic at all.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I do wonder how much of attraction is conscious preference versus, I don't know what you would even call it, body level data or something like that, or f- can you even measure that?

Justin Garcia: Yeah. Sometimes we're vibing and it's synchrony. It's really just sort of- Okay

we're kind of f- following each other's movements or picking up on conversation. But some of that is also all of the information, and I think it's one of the challenges with technology and dating apps, is that we, courtship processes for our species involves watching someone's body language, hearing their voice, smelling them, perhaps touching them, perhaps tasting them.

So we invoke the bodily senses- Mm ... in courtship process. And sometimes there's something there. There's something about someone's voice or something about their body language, or it's their social network. So how we take in all that information, we can have our list. I really want a partner who [01:22:00] can do this with me.

That's conscious, that's cognitive. That's where saying, "Here's what I'm looking for. Here's what I'm putting in my profile. Here's what I'm telling the matchmaker I want." But then when we actually interact with people, who makes us feel psychologically safe? Who makes us be our best selves? Who makes us feel more charming?

That is all about human interaction. That's why I say we're the intimate animal. That's where it's this almost biological a- animalistic way that we think about what is sociality? How do we connect with each other? And this, that is so much a part of understanding our intimate lives. Yes, we could talk about what we want.

We can think about what we want. We can build the lives that we want with people. But there's also a lot of it that's just how do we respond to each other at a core biological way.

Jordan Harbinger: Can we mistake or sometimes mistake synchronization for actual compatibility?

Justin Garcia: That's a good question. I never thought of that.

At different points in a relationship, we can often mistake signals and cues, and so sometimes we could say, "Oh, we were great on a dance floor. We were on the dance floor and we were so in sync." Now you might feel passionate. If you've ever been on a dance [01:23:00] floor with someone and you really sync with them-

Jordan Harbinger: Uh, it does not happen to me on dance floors, my friend.

No, sir. Negatory.

Justin Garcia: Well, somewhere. If you're anywhere, right? Yeah. But if you feel that, it's erotic, and maybe there's different contexts for different people. that you can then sometimes what we can do is we start to build love stories. So that's where we could start to say like, oh my gosh, we were on the dance floor.

And one of the stories I tell in the book is this woman was on a dance floor in Jamaica and she meets this guy and it's, you start to build this whole story of what our relationship's going to be like and how everything else. I think we all want to be cautious that love takes time. Healthy relationships take time.

Getting to know someone takes not just those second and third dates, but takes time. So you want to keep accumulating information. And sometimes you can have these early interactions, whether it's synchrony or how someone smells or, and we could take that data point and start to imagine our whole life together.

Or you could have a hookup, you could have a sexual event, and it's got great chemistry, and then you, you assume that you can have a great relationship. And being in love with [01:24:00] someone and being attracted to someone is not the same as a healthy relationship. One of the hard lessons many of us have to learn.

So I think that's where we want to be cautious. It's an important data point, but it doesn't necessarily tell us everything.

Jordan Harbinger: Dating apps have turned romance into a slot machine where the prize is occasionally somebody named Brayden holding a fish. So before you doom swipe your way into carpal tunnel syndrome and a restraining order, let's take a break for something more reliable

We've also got a subreddit for the show over on the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. You can discuss episodes, the show itself, or just share a dank meme or inside joke. Feedback Friday threads are especially popular. That's over on the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. Now for the rest of my conversation with Justin Garcia I keep hearing from really, I call them annoying, but they're worse than annoying.

They're these influencers, right? Most of them are guys, I guess. I don't know what you would even call it. Some of them are red pill, if you know what that is. But they'll say something like, when a woman or person in general engages in casual sex, it damages [01:25:00] their ability to pair bond. Have you heard this nonsense the- I think, nonsense theory before?

Justin Garcia: Yeah, I've heard it, and it is nonsense. There's not a lick of evidence to suggest it's true.

Jordan Harbinger: That's, yeah, I was curious about that because people will really lean into this. What I find ironic is they're also teaching guys to, like, go after as many girls as possible. But by the way, if she actually sleeps with you, then she's trash and you should discard her immediately because she's not going to be able to pair bond.

So it's like, go out and sleep with as many women as possible, but anybody who would actually be with you, you need to get rid of. I mean, it's like wow, this is, I can't think of a better recipe for being a miserable, lonely piece of crap guy.

Justin Garcia: You said it.

Jordan Harbinger: Perfect formula for that.

Justin Garcia: Yeah, you said it. And that's just what happens when we don't have data, when we don't have enough research or thinking about really the complexities of our romantic and sexual lives.

We create these mythologies. But then we start acting in these ways that are kind of really-

Jordan Harbinger: Yes ...

Justin Garcia: unhinged at times about what do we want and who are we pursuing, and then, oh, you did this on a date or you did this sexually, so that means that I can't have... There's plenty of good data that people who have hookups then have healthy and happy [01:26:00] relationships, that people's sexual histories don't necessarily impact their relationships or their reproductive lives.

But we create this mythology about what it might mean. And we forget, then, all the context. Like, maybe you met someone, maybe you have a five-date rule, but maybe you had too many cocktails on the first date and you ended up having sex, but you want a really meaningful relationship with them. Or maybe you really want a meaningful relationship, but you met someone and you just wanted to have sex with them that night.

And so it's all sorts of complexity that happens. And when we read too much into it, we're just kind of playing a fantasy game.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with guys' insecurities, right? Like, oh, I don't want a woman that's slept with a bunch of other guys because some of them might be better than me or whatever in some way, and, uh, that she'll be thinking about them when she's with me.

And so I'm going to come up with this ridiculous fake pseudoscience nonsense that says that anybody who does that, there's something wrong with them and I should pre-reject them. I mean, it's just a really unhealthy way to look at things.

Justin Garcia: It is. The most important data point if you're in a relationship with someone is that they chose you and you chose them.

Yes. That is the most important data

Jordan Harbinger: point. I had plenty of long-term relationships that started off as a hookup, and I remember there was one [01:27:00] girl that I dated, again, in New York, who I dated and I remember in the morning being like, "Crap, I don't remember her name and we hooked up last night," and like, "This is awkward.

Oh well, I'm probably never going to see her again." And then I saw her again and she was really happy, and I was like, "Hey," and we hung out as friends and with her friends, and I was like, she's really cool. And then I took her out on a real date. And then I w- I remember dating her for a while. And my friends were like, "How did you guys meet?"

And I was like, "Okay, uh, we need to come up with a th- a story where we sort of skip the first time where we actually met because it makes us both sound like trash." And then we'll just go into this thing where we just say we met through friends instead of I met you at 3:00 in the morning on St. Patrick's Day, right?

And I remember- Yeah ... doing that because it was like a hookup that turned into a relationship. And I wasn't like, "Oh gosh, she hooks up on the first..." I mean, that was okay, but that's what I wanted to do. So how- Yeah, yeah ... can I get mad about that? Mm-hmm. I don't know. You planned a zip line first date. Is that a sex researcher's idea of romance, or were you kind of like trying to hack the nervous system with some [01:28:00] excitement?

What was going on there?

Justin Garcia: Yeah, both.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Justin Garcia: So, so what researchers do is we think, we do a little biohacking here and there. Okay. And the reason we went on this date, it was someone that I knew, I actually had built, I had a friendship with, so we knew each other. Actually, a lot of people date friends first. Uh, having that core connection as friends can help.

But we hadn't really moved into a more romantic or real clear dating context. And the challenge when you start dating friends is, how do you really know? Are we just still friends? Are we getting... Is the relationship moving to a new place? So we planned this date And I went zip lining because of this principle known as misattribution of arousal.

Mm. And that's that when we're with ... It's actually the same thing that long-term couples do, just in a different way, that they're doing things for novelty and excitement. Going on dates, going to dinner and a movie. Well, going to a movie is actually a terrible date because you're just sitting next to each other- Yeah, you can't even talk

and you're quiet. And sometimes dinner can be nice, especially getting to know someone or a meal or a coffee or a cocktail. If you can do a little something that's fun, that gets the nervous system going, a little bit of excitement, maybe a little bit [01:29:00] of, uh, shock. So zip lining is good because you get a little bit of an anxiety response and a little bit of excitement, and you're kind of screaming as you go, and you're outside.

You're talking in between the zips. I only used that once, but it was a really great way. And I think when we think about dates, doing activities, particularly ones that can be, you know, shared activities, you just start to build a connection in a new way and a lot faster.

Jordan Harbinger: Why do novelty or, uh, slash mild fear slash adventure sometimes make people feel more attracted?

Is it because of the time dilation where you feel like you've known them longer because you've done a lot of things you normally don't do? I mean, what's happening there?

Justin Garcia: Part of it is physiological. So when we think about what happens when people are in love, when we see a rise of the dopamine sys- uh, in the increased dopamine activity, sometimes, uh, particularly in early love, we see a drop in serotonin.

So you can get those same responses when you're doing activities. So it's, I mean, it can happen in group sports, it can happen with a little bit of risk. It can happen actually with sexual activity, which is why some people say sex itself can start to stimulate feelings of [01:30:00] connection. So doing those things like those kinds of activities that are a little bit exciting, you start to associate with that person, and then you start to

I mean, I think the thing that's so interesting about the data I shared earlier, 70% of people have fallen in love with someone they didn't initially think they could. What it means is that we tend to not realize that around us there's opportunities. We found that in the pandemic. One in four people had sex with a non-romantic roommate, and because maybe you p- just would've never thought of them as a potential partner before the pandemic.

Jordan Harbinger: Until they were the only person you could see besides the DoorDash guy every week.

Justin Garcia: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So often we just don't realize that within our networks, that there are often, not for everyone, but for many people, there are potential intimate partners. And we don't necessarily see them even though they're right there.

So things like zip lining, it helps you see the person in a new light and you're like, "Oh, oh, there's something a little bit more fun, more exciting about this person than I remembered."

Jordan Harbinger: Where is the line between creating sparks and manufacturing false intimacy? And I'll give you something to play with here.

When I was, again, you know, in [01:31:00] my 20s dating phase, one of the things that me and my crew w- were fond of doing was creating something that was a little bit adventurous, right? So it'd be like, "Okay, let's meet here. We're going to go for a drink." And then we would go to this place with, like, a really good view of Brooklyn that was near my place coincidentally, right?

And then I'd be like, "Oh, I want to... You think this view is great. Let me show you something awesome." And we would go up, and she's like, "I'm not going to your apartment." And I'm like, "Relax. We're not going to my apartment." And we'd go up on the roof, and there was a way to get out on the roof, and it was, like, not a public roof deck or, or even a roof deck for us as residents, but you could get up there.

And then you could go up to this almost, like, spire, for lack of a better word. There were railings, but it was a little bit dangerous feeling, and it was like you're not supposed to be here. But it was still clean, still safe, and had a view, like a 360-degree view of all of Lower Manhattan on a good day.

It was nuts. I'd bring a speaker up there and play music and stuff, and sometimes if it was just the crew of friends, we'd, like, dance up there and have a few drinks. But I'd bring a girl up there, and she'd be like, "Wow, this is crazy." And I'd say, "Hey, I've got to use the [01:32:00] restroom. You can stay outside if you want."

And she'd be like, "No, that's fine." Then we go down to my apartment, and then she'd see my apartment, and we'd use the restroom, and I'd be like, "Do you want something to drink?" So I had this sort of, like, mapped out, right? And it was pretty good and had a pretty good rate, and I gave the, them the option to sort of bail at any moment if they weren't feeling it.

But by the time we ended up from, you know, walking from Midtown or whatever to the Village to the view spot to the drink spot to my building then to my place, I was like, "This is happening." So what's the line between creating sparks and manufacturing false intimacy and using time dilation to make it feel like I've known this person for a week?

Justin Garcia: Yeah. I think what's interesting about that ex- I love that example, and let's use that one. What, what's great about that is that- It's not like it's just manufacturing spark. You're creating the conditions. It's intentionality. Yeah. It's not entirely different from the couple who are together for 30 years who light candles, dim the lights, play some music, create a setting for feelings of passion to emerge, to create a little spark.

Doesn't mean you're manufacturing the whole thing. Because in fact, [01:33:00] every part along that way, from the first encounter to going from point A to B, then to C, then to D, then to E, you're building that connection. So yeah, did you have a game plan? Did you have a, "Here's where I'm really going to show the, you know, let's take a look at the whole city, and that's romantic"?

And I think that's just putting some fuel on the fire. That's helping get those sparks going. We are always able to make decisions. We're able to detect if someone makes us uncomfortable, if someone disgusts us, if someone... And along the way, I think what also happens then is if you have a plan, and then you have, say, okay, part C, D, E, is this what I'm going to get?

It means that you're really trying in parts A, B, C to get there. So those first half of the date until you get there, you're really putting effort in because you know you have this plan that you want to get to. So subconsciously you're engaging in all these other behaviors of really talking and saying, "Okay, I want to take you to this next place.

Do you feel comfortable or safe enough to go with me to this next place?" So I actually, I think that these are good things. This is being intentional- Mm-hmm ... in our dating lives. You know, it's different if you're totally deceiving [01:34:00] and lying and taking someone to a mansion that it's not really yours. And you know,

Jordan Harbinger: this- This basically only happened if I was already interested in the person.

Yeah. You know? It's not like every girl got the same- And they're interested in you ... treatment. Yeah, it had to be going well. I mean, that's why we started off with a walk and drink because if I was like, "This person sucks," suddenly I got a phone call, right? And I had to go. Yeah. I'd be like, "This person's okay, but I'm not, I don't really, not super interested in them," and I would say-

Justin Garcia: Yeah

Jordan Harbinger: "I've got to introduce you to my roommate. I think he would really like you." And then they're like, "Okay, loud and clear, pal." And that, that was kind of the end of that.

Justin Garcia: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Man, there's so much I want to discuss, but okay, let's, in the interest of time here, what do you think is going to happen, in brief, with AI? Because man, there's a lot of lonely guys, and women for that matter, that love talking to chatbots. I mean, we've seen this. I've covered this on the show. You know, you see these New York Times articles where people are going crazy w- talking to these chatbots. They're only going to get better, and there's a lot of comments you see from people that are like, "I would love to have this kind of companion.

I don't need all the rest of this stuff in my life." And I [01:35:00] kind of get it. If you're 65 and divorced, why start again with some other schmo when you can talk to the internet?

Justin Garcia: Yeah. Oh my gosh, how am I supposed to be brief on this one? This is a big one.

Jordan Harbinger: You can't be. We can- We, we don't have to be that brief.

But basically, like what, what are AI companions going to get right about intimacy and what are they going to fail to provide is kind of the core beginning question here.

Justin Garcia: Yeah, there's so much to uncover about the role of AI in our, in our romantic lives, in our intimate lives, our, in our sort of sexual experiences.

So much research to do. There's so much to think about. Now, we have a study actually with my colleagues Ellen Kaufman and Amanda Gessman. We have a paper that we just submitted on this issue, including these romantic chatbots, some of them really interesting data in a national, in a multinational sample.

So one of the things we're seeing, and we saw this in last year's Singles in America study that we did, was that- We asked people, are you using AI in any aspect of your dating life or your romantic life? And what we found was that overall about a quarter of people were using it in some way. Help me pick good pictures for my dating profile.

Help me with prompts on a date. But young people, Gen Z, are [01:36:00] doing it at half the rate. They're about 50%, nearly 50% are using AI in some aspect of their dating life. So I think what we're seeing is we're going to really start to see an ushering in a wave of AI in people's lives, how they're using apps, how they're making choices about partners, how they're describing what they want, even who t- chatting.

I mean, I think we're going to get to a place where it's sort of my AI and your AI are flirting with each other to decide if we're actually going to go on

Jordan Harbinger: a date together. That's actually not a terrible idea, right? Instead of swiping, it's- ... I talked to 7,000 AIs and these 100 were actually going to jive with the things that you said.

Yeah. That's crazy to think about.

Justin Garcia: There's a lot of things that are, I think, going on. The challenge I think with AI, on the one hand, I think what is a great opportunity is particularly for people who are neurodivergent, people who have high anxiety, or people with high loneliness, because we know how bad loneliness is- Right

for your psychological and physical health. Does it give you a way to feel connected to something, or to practice, or to say, "Here's how I want to chat. Here's what I'm going [01:37:00] to say"? I think that can be good. I think of it as a kind of bike with training wheels, and at some point you want to take those training wheels off.

If you're using it to practice and to feel okay, but then you take the training wheels off. If you keep them on and you keep using these bots, I think the challenge is I don't think you're going to get the same positive feelings that we get from- Mm-hmm ... true intimate relationships. In part, one of the things we look for in romantic relationships is not just I want to do good for you and you do good for me, but you want someone who...

I want a partner who you expand your sense of self. My worldview's changed, but I also want to know that your worldview has changed. Do we really think with these bots that we're expanding their worldview, that we're making their lives better? Right. I wake up in the morning, and I put my wife's vitamins out, and I make my coffee.

I get her drink, and I- just because I tend to be up first, and I do it. Do I have a lot of time in the morning? Usually not, but I do it because I want to make her life better.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

Justin Garcia: yeah. That's what we do in our relationships. Do we feel that we can do that with these bots? I think that there's an element of optimizing and transaction in them that are helpful for business [01:38:00] but that are going to feel unfulfilling when we look at them as long-term romantic or intimate partners.

Short-term, I think they can be helpful.

Jordan Harbinger: I think what I worry about is these things being training wheels for a bunch of, let's say, a 13 or 12 to, f- I don't know, 18-year-old boy uses it for six years. This bot has no needs. It's never going to cause drama that you have to figure out how to handle. It's not going to have mental illness or developing brain stuff that teenagers have.

It's not going to give you harsh truth about the way that you're showing up. It's going to re- in fact, reinforce all of the stupid, selfish, annoying things that you do. And all of the ways that you try hard are not going to be met with, "Hey, you don't have to try so hard." They're going to be met with, "Ha, everything you say is funny, and everything you do is attractive, and everything you do is great, and I have no needs."

That's what I'm worried about, right? Because then you get a... And then they go, "I'm ready for the real world." And then a real woman's like, "This is stupid and you're insufferable." And you're like, "Uh, okay, I don't know how to handle any of that. I'm out. I'm going back to the robot."

Justin Garcia: Yeah, exactly, [01:39:00] and I think that that's long-term going to be a real challenge for people's relationships.

A little bit practice experimenting, that can be helpful, but I'm not convinced that they're going to be as fulfilling. I think at its core, I'm not convinced as the... At least yet. I could be eating crow in a year, but at least yet I don't think that these technologies can override four and a half million years of evolution and our desire to connect with another.

Jordan Harbinger: Very unlikely. So after studying cheating, heartbreak, loneliness, illness, the weird ways technology's reshaping dating, what still makes you optimistic about human intimacy?

Justin Garcia: Yeah, and I am optimistic, Jordan. I think that it is so profound, our... when we form intense connections, intimate connections with another, how they impact our well-being, our happiness, our satisfaction, both physical and psychological health.

All the evidence suggests we're still motivated for them. I think the great challenge, the great intimacy crisis we're in is We're struggling with figuring out how to establish them, but we want them. The fact that hasn't gone away, and we know that when we can form intimate relationships, we [01:40:00] benefit from them.

So I'm optimistic about that. I think even the technologies that are pose challenges for us, that are distracting us from forming, investing in those relationships, increasingly we're finding ways to use technology to lean in. Use AI to practice, then go on a real date. Use an app to just meet people, then let the brain decide who you're going to be in love with.

I think that's where we can take these things that have been distractions or noise and leverage them. We can only do that if we know more, so it's partly why I wrote The Intimate Animal. I think it's why we have to study love and sex scientifically. It's what we do here at the Kinsey Institute. I think the more we really invest in understanding who we are, then we leverage that to have more meaningful, more enjoyable, more satisfying relationships.

I don't think we're going to stop being motivated for that. If anything, I think the more we know, the more we can achieve that.

Jordan Harbinger: I was going to end there, and that's a great way to stop, but I just thought of this. So okay, you spent your career studying love, biology, and behavior and data. But when you proposed to [01:41:00] your wife, Michelle-

Justin Garcia: Yeah

Jordan Harbinger: what did you finally understand in your body that the science had only previously explained in your brain?

Justin Garcia: There's a lot, and I think since I finished the book, just also how our lives have continued to evolve in such beautiful ways. I think I understood attachment, but once you really kind of experience it, it's different.

The thing that for me that was so interesting was that I always understood as a biologist that marriage is the social cultural contract that's different than the physiology of love, of, of a bonding. But at the same time, in all of our studies, we found that people who were married, like let's compare cohabiting couples to married couples.

The married couples had like somewhat better psychological wellbeing and less stressed and less anxiety. And I was just said, what exactly is going on? It's just a social contract. And I think I finally understood that it's a social contract that's embodied. It is a social contract once you get engaged, once you get married, but it's saying to someone, "I choose you," and it's them saying to you, "I choose you as well."[01:42:00]

In this really profound way. Now, we could argue it's just a complex legal way and you've got these contracts and there's tax advantages, sure.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Justin Garcia: But it does really say that it sort of ramps up the type of connection, and that becomes embodied. You feel that. It's why you see that these stress responses were different, oxytocin responses were different, health outcomes were better, and I just couldn't understand that.

I just thought like, ah, people are too into the construct of marriage. And then I think once I was engaged and then once we actually married, I really felt it. And I think what it is is- That when we talk about wanting someone you can trust and confide in, it's also, it's a way of saying to your partner, "I know that you're going to mess up, but I'm still here.

I know that we're going to both make mistakes. We're both going to fall, but I am here and I'm here to pick you up, and you're-- and I know you're there to pick me up." That really is what the agreement is. That's to me, I think, when I think of marriage, we could critique it as a cultural institution. For me, it's really reminding each other we're here to pick each other up when we slip.

Jordan Harbinger: Dr. Justin [01:43:00] Garcia, thank you very much, man. I've been looking forward to this for a while. You did not disappoint.

Justin Garcia: Thanks, Jordan. Great to be with you.

Jordan Harbinger: Big thanks to Dr. Justin Garcia. His book, The Intimate Animal, we'll link to that in the show notes. Please use our links. It does help support the show. What I appreciated about this conversation is that Justin doesn't just reduce love to just biology, but he also doesn't let us float away into greeting card nonsense where every relationship problem is solved by communication and a decorative throw pillow that says, "Live, laugh, love."

The big takeaway here is that sex is powerful, but intimacy is often the deeper hunger. People are not just chasing bodies. They're chasing being wanted, being known, being part of an us. And when we don't understand that, we try to get intimacy sideways through sex, cheating, control, attention, dating apps, status, sending one more incredibly sad you up text to somebody who's already emotionally moved to another zip code.

So whether you're dating, married, divorced, widowed, heartbroken, touch-starred, or suspicious of your partner's work friend, or in a currently committed relationship with your phone and a bag of [01:44:00] trail mix, I hope this episode gives you a better way to ask, "What am I actually hungry for?" As always, all things Justin Garcia will be on the website in the show notes.

Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Our networking course is over at sixminutenetworking.com, and I'm @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others, and the fee for the girlfriend experience is apparently 20 grand, but forwarding this episode to somebody who needs it is free and significantly less likely to show up on a credit card statement.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.