Science Friday
Hosted by Flora Lichtman and Ira Flatow
An evolutionary biologist weighs in on mating and dating in the age of the apps. Is pair bonding passé? Is single the new married?
3,250 words · 4 speakers
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Happy Valentine's Day. I'm Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday. Ah, February. The days are short, the temperatures are low, spring seems like a million light-years away. You know what would make me feel better? Eating my body weight in Whitman's chocolate samplers while my partner and I stare lovingly at the same screen. And luckily, I can do that because it's Valentine's Day. That special 24 hours meant just for candy and relationships and possibly disappointment. To celebrate, we are checking in with the Kinsey Institute, which has been producing studies on human mating, dating, and relating longer than any other scientific institute. Justin Garcia is their executive director.
He's also an evolutionary biologist, a scientific advisor to match.com, and he has a new book out called The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex Fidelity and Why We Live and Die for Love. Justin, are you slammed on Valentine's Day? Are people just sort of like, we gotta get Justin?
It's funny, I have a friend in the English department who wrote a book on zombies, and we laugh that Halloween is his busy season and Valentine's is mine.
So at the Kinsey Institute, you do this annual survey on singles in America. Tell me a little bit about the survey and what you want to know.
Yeah, so we've been doing the Singles in America study since 2010 in partnership with Match, Match.com, the dating company. They fund the study. It's not people on a dating app. And we look at over 5,000 US singles every year. We're collecting our 15th year of data. And it's really, it's the largest study looking at US singles. We've got over 80,000 people in the sample now. And we look at the attitudes and behaviors of single people. There's, there's well over 100 million single adults in the United States today. It's a huge demographic.
Is that high?
Yes, I, I love that you asked that. In fact, it is. And as an evolutionary biologist, this is really historically unprecedented to have so many single adults moving in and out of the relationships. I mean, we're talking about almost a third of the adult population. So it's a very high number, something our ancestors didn't experience.
What, what does that tell you?
Oh, a lot. It tells us a lot. And there's a lot of implications. There's implications on everything from the impact that singles have on the economy to social life. But the real question is why? Why do we see so many adults that are not in a relationship at any given time? I think there's a bunch of different factors. Some are that it's easier to get out of relationships than in past generations. Divorce is more permissible. But we also see people going through a prolonged courtship period. So just a few decades ago, people would date for a relatively short period of time and then start a marriage. And what we see now is more people spending more time. They hang out for a few months. They're dating for a few months. They're in a relationship for a few years. They're engaged for a few years.
That gives people more flexibility than ever before to find and choose the person that they want.
And to call it off, right?
And to call it off. So the outcome is that there's more people who are moving in and out of singlehood.
You know, as an evolutionary biologist, is that interesting to you? That this, this, that we're seeing this sort of new pattern in mating?
Yes. So I think as we understand how people's relationship structures change, it has all sorts of consequences for how we understand the evolution of love, of mating behavior in psychology. For evolutionary biologists, we're often interested in what does a population look like? How many males and females are there? What are the pressures on mating? What are the pressures on forming relationships? We have so much going on in our lives today. Everywhere in the United States and around the globe, there's a lot of big questions to ask about the impact of our social and physical environment, including population structure and relationship structures, on what intimacy, sex, and love looks like today.
I mean, do you think that there's an argument that people are single more? I mean, partly because of women, women have more choices, right? Like, women can be more independent than they have been able to be in history. Is that a piece of this?
There is. There's some researchers have argued that when more women started to pour into the workforce after, particularly after World War II, that that started to change the, how people thought of marriage. So traditionally, marriage was not always thought of as a luxury. It was more thought of as a need. You needed a partner to weather life and have resources.
Right.
Typically, a male brought in financial income. A female was running the home.
Doing everything else?
Yeah, dividing the labor of maintaining a house and a family. And increasingly, that's not needed. So we're seeing more and more that relationships now are about joy and pleasure and what you want. To your point, you can choose who you want. That fundamentally changes the dynamics in many ways of.
The pressure to how soon you have to partner or who you partner with. We have more freedoms, particularly women have more freedoms than in the past.
How does online dating compare to I R L dating in terms of success rate? Like, are you just as likely to end up with someone that you met online and go on a date with as someone you met in person?
Yeah, there have been some studies that look at couples who met in person in a bar, in a club, through friends, or on an online dating app or website. And then look at the, what the relationship trajectory looks like. Are you likely to stay together? Are you likely to get married? Those numbers are relatively similar. There've been sort of conflicting findings, but online dating is, their relationships are pretty stable. There's a little bit of evidence that if you are, put yourself in the position that you, you fill out a profile and you're on an app, you're more motivated to form a partnership. So the people who are using the apps, and some of the studies are more likely to get into a relationship and more likely to get married because they're already in that space.
Everyone else, you're capturing people who are kind of incidentally dating or maybe not actively looking. So in some of our studies, we separate the active daters versus singles who are not actively dating. The other piece is, do we see differences between online daters and offline daters? And I hesitate to use the word success because I think that's such a loaded term. And what is success? Is it longevity of a relationship? Is it satisfaction with a relationship? But we do see some differences in, in some of those metrics. But increasingly, the folks that are using the apps, because it's so prolific, it's the most common way people are connecting. Doesn't mean there's not problems.
There've been problems reported with them and challenges with all the data for our brain, the process that comes with it. But from what we know, for the most part, in, in a series of different, both experimental studies and then looking at population studies, relationships seem to be just as stable.
I guess it surprises me, Justin, because. I feel like you don't know as much going into a date with someone you met on an app than someone your friend works, has worked with for the last five years. Like, I'm surprised that the outcomes are similar.
Yes, and I love that you bring this up because you, Flor, you're hitting on what is, I think, one of the bigger patterns we're seeing in dating behavior that's really changing. My colleague, the late anthropologist Helen Fisher, and I talked about slow love. And the idea behind slow love is that we're seeing people slow down the courtship process. So they're spending more time getting to know someone. So you hang out for these long periods. You take a while to really define the relationship. You're dating for years, so different from just a half century ago when people would date for a relatively short period of time, get married, start a life together. Marriage was really the start of an adventure. For young people in particular today, marriage is viewed as the grand finale.
You marry someone when you know everything about them. That is a very different context of formalizing a relationship. And I think, to your point, part of that is because people want to get to know a lot more about someone. You're not reaching out to the person who lived down the block that you've known throughout your whole adolescence and your families have known each other for three generations. That does still happen in some places, but that is, does not characterize dating in most of the developed world today. So, so what that means is there's this real urge to, I think this slow love is a pattern of playing it safe. There's an urge to get to know a lot about someone, their ins and their outs. And I think that's a response, an adaptive response, in fact, to, to that very challenge
of how much information do you know about someone?
Yeah, instead of having your grandma be like, oh, yeah, well, I know his grandma and blah, blah, blah, you're just doing a, you're just Google searching for hours.
Exactly.
In every corner of their social media.
Exactly. But on the grandma piece, I want to also bring up, there is not a species on this planet that kin and family members are as invested in mating and dating as the human animal. We do rely on our kin and we do listen.
Anyone with a family knows that.
Yeah, right. I used to teach my relationship science course in the fall semester and on, when the students would go home for Thanksgiving, I'd say, talk to your parents and your grandparents about love and sex. And I'm surprised I never got called in the dean's office. But we, exactly, that people want to talk about that. And your family, for the most part, have, they care about you. They want you to make decisions and be with people that they think are going to elevate you and take care of you and love you. But it is, in many ways, a uniquely human process of our mating lives. Our kin and our close friends get deeply involved.
It seems like there's a clear advantage to having your family involved, right? In terms of, you know, an evolutionary advantage if we're taking ourselves out of today's current culture. Why wouldn't other species do this? Like, why don't we have cowbirds being like tweeting to each other like, you know, to avoid that one?
Yeah, when we do see, there are familial and social dynamics that play out in mating, particularly in some primate species, where you can see that there are families and there's competition going on for access to mates. But part of it has to do with how we understand all of human mating structure. And there's two things going on. One is that we have the capacity to form intense pair bonds, that we farm these loving relationships. And sometimes we take for granted that we even have the ability to love. Only three to 5% of mammals do this. So that we even have the architecture in our brain to feel love, romantic love for someone, is something we should celebrate.
Are you telling me that my cat does not love me?
I think your cat might have some bonding to you, but I wouldn't call it romantic love, particularly for cats.
Well, it's not romantic love, just to be clear.
Or any kind of real deep, deep bonding love is different. Dogs are a different story. For instance, coyotes actually form very intense pair bonds. And wolf packs are often led by a pair bond. I always, I get my feathers ruffled when I hear someone talk about alpha wolves, and I always have to say, it's a pair, it's a couple, it's an alpha couple.
It's a power couple, yeah.
Exactly. So so that we have this capacity to form these intense pair bonds. And often lifelong is really remarkable. A outcome of our biology, of our selection pressures that shaped who we are. So that's one piece of it. But there's another part to the story. We form these intense pair bonds. But anthropologists have also talked about that it takes a family to raise a couple, and it takes a village to raise a family. So the the love bond is nested in these layers of social connection. So we do have these other players that shape our social lives and that shape our relationships.
You know, at the same time, I feel like ethical non-monogamy has never been trendier. What does the data say about that? And how does that fit into this sort of big thesis that you have?
Yeah, and you're right. There was this great study published in the Journal of Sex Research by psychologist Amy Moore that looked at Google trend data on ethical non-monogamy, consensual non-monogamy. Some researchers prefer the term negotiated non-monogamy. That that people have shown there's more interest, there's more news articles, and people are looking it up. Now, on the one hand, I mean, talk to people who are in the 60s and 70s, it was things like swinging and open relationships.
They're like, this is not new, guys.
This is not new. Every generation has their own sexual revolution, and they're each convinced that they have redefined love and sex. And that's in some ways, that's charming, I think. But to your point, we're hearing more about it, and more people are thinking about it. When we look a little bit under the hood of all of what's going on there, that, yes, we found that about one in five, 21% of people in our national study, have at some point had an open relationship of some kind. So it's a pretty high number.
Wow. That's a really huge number.
Yeah, and back to your point about cats, my colleague Amy would say it's as high as how many Americans have a pet cat.
It all comes back to cats.
It all comes back to the kitty cat. And so we know that a lot of people try this, at least incidentally, but not necessarily as a long-term relationship structure. I think it presents different challenges, but.
What I see when we study these relationship structures is still people are trying to negotiate pair bond relationships. They're trying to negotiate the intensity of love, but often by still managing their desire for sexual novelty or sensation seeking. And if we split up how we think about our relationships, on the one hand, there's relationship structure, social monopoly. The other, there's this desire for sexual novelty. Well, one way we can do that is we open our relationships, we get novelty. Another way, some people have done that is through infidelity. That comes with more challenges and problems and betrayal. And then the other way that we could do it is that we harness that that desire for novelty, particularly sexual novelty, and we pull it into our relationship.
And in fact, in our studies, when we look at couples who are long term passionately in love, often they're the ones who have said, we've harnessed our desire for novelty in the context of our relationship. We travel, we do new things, we try new things in and out of the bedroom.
Okay, I want to leave our listeners with some advice. For people on the apps, is there a way, Justin, tell us, you're behind the scenes.
Yeah.
Is there a way to increase your chances of success? Let me not use the word success. Is there a way to increase your chances of finding a good match, of dodging the creepy duds?
Yeah, oh, now I've got to share my insider secrets.
Here we go, guys, everybody buckle up.
Yeah, there are, and they shouldn't be secrets. So when we're looking at the apps and websites, there's a handful of things that happen. One is our framework. And what I see so often are people who put themselves in the search mode. So they say, well, here's what I'm looking for. Here are all my criteria. And then I'll say,
Water skier, six pack, whatever.
Exactly, yeah. Or, I mean, the song that went viral last year, looking for a guy in finance, six, five. Although, interestingly, one demographer, one researcher looked and said, I think there's one single man who fits this category in the whole country. So one is sometimes our criteria are too strict. And in fact, in our research, we know that huge numbers of people have fallen in love with someone they weren't initially attracted to. So as much as we open up our app and we get in a search process, we're looking for someone with certain characteristics. But we can forget that people are also looking for us. So I see people all the time who open their app, they'll show me, how does this look? And I say, you have one picture. You haven't filled out your profile. So one of the biggest pieces of advice, if you're using an app or a website, is you
have to engage with your own profile. You have to put pictures that say something about you, profile information that says something about you. Because just as you're out there searching for someone, other people are searching for you, and you have to give people an opportunity to hook in. You have to give them opportunities to connect with you on something. And I think people make this mistake over and over. They just focus on their own search process and forget that it's a two-way street.
Yeah, but doing that profile is so hard. Let's be real.
Yeah, it is. It takes some self-reflection, and then it's kind of awkward. But that's courtship. That's dating. And that has been courtship and dating for thousands of years.
Justin Garcia is the executive director of the Kinsey Institute and the scientific advisor for Match.com. His new book is called The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex Fidelity and Why We Live and Die for Love. Thank you, Justin.
Thank you so much. Happy Valentine.
This podcast was produced by Annette Heist. Thanks for listening, and I will see you next week. I'm Flor Litzman.
Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated