Transcript

Justin Garcia (on the science of sex) | Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

From Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 42 min · 21,439 words · 402 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Justin Garcia (on the science of sex) | Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard", an episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard published February 11, 2026 (1 h 42 min, about 21,439 words). It mentions 39 people, works and ideas, including Kinsey Institute, Justin Prince, Alfred Kinsey, Intimacy, The Intimate Animal.

What this episode is about

The discussion centers on Justin Garcia's insights into sex research, emphasizing the historical significance and unexpected location of the Kinsey Institute in conservative southern Indiana. It delves into the complexities of personal relationships, the challenges of parenting, and the evolution of societal perceptions regarding sex and intimacy.

Key takeaways

  • Kinsey Institute: a beacon of sex research in Indiana's Bible Belt—proof that knowledge knows no geography.
  • Families adapt like chameleons: stepparents earn trust gradually, transforming from outsiders to in-group members.
  • We evolved to take risks—just like our ancestors, dating apps now blend survival instinct with modern matchmaking.
  • Humans: a social species with preferences. Friends are the self-selected family we never knew we needed.
  • From hunting-gathering to urban living, our social evolution showcases both adaptation and, oddly, some cultural casualties.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Alfred Kinsey, Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana
  2. – 20:00: Alfred Kinsey, Evolutionary Biology, Monogamy, New York, New York
  3. – 30:00: Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior of the Human Male, Kinsey Institute, Judith Allen
  4. – 40:00: Pandemic, Justin Prince, Intimacy, Singles in America
  5. – 50:00: Sexual Orientation, Alfred Kinsey, The Intimate Animal, Cornell University
  6. – 1:00:00: Intimacy, Las Vegas, Kinsey Institute, Alfred Kinsey
  7. – 1:10:00: Monogamy, Intimacy, Pair Bonding, Consensual Non-Monogamy
  8. – 1:20:00: Infidelity, Monogamy, Consensual Non-Monogamy, Pair Bonding
  9. – 1:30:00: Monogamy, Pair Bonding
  10. – 1:40:00: Breakup, Kinsey Institute, Alfred Kinsey, Intimacy
  11. – 1:41:48: Justin Prince, The Intimate Animal

Notable quotes from "Justin Garcia (on the science of sex) | Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard"

  • The Kinsey Institute's on the Bloomington campus about an hour south of Indianapolis. But it's a funny place for like this hot bed of sex research and it is southern Indiana. You wouldn't.
    about Kinsey Institute · at
  • So, now I would love for you to tell us a little bit about the history of the Kinsey Institute. You are currently the executive director of and you're bringing back an old…
    about Justin Prince · at
  • And at the time the joke was Kinsey filled the Berkeley gym more than any sporting event ever.
    about Alfred Kinsey · at
  • And I think for me that's a story of how pair bonds of love relationships can have this incredible power of dictating our sexual lives.
    about Pair Bonding · at
  • And the other thing I wanted to read that I wrote down is we might not even recognize the need for intimacy as a biological drive perhaps because it lives in the shadow of our other primal urge our sex drive. So these are like.
    about Intimacy · at
  • Relationship. Now, often we talk about monogamy, people just talk about monogamy, but for biologists, there's two different mechanisms when we talk about monogamy. There's…
    about Monogamy · at
  • Sex research and relationship science and how does it all come together and using this evolutionary lens, how does it all come together to understand that we are this intimate…
    about Evolutionary Biology · at
  • Wind in the sails. This was such a fun episode. It makes me want to keep doing this job until I'm dead. the book is The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex Fidelity and Why We…
    about The Intimate Animal · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Justin Prince — Person · Main guest · 4 mentions · first at
    Interview subject: executive director of the Kinsey Institute and author discussing the science of intimacy, sex, pair-bonding, monogamy, dating apps, and relationship outcomes.
  • Alfred Kinsey — Person · Referenced expert / historical figure · 19 mentions · first at
    Central historical figure used to explain the origins, methods, and cultural impact of the Kinsey Institute and modern sex research (Kinsey Reports, Kinsey scale, academic freedom case).
  • Judith Allen — Person · Referenced expert (historian) · 2 mentions · first at
    Cited as a scholarly authority on the history of sexology and Kinsey’s work; used to support claims about couple-report discrepancies and interview framing.
    Kinsey's work, but was a leading authority on the history of sexology as a field. And she argued one of the things that happened in the books was that if you when Kinsey would talk to.
  • Rich Seven Williams — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of research on sexual orientation
    Seven Williams at Cornell University was looking at the mostly heterosexuals and we're seeing more and more people who are falling in that category. And it's why you'll see…
  • Steve Porges — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of neuroscience research
    So part of what Steve Porges, my colleague at the Kinsey Institute, calls neurosception. The for the brain to be able to engage in social activity, you need some degree of…
  • Helen Fischer — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of anthropological research
    As we get older. So all sorts of stuff going on that front. my colleagues the late anthropologist Helen Fischer and Amanda Guesselman at the Kinsey Institute we had been…
  • Amanda Guesselman — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of research on relationships
    As we get older. So all sorts of stuff going on that front. my colleagues the late anthropologist Helen Fischer and Amanda Guesselman at the Kinsey Institute we had been…
  • Michelle (last name not provided) — Person · Wife of the speaker · 1 mention
    Provides context about the speaker's family life and support system
    They my parents semi-retired in Bloomington so they're closer to me and my wife Michelle now so and we have an infant so they're helping they're helping with that which is what…

Books & papers

  • The Intimate Animal — Book · Primary recommendation · 4 mentions · first at
    Book by the guest discussing the science of sex, fidelity, and love
  • Sexual Behavior of the Human Male — Book · Referenced work · 3 mentions · first at
    Follow-up work by Alfred Kinsey on female sexuality
    Separate interesting that book the female book was also a bestseller but what was interesting is there were book burnings all over the country but you had to buy it to burn it so it was a bestseller so but this idea.

Companies & orgs

  • Kinsey Institute — Company · Research focus · 8 mentions · first at
    Primary research institution discussed in the podcast, focusing on human sexuality and relationships
  • Indiana University — Company · Affiliation · 2 mentions · first at
    University where the Kinsey Institute is located
    Track, what was how where would you rank your interests in human evolution? So I went to school at Bingmpington University in New York, part of the Sunni system and we had this…
  • Binghamton University — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at
    University where the guest studied
    Went to school at Bingmpington University in New York, part of the Sunni system and we had this evolutionary studies institute. So it was intended from the start to be thinking…
  • Harvard — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at
    University where Alfred Kinsey was trained
    There's I think I'm six. So Kinsey was a zoologologist. He was a Harvard trained zoologologist. he studied gall wasps. He also studied insects. And he was renowned for that. He was.
  • Rockefeller Foundation — Company · Historical reference · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of funding for the Kinsey Institute
    Yeah. that then people had a very ne different reaction and he lost funding. He lost funding from the Rockefeller Foundation at the time really and then there was a big court case that they had tried to ship 31 photographs in the mail. It.
  • Cornell University — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at
    University where Rich Seven Williams is affiliated
    Seven Williams at Cornell University was looking at the mostly heterosexuals and we're seeing more and more people who are falling in that category. And it's why you'll see…

Products & tech

  • Singles in America — Product · Guest’s research study (referenced dataset/productized survey) · 1 mention · first at
    Recurring annual survey of singles (with Match) used as evidence for pandemic-era relationship/sexual behavior shifts (e.g., roommates becoming sexual partners).
    Being in your face on the pandemic piece, just one more piece on that. What we found, we do a big study called singles in America with match every year. And what we found in…

Concepts & topics

  • Intimacy — Concept · Core topic · 7 mentions · first at
    Central theme of the episode, discussing the biological and social aspects of intimacy
  • Monogamy — Concept · Key argument · 11 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a social and biological concept in human relationships
  • Pair Bonding — Concept · Key argument · 5 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a biological and social mechanism in relationships
  • Evolutionary Biology — Concept · Framework · 3 mentions · first at
    Used as a lens to understand human sexual behavior and relationships
  • Infidelity — Concept · Discussion topic · 12 mentions · first at
    Explored in the context of relationships and monogamy
    That a lot of infidelity is situational and unexpected. One study of men who committed infidelity, more than half of them said, I never I wasn't this kind of guy. I think it…
  • Sexual Orientation — Concept · Discussion topic · 4 mentions · first at
    Explored in the context of human behavior and identity
    Pansexual. There's sort of they all have somewhat different definitions. So bisexual is this idea that you the by part you're attracted to men and women.
  • Consensual Non-Monogamy — Concept · Discussion topic · 3 mentions · first at
    Discussed as an alternative relationship structure
    Yeah. And sometimes they don't even know if they even know about it. We found in one of our studies in a national sample and we replicated it was about 20% of Americans have at some point had an open relationship of.
  • Breakup — Concept · Discussion topic · 3 mentions · first at
    Explored in the context of the pain and science behind romantic dissolution
    Academic literature and the evidence that we see. But breakups are so intense and actually colleagues of mine put people who had just gone through a romantic dissolution into an fMRI brain scanner. Oh yeah.
  • Dopamine System — Concept · Discussion topic · 1 mention · first at
    Discussed in the context of risk-taking and social behavior
    Thinking about evolution broadly. I started my graduate studies with a pretty narrow focus. I was interested in the brain. I was interested in the dopamine system and…
  • Dopamine — Concept · Discussion topic · 2 mentions · first at
    Discussed in the context of the brain's reward system
    And they were associated with for our ancestors, they evolved for the thought is they evolved for risk-taking. So that there were some individuals in a population who would go see what was on.
  • fMRI — Concept · Discussion topic · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of brain research on breakups
    Academic literature and the evidence that we see. But breakups are so intense and actually colleagues of mine put people who had just gone through a romantic dissolution into an fMRI brain scanner. Oh yeah.
  • Moore's Law — Concept · Mentioned in passing · 1 mention · first at
    Briefly mentioned in the context of technological progress
    Gathering societies is like they almost bear no resemblance to one another. And so we get to watch our evolution but up against our new culture which is not without its yeah casualties.

Places & events

  • Pandemic — Event · Discussion topic · 4 mentions · first at
    Discussed in the context of its impact on relationships and sexual behavior
    Yeah. You're trapped and you're trapped. But most marriages because you looked at your partner and you thought this is the whole reason we did this to weather uncertainty to respond to storms and you have this.
  • Indiana — Place · Setting · 3 mentions · first at
    State where the Kinsey Institute is located
    It's in the Bible belt. It's Indiana's in the middle of a re trying to do similar to what happened in California by trying to have a jerry so to have all Republican seats. So you.
  • Bloomington — Place · Setting · 3 mentions · first at
    Location of the Kinsey Institute and Indiana University
    The Kinsey Institute's on the Bloomington campus about an hour south of Indianapolis. But it's a funny place for like this hot bed of sex research and it is southern Indiana. You wouldn't.
  • US versus 31 photographs — Event · Historical reference · 2 mentions · first at
    Landmark court case involving the Kinsey Institute
    Still is used today as an example of academic freedom laws and censorship laws. It was a very influential case. It was called US versus 31 photographs because when the…
  • New York, New York — Place · Setting · 4 mentions · first at
    Mentioned in the context of the guest's upbringing and Kinsey's work
    He collected thousands and thousands of specimens of gall wasps. Most of them are in the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Now, can I ask what kind of personality type was he?
  • COVID-19 pandemic — Event · Discussion topic · 4 mentions
    Mentioned in the context of its impact on relationships
    Yeah. You're trapped and you're trapped. But most marriages because you looked at your partner and you thought this is the whole reason we did this to weather uncertainty to respond to storms and you have this.
  • Las Vegas — Place · Setting · 2 mentions · first at
    Mentioned in the context of research on sexual behavior
    Testosterone and estradile estrogen and so that's what first brought us to Vegas then we decided to take the trip an hour out to Perump in the middle of the desert and there's…
  • Perump — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of research on sexual behavior
    Vegas then we decided to take the trip an hour out to Perump in the middle of the desert and there's quite literally a menu as you and The woman who was giving us a tour takes…

Sponsors

  • Allstate — Product · Sponsor (ad read) · 2 mentions · first at
    Mid-episode sponsor message promoting Allstate car insurance quotes and savings; includes explicit CTA and brand tagline.
    Checking All State first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart.
  • HubSpot — Product · Sponsor (ad read) · 2 mentions · first at
    Sponsor segment promoting HubSpot’s customer platform and data unification; includes explicit CTA to visit website.
    North American Insurance Co. and affiliates, North Brook, Illinois. We are supported by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses, Monica, only use 20% of their data?

Full transcript with timestamps

Justin, where are you in from? Uh, Indiana. It's in Indiana. Yeah. Counterintuitive.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Kinsey Institute's on the Bloomington campus about an hour south of Indianapolis. But it's a funny place for like this hot bed of sex research and it is southern Indiana. You wouldn't expect it, but in some ways that's the story of studying sex for 80 years at at the Kinsey Institute was

because we were in southern Indiana in a pretty conservative state and it's in the Bible belt.

It's in the Bible belt. It's Indiana's in the middle of a re re trying to do similar to what happened in California by trying to have a jerry so to have all Republican seats. So you think like how did we how did we end up there?

Yeah. But it's what defines the institute. Well, that was my very first question for you. I think the history of the Kenzie Institute would be really fascinating for all of us to hear because I think we have

vague awareness of it. Yes. Um but but first and foremost, you're a New Yorker.

I'm a New Yorker. What did your parents do? When I was young, I was raised by a single mom.

Okay. And then same. Yeah. Yeah. And and and we're still very close. Talk every day. And uh actually they my parents semi-retired in Bloomington so they're closer to me and my wife Michelle now so um and we have an infant so they're helping they're helping with that which is what blessing

yeah we raised two kids with no family around well my sister but no grandparents.

It's really tough in some ways what's been interesting for me is so we had the baby after I finished the book and uh you have these moments that you'll think well this is why mother nature made these pair bonds so intense like how on earth do you get through this unless you deeply love the person you're doing it.

Absolutely. Um, when I was a tween, my stepfather entered the picture. Did you get a good one?

I adore my step. Pretty rare. Yeah. Yeah, I was lucky. And my best friend growing up hated a stepdad. What's interesting, and I think now when I look at my work and understand like the evolution of family relationships and how um families connect or as anthropologists will sometimes talk, it takes a couple to raise kids. It takes a family to raise a couple. It takes a village to raise a family. that were nested in these social layers that part of that is these degrees of relatedness. And a stepparent when they enter the picture, there's this warming up period of saying, well, you

you inherently have a genetic relationship to some people where aunts or uncles or genetic parents

that you kind of expect that that feedback that saying, oh, you shouldn't feed them that, you should raise them this.

When someone else enters, you have to really build that trust and connection before you start to tolerate. Then that changes. There's something about that that changes. That's what's so remarkable about humans. It's not like you're suddenly changing your DNA that they've become but they become an inroup member. They become a part of a family.

Yeah. And that's what's so interesting about our social lives is that we respond to environment. We respond to context. We respond to who's there and and when and why and how. And uh it's we're an adaptive critic. We are.

It's really true. And um as we'll get into it, as we get into the weeds, Yeah. like how we're living currently versus how we live 300,000 years ago as hunting and gathering societies is like they almost bear no resemblance to one another. And so we get to watch our evolution but up against our new culture which is is not without its uh yeah casualties.

As you got into the evolutionary biology track, what was how where would you rank your interests in human evolution? So I went to school at Bingmpington University in New York, part of the Sunni system and we had this evolutionary studies institute. So it was intended from the start to be thinking about evolution in all sorts of different disciplines. It was housed in biology but including psychologists, anthropologists, um people in the English and literature and history. So I was really fortunate. I had this this institute that I trained in that we were thinking about evolution broadly. Um I started my graduate studies with a pretty narrow focus. I was interested in the brain. I was interested in uh the dopamine system and risk-taking and then the genetics of it and then the evolutionary genetics of it. These different patterns, some risktakers, some people who are neophobic. I was interested in DRD2 and DRD4. There were

these dopamine receptor genes. Yeah. Um and they were associated with for our ancestors, they evolved for the thought is they evolved for risk-taking. So that there were some individuals in a population who would go see what was on the other side of that mountain. So you had some folks that really migrated and they had to have a propensity for risk, but they might die sometimes. So that's the other side of risk. You could find mates and resources and new lands and um but you could die.

So you're into this dopamine reward system whole network and risk-taking and then how does that then where do we go from there? For me, these are big stories about social behavior, the evolution of sociality, the fact that we are a social species. Not all species are, right? Um,

not only are we social, we're preferentially social. So, you like one individual more than another. We have friends, we have people that we we rank. It's not just that we walk outside and we say hi to everyone. We groom everyone. We

we have preferential sociality. And then our romantic and sexual relationships fall within that. It's it's these it's a type of social behavior, but it's a highly specialized one.

So, now I would love for you to tell us a little bit about the history of the Kinsey Institute. You are

currently the executive director of and you're bringing back an old theme which is Kinsey himself was also

uh he was an evolutionary biologist. Yeah. And you're the you're the you're the you're only two, right? How many directors have there been? Five or six. There's uh I think I'm six. So Kinsey was a zoologologist. He was a Harvard trained zoologologist. Uh he studied gall wasps. He also studied insects. And he was renowned for that. He was renowned as this zoologologist. He also interestingly used evolutionary theory in his work. So he wrote an introductory biology textbook. And at the time it was one of the first in the 1930s that used evolution as an overarching framework for the whole book where before that it was a chapter. It was a section. And today we take that for granted. every introbiology textbook, it uses evolution as a sort of meta theory, we call it, as a as guiding principles.

And uh he was just this interesting guy. He hybridized over 200 species of iris. Uh he collected thousands and thousands of specimens of gall wasps. Most of them are in the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Now,

can I ask what kind of personality type was he? Yeah, I love that you're that you asked this. Every so often we'll do an event. Like we have an award in his uh name and we'll do events and people are always like, "Do you have any pictures of him smiling?" like there's not then we have a handful that we'll use and but there's not that many of them. He was very serious. He was a serious academic and I I think because he understood the weight of the research he's did when he transitioned to studying sexuality.

But when you talk to people who were interviewed by Kinsey so the the initial Kinsey reports that emerged and I'll get back to the whole story but when the um Kinsey reports emerged there were 18,000 interviews in total. About 8,000 of them he did himself.

Wow. There's an enormous amount of labor and the interviews lasted between 3 and 18 hours. Some of them were several days long.

Oh my god. I thought we were like impressive for doing a thousand episodes in 2 hours to hear this place.

You're doing great. But Dr. He would do these interviews and when we look at reports from people who were interviewed,

you hear that he was charming, that he was thoughtful, that he really focused on the person in front of him. um that and for some people they say I shared things with him that I didn't share with anyone else that I didn't feel safe to share with anyone else

and um I mean what a remarkable legacy that people their whole lives couldn't talk about who they were or what they wanted till they were in a laboratory

with this renowned scientist and and this idea and this notion that it was secure and safe.

Mhm. So there was that part of him and then there was this serious scientist part of him. Um so when he he first came to Indiana University in 1920 um and was teaching biology and the story of of of Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute today what was then called the Institute for Sex Research was in 1938 he was asked to team teach a course on um kind of a sexual hygiene a marriage course and a couple of universities around the country were starting to pop up these marriage courses in the late 1930s

which is and you point out in the book like a lot of people were married in college back then

so different from today I could lecture 500 students and no one's married. What's a marriage course mean? Like how to

Yes, it was it was meant it was part like sexual hygiene like preventing veneerial diseases, part what to do when you know you want to have kids. And so it was a little bit reproduction, a little bit sexual health,

like vocational training. Yeah. For marriage. People will tell you like there's no book on this or or there's no course on how to be married. Turns out there is.

There was. There used to be. Yeah. And what was interesting was so you had to be like a married student. You had to be a certain age to be in these course. You had to be an upper classman to be in these courses. And people were signing up.

And the thought at the time was well um have that guy in biology. Have Kinsey who's studying you know gall wasps and knows a little bit about sexual reproduction because he's an evolutionist and it's your bread and butter.

Have him do a section of the course. That'll be safe. And I think this is represents the very best of what a university should be even to today. what what a university a research university should be. Students had so many questions that they brought to the faculty that they couldn't answer. They couldn't find the answers in the library or the other books because there wasn't a book um or in the academic literature. So what Dr. Kinsey said is we have to go out and find answers. That's our obligation as academics.

Yeah. Students have questions. Let's go do research and answer them. Yeah. And from that curiosity um from students and from the faculty, they started doing interviews in town in Bloomington and and now we're outside Indianapolis. And we have so much um shame

around sex that we don't talk about perverse and well even sexual hygiene. That's like wild. That's like shameful shaming.

The framing is disease and preventing the disease. Um earlier in my career, I used to write about hookup culture and casual sex. And I was interested in how people were negotiating, young people were negotiating casual sex with desires for relationships and commitment. And like we found 51% of college age men and women, no gender difference, had a casual sex hookup because they wanted to initiate a romantic relationship with the person.

And they didn't necessarily know the scripts for dating or they were they were trying a different avenue to get there.

But for so many I remember giving lectures at the time and so many students this idea was like, well, it's a sexual revolution. And you know, young people are hooking up now. This is maybe 10 years ago. And I thought like, do you know what your parents did when they were in college? You know what your grandparents did in the '60s? Um, and there's this idea of like, no, that every generation has a moment that they imagine that they are sexually enlightened. Yeah. And that no one before them was, but we have a long history of of and a deep evolutionary history. Sex was a part of our lives and people knew about it and they talked about it. They had rituals about it.

They sing for it. They dance for it. they celebrate it because it was a part of reproduction. In some societies, it's tied more or less to really celebrating reproduction and family formation. And in others, what's so unique about humans is that we can celebrate it for pleasure. And

not all species can do that. Even the fact that we can have sex any time of the year, um that women can have sex across the menstrual cycle. A lot of species, females can't uh engage in sexual activity and reproductive behaviors around their ovulation cycle. So there's cases there's a species where the vaginal opening closes.

Um there's species Yeah. Or take rats in a laboratory. The females engage in lordosis. They arch their back.

Um it's only during certain parts of the cycle that they can arch their back enough that a male could.

Wow. So there's all these physiological constraints on mating. Humans are released adaptively released from that that because sex is so tied to our social behavior to our relationships.

Yeah. So as as um professor Kinsey started an or trying attempting to answer these questions what were some of the things that like immediately he wanted to answer.

Yeah. So students were coming with questions. Some were about things that just no one was talking about like pain with with sexual activity. um some were talking about behaviors and he wasn't really interested in identity the way that we think about it today. But what he was interested in is that people's behaviors and fantasies didn't align. So over the 80 years since we've got different methods where we think about that and we unpack that a little bit differently. And so today sex researchers talk about sexual behaviors, sexual um preferences and uh your sexual identities. And sometimes they could be different. So, let's say you're a heterosexual male who's in prison for 20 years. We know that many have a boyfriend or a partner, right? And and there's all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it's loneliness. Sometimes it's safety.

Um, so does that fundamentally change your orientation? And it's a behavior, but is it your preferred behavior if you weren't in that particular context?

Now, that's a case of prison. We see things in military. We see things in populations where there's a sex ratio soldiers. Yeah.

Yeah. There's all sorts of different examples. If you're not going to see a female for four years, you got to start considering other

humans are creative, right? And and what's interesting about that is it doesn't necessarily mean your identity is changing or your or what you think of as your orientation. It also doesn't mean that your preferences are ne necessarily changing. So how we look at behaviors and in fact when we look at big data in the United States if you look at how many men and women had a sexual event in the last year and did they have heterosexual events samesex events there's way more men that have had a a sexual event with another man last year than who identify as gay and bisexual

consensual I assume there were a study years ago by a colleague of mine um and uh the paper that they wrote was called straight girls kissing and the idea was that um two women in bar, you know, two college women in a bar who kiss. And early on, people were saying, "Well, they're doing that for the boys because the boys want this attention. All these young men, they're buying them drinks, they get the drinks, and that's why they kiss in the bar.

It's hot." Yeah. Right. This idea, it's kind of sexy. Is it turning them on? But what these two sociologists argued was

what everyone is forgetting about that is maybe the women just wanted to kiss each other. And by doing it publicly in a bar, as a as a show, you in some ways remove some of the stigma. This public display of it allows people to experiment with their sexualities in a way that doesn't feel safe.

It feels safer because it doesn't challenge this idea that um of who you are, what you really want. So today, uh researchers and the public are really interested in the questions of identity, of sexual identity, of how how do you identify? Even if you do a survey today, you would often be asked, "What's your identity?" That's a different question from your behavior. Um, and and that has all sorts of implications because people assume certain things about your behavior that if you're gay or lesbian, you're engaging in certain types of behavior, but but we know that people are flexible. So, in fact, if you talk to gay and lesbian people, most have had an an opposite gender experience at some point in their life, often when they're younger. Um, but sometimes even later in life, you'll talk to lesbians who will say, "Well, I wanted to have uh we wanted to have kids and we wanted to do it this particular way." Yeah. And it

doesn't necessarily challenge your identity. Now, there's plenty of other ways you can reproduce, too, if you have the resources. Um, you know, we we we a lot of what we think about when we talk about sex and family and reproduction, a lot of it is resourcebound. So, we can talk about in here in LA or in New York, if you're a lesbian and you want to have kids, you can do IVF. Well, there's a whole lot of people around the world who don't have the resources for that and they find other ways.

Um, and and sometimes that's just behavior and there's these realities of how flexible our sexual lives can look. What's interesting when we think about the other apes. So that we're all a little bit different in our sexual behaviors. And when we kind of look just to humans and understand our diversity, I think part of what we can do is also look to the other apes and understand that diversity and say ah there's a lot going on in how we respond to environments. So yeah,

gorillas have a herum mating system. Um chimpanzees are multi male multi-female what we call promiscuous mating. Some people don't like that term.

I love it. Promiscuous sounds fun. Yeah, it's well it was a technical term in the literature and now it's like it's loaded. And bonobos have a similar multi male, multi-female. But then gibbons, the um what are called the lesser ape, the most distantly related of the apes. They engage in social monogamy. They engage in long-term bonds. So

orangutans have a different system. Well, there's the most fascinating because the females get raped.

Mhm. And somehow biologically, I don't know that we know that we didn't know in 2000 when I graduated. Yeah. They somehow select for who gets them pregnant,

which is fascinating. There's still a lot of debates and there's not um there are researchers who study orangutangs. They're just really difficult to study. They are like deep in the forest of Borneo way up high and uh so it is it's coercive mating is rape behavior what we would call in humans and uh there's a little bit of evidence that they do have preferential partners sometimes so that females might even kind of stick around certain males. Yeah.

Um and sort of where they are, what part of the trees and and the males are heavier. So the females try to escape by going higher up in the trees or further out in the branches. It's too far for the males to get to.

Yeah. Once they're full adult males, they're just sitting on the ground. They're too big to get up there.

Big cheeks. And I think they have the highest sexual dimmorphism maybe besides gorillas. Yeah. They're like two and a half times the size of the females.

Yeah. And the sexual dimmorphisms um they depend on certain traits. So what's interesting, one of the ones that researchers have studied for instance are genitals. And um so gorillas have actually really small testes for body mass

because they don't have a lot of sperm competition if you ever seen the the balls on a on a chimp.

Yeah. Exactly. They're enormous. Yeah. Enorly humongous. And because there's a lot of mating and the the sperm of one male is competing with the sperm of another male inside the reproductive track of a female.

Interesting. So they're producing. You better really hose it down if you're Those poor those poor female chimps. And it turns out when we look around the animal kingdom, there's all sorts of adaptations of ways that organisms are responding to this sort of mating.

Hyenas, fascinatingly, right? A matriarchy with a clitoris that looks like a penis.

And they birth through the clitoris. Yeah. And uh and there's I mean wol if you see wolves or if you have a large dog, you'll sometimes know they mate and the penis continues to swell in mating and the males can get stuck.

Um and that's prevents another male from mating in a in a short period. Sometimes we see things that look so wild and there's actually this evolutionary adaptive story

that I think that's what drew me when I try to get deeper and deeper and deeper. What what draws me to it,

it's that there is there is reason to all this. Nothing is accidental. I remember being a first year graduate student and so I did my masters in anthropology and then my PhD in evolutionary biology and one of the cultural anthropologists I asked a question about evolution and behavior and one of the cultural anthropologists looked at me and said do you think we're just like magpies and attracted to shiny things and I thought yes I do and because we do have these these evolutionary tendencies of liking shiny things in fact when we look at cultures around the world why do we have so much shiny art and jewelry and decorate ourselves with Chinese. There's patterns to our behavior that are

rooted in the legacy. Yeah. Undeniable. And this legacy of um of social behavior, but also trying to signal certain types of information.

Um and I think what's interesting for me is that when we understand that, we can also try to biohack parts of it. We can try and improve our relationships if we understand where some of those tensions and touch points are.

Yeah. but also the things that we're really craving that we might sometimes forget.

So, just to speed through Kinsey, I think the part that was really breakthrough or at least my limited understanding of it is like

women prior to his work weren't even a part of the equation. We weren't interested. They were not sexual creatures. They really had no sexual desires. They were mothers. Like he challenged kind of all of that. Is that accurate? So Kinsey was teaching team teaching this course in 1938. Two years in the university president said you can either do this massive study or um go back to teaching but you can't do both because you're interviewing everyone in town about their sex life.

And so he decided to go do this study and then in 1947 um the Kinsey Institute was formed. It was then called the Institute for Sex Research and it was formed to protect the data. Kinsey was very much aware that there were actors, including government actors, who might um want to know who were in these studies. And it was a time you could be put in a mental institution for being gay.

Yeah. Wow. Cuz we had sodomy laws on the books. Yeah. Homosexuality was still in the DSM as a mental illness at the time. And it's 1940s.

Yeah. And he was aware of that. So he felt that we had to protect he had to protect the participants. I say we because it's still so um fundamental to what we do as researchers are protecting the people who share a piece of their life with us in a study.

They're putting so much trust into you. Yeah. And we have to honor that at all costs and we try in all sorts of different ways. And um some are legal, some are how we code data. So actually they had a coding system that you couldn't if you walked in today you couldn't decipher this coding system. Um which is a great reminder of like how you know the obligation and of a researcher. And so 47 they form the Institute of Sex Research as a as a separate nonforprofit 501c3 on the IU campus. 1948 the first book comes out sexual behavior of the human male huge bestseller. Kinsey's lecturing all over the world. I have a picture outside my office of him lecturing at UC Berkeley in the men's gymnasium and it's packed.

And at the time the joke was Kinsey filled the Berkeley gym more than any sporting event ever. Um, people were craving this information and then to your point 5 years later, Sexual Behavior of the Human Female came out. Um, actually a much more theoretical book was interesting because they had to change how they were measuring sexual outlet. In the male volume, they associated climax with a sexual event, which we wouldn't do today either. I mean, there there are things that change in 80 years from research, as it should. It's iterative. We get better.

Um, but they knew instantly they couldn't do that with females because orgasm rates were so variable. So they had to change how they were laying out all the data in the book of just of a did you engage in sexual behavior but then did you also have this climaxes separate

interesting uh that book the female book was also a bestseller but what was interesting is there were book burnings all over the country but you had to buy it to burn it so it was a bestseller so but this idea as you were saying Dax this idea that he could talk about men's sexuality and society was okay with it most of society there were still a lot of people who are not not okay with asking anything and still are not okay with asking anything about sex and relationships and gender and reproduction.

But the second volume when he started showing data about people's wives and mothers and sisters and daughters this idea that women had sexual lives that they wanted sex that they were um craved pleasure but only a quarter were regularly having

Was that a symptom of hysteria? Yes. Exactly. And it wasn't this sort of Yeah. that then uh people had a very ne different reaction and he he lost funding. He lost funding from the Rockefeller Foundation at the time really and then there was there was a big court case that they had tried to ship 31 photographs in the mail. It still is used today as an example of academic freedom laws and censorship laws. It was a very influential case. It was called US versus 31 photographs because when the government well in particular when something is seized by customs it's the the item is named in the court case. It was like US versus candle or US versus Wow. So these funny cases

sounds so stupid. I know, right? And it was the nude there were nude photos and the government seized them because they said this violated obscinity laws and the case ultimately over seven years determined that researchers had the right to have materials that some people might find objectionable for the sake of research. So it's still a a really important it was settled in 1957 is still really important for for all sorts of researchers of all stripes.

Yeah. So Kinsey did so much for us to be able to um ask questions about our sex life. Even the fact that we could sit here and talk openly about love and sex that we had to have people before us. We had to fight for that.

Start that ball rolling. Yeah. For the book burnings, do you know was was it like equally shunned by men and women like both or was it mainly like men don't want to hear about women want it? What? Do you know?

Yeah. I don't I'm thinking of pictures that I've seen. I don't know any numbers on it and it was a mix. There were a lot of men. I'm almost thinking of like today's abortion debates, right? Where you see all these men. Maybe that's where you're going.

Yeah. I just imagine like who's but I I assume it's both. It was both. I was just going to say it's always counterintuitive though how many women participate in things that might not benefit them, but they're benefiting from the larger structure of the patriarchy or this or that.

They're all in a patriarchy. So, you know, there's a trickle down sometimes. And this idea that if you talked about it for some people this idea that you if you talk about your sex life then um some don't want to talk about it for religious reasons but then they maybe have to confront something. One of the things that came up my colleague Judith Allen is a historian who studied u Dr. Kinsey's work, but was a leading authority on the history of sexology as a field. And she argued one of the things that happened in the books was that if you when Kinsey would talk to couples and the researchers would talk to couples and he brought in other researchers, he realized he was a biologist. He brought in anthropologists and sociologists and they had to have this team he assembled um and it was hours and hours of training because you had to be able to ask questions and not make someone feel judged. Um and you

would ask in a way you wouldn't say um when was your last affair? He would say, "How old were you the first time you had sex outside your marriage?"

Oh, wow. And it was really this focus of not invoking that shame. This these behaviors happening all over the world. And so, um, for some folks there was the there were sort of religious views or, um, particular cultural views that shaped and shaded how they thought about their sexualities. Um, and then for others it was because they didn't know could you know I have pain with sex and I don't know if I want to if I could I don't know who to go to for a resource or I just don't want to talk about it.

Yeah. But what Judith Allen found in her historical work was that when he talked to couples you would and it's been turned into jokes since then like comedy bits since then. You would talk to a couple and um women would say, "Oh my gosh, my husband wants to have sex all the time. It's like all the time he's scratching at the door. He wants to have sex. It's three times a week." And then you talk to the husband and say, "Well, my wife doesn't want to ever have sex. she's not interested. We barely have sex. We only have sex three times a week.

Right. Right. And so sometimes the same activity, the interpretation of it could be could be different.

And I think what's challenging is we often don't have the tools or the comfort to talk about that. Yes.

So we see these people showing up um in the therapist chair, which is great. You're getting help. You're getting resources. You have a guide to talk through those, but

they're not necessarily having conversations with their partners about is our sex life working for you? Is it working for me?

Yeah. Um, we did a study at the start of COVID on on people's romantic and sexual lives and most of it was good news. Actually, we did a several studies at the Kinsey Institute. We did one that showed that over close to 85% of married people, their marriage got better during the pandemic,

right? Because we only heard about the uptick in divorce rate. That was early on. And and then it actually it didn't it didn't increase all that much, but most marriages did better. There were some that really struggled or if you were in a relationship characterized by violence for instance, you were really in trouble because you couldn't get out that easily worse than typical.

Yeah. You're trapped and you're trapped. But most marriages because you looked at your partner and you thought this is the whole reason we did this to weather uncertainty to respond to storms and you have this moment that you look at each other and you oh my oh my gosh

we might die but we're going to die together. Yeah. Yeah. You have this fear of death kind of looming together. Yeah. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. We are supported by All State. Checking All State first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking your phone's battery before heading out. That'll get you every time. Of course, your phone dies on the way to meet someone, leaving you wandering around quietly panicking about being in the wrong spot. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check All State first for a quote that could save you hundreds.

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That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out. Yeah. Or paying for a coffee that's 1/5 full.

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So most marriages did well but sexual frequencies decreased. We also found in another study. So frequency of sex decreased. Also the frequency of masturbation decreased which suggested that the desire had decreased. It wasn't just you were afraid of getting co from kissing your partner. And um the one other piece I want to add on this is so the frequency decreased um but what we found was an increase in new behaviors. So when we looked the variety was increasing. So about one in five people, it was the first time it took being locked up in the pandemic. It was the first time they ever turned to their partner and said, "Is there anything we've never tried? Do you have any fantasies we've not talked about? Is it sexing? Is it a new behavior? Is it

I remember interviewing one couple." And the woman said, "My husband and I started having shower sex during the pandemic." And it was fun. And then as we were talking, she said, "Well, we really did it because we it was the only place we got away from the kids for 5 minutes."

Oh, yeah. Out of necessity. Out of necessity. But it was this um idea that the pandemic was this horrible time for the whole world. Um

but relationships, our romantic lives were this this place that we were weathering that storm. And for most people, their relationships, even though if you were just bean counting and saying, "How much sex did you have in the last 6 months as the world was on fire?" You would say, "Oh, maybe couples don't look so good."

But actually, they were doing well. They were responding in all sorts of other ways. the relationship was doing well.

Do you think part of that could almost be comparison? Like people in relationships had the wherewithal to know like I guess I'm glad I'm in a relationship. If I were alone, I'd be literally all alone in my house or apartment right now. Maybe there was some level of gratitude of understanding like oh I have people and that's good.

Yeah. I think I think it was gratitude. Yeah. And also like I think this tension which your book confronts primarily is like this tension between your sexual desires versus your intimacy desires.

So when you're out in the real world you're a observing your single buddy's telling you about it. All these things that you get pulled off of the table I think helps you focus on you know why you give up all that stuff.

Yeah. Is you're not it's not even in your face as much. Yeah. Yeah. And like what's going on in the world? Well, and thinking speaking of being in your face on the pandemic piece, just one more piece on that. What we found, we do a big study called singles in America with match every year. And what we found in that is survey of 5,000 singles. One in four who had um non-romantic roommates started a sexual relationship with them during the pandemic.

One in a pretty high number, right? A quarter of people were And it's boredom. It's safety. It's

companionship. Yeah. Companionship. You're out of options. Yeah. At least you're in your little pod. Um, but it also was a moment that I think for a lot of people, we were looking around and seeing things we didn't see before. And it could be that you're trapped in the house and you have this roommate and say, "I really enjoy living with you."

Yeah. And there's all these things I like about I've never thought of you as a romantic or a sexual partner, but

now that we're trapped here, it's kind of the answer to, you know, we used to debate about this. If you're on an island,

I was thinking the exact same thing. If you're on an island and there's one other person there, Dax is always saying like you will fall in love with them. Like that's it doesn't matter who they are, you'll fall in love with them. I didn't I'm like no, I don't think necessarily, but maybe

we could turn to some of the work on arranged marriage. I think that kind of gives us some insights on that that there has been some work that couples in arranged marriage long term can have just as high relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction

even if you're kind of the only two on the island or the only two that your families decide you can marry.

Now the big myth about arranged marriage in the anthropological literature is most people can reject it. So there is this sort of sense that I mean I think that's why some of the reality shows of arranged marriages the challenge

is in the real world people could say hey mom and dad I don't I'm not marrying that guy.

Yes. And typically families do they want to do what's best for you and there's some flexibility there.

Yeah. My parents have a like half arranged marriage in that same way where it was like two family members saying hey I have this brother. Oh I have this daughter. Let's get them together.

We'd like to see this happen, but Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. We'd love to see it happen, but it's I think it's more that than what people think.

Exactly. Yeah. 300,000 years ago, there was 100 other people to choose from. Yeah.

Right. And now we have this like decision fatigue and anxiety and there's too many options and then you add the internet into that. Now I can see every girl from every town at all times.

How do I know it's the best? There's been a lot of studies trying to understand how people are making sense of all this data in our dating lives. So more people meet on dating apps and websites than through any other venue. So if we ask Americans, we've asked them for the last 15 years in an annual survey um where did you meet your most recent first date? And the internet and apps is the most common way more than church and school and family and friends and a bar. I think last time I looked it was four or six% met in a bar whereas you know over

30% are meeting from apps and websites. So there there's still fundamentally how people are are connecting today. There's all the but you go on at exactly like Dax is saying you go on and there's so many options and what happens is the human brain didn't evolve our mating mechanisms didn't evolve in that context to have that much data and there's different kinds of data. So our ancestors not only would they have a smaller pool to choose from you knew family networks.

You had reputational Yeah. Yeah. like the true social network, the ancestral social network, and you had all this other information. So, we're dealing with different information in today's environment.

And one of the challenges we know is sometimes some psychologists call it cognitive overload, some call it paradox of choice. There's different ways that researchers have talked about it, but the challenge is you go on the app and you start swiping and looking for partners and there's so many. And what happens is even if you start a chat with someone, you're kind of quick to move on to the next one because you say, "Well, I didn't like your, you know, use two exclamation points. Who does that?"

Yeah, it wasn't perfect right out of the So, we're we're sort of discounting perfectly reasonable partners because we have a sense of an unlimited resource. And then we're playing these sort of psychological games of saying like, "Oh, he has a picture of the puppy. I'll like him. It's caretaking." We found in one of our studies that people are looking at teeth as a way to assess your health

um and wellbeing because they're kind of picking little things from photos so that you know or hair shine and hair I'm sure.

So we're trying to pick information but when we think we have so many options and particularly it's this idea when we think it's unlimited the brain just can't turn the lever to say we're we have to start um we have to start making some decisions. And we know this from studies on foraging, how animals look for food in a food patch. And if they have a sense that the patch is ending, that they could see the end of the, you know, the bush of where there's fruit. And then they might early on just look for the best thing, but then they start making some decisions. They realize it's running out. When you have a real sense of an unlimited resource when the brain can't say, "We're running out." You never switch to start to this making decision mode.

This is Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah. He's got unlimited resources. It's not his fault.

Yeah. And not being mean resources in ter I mean he has resources himself but unlimited options options.

Yeah. Virtually every option. Yeah. Yeah. Three and a half billion. So we struggle. So the challenge for so many of us is like we have to grab the brain and and just say okay I'm going to make a choice. So we have to do things if we want to have more fun and more satisfaction with how we use these apps. I think we really have to do things and say, "I'm going to start a conversation today. I'm going to swipe x number of people."

You need a game plan. If you think it's just going to present itself to you, it's not.

Yeah. Because the apps are really um introducing sites. They're not necessarily going to say, "Here's your person who you're going to have a wonderful relationship with." There's too much dynamic that happens in the real world. And there's timeliness. It could introduce you to someone and say, "Well, you're great, but you're about to move to Paris for three years. I don't know if this is going to work." That's the real world for people. There's all these these timeliness factors. There's geography. There's family. There's careers.

So all of that stuff happens that the apps can't pick up, but they can introduce you to, they can connect with people that you maybe can have a relationship with.

Yeah. But then you have to kind of make this decision. One of my favorite studies gave people it was um an experimental design looking at um app app dating, online dating and they gave people profiles and the one group saw a smaller number than the other. I think the larger group saw 24 profiles and then the other group I think saw six. And when they followed up with the participants in this experimental study, the people who saw fewer profiles were happier.

Those that had more were in this was the grass greener on the other side idea. This idea that well there there was someone else I thought was attractive and maybe I should have talked to some of those others. That's just in an experimental design where you have all things considered a relatively small number of more options.

But we get stuck in this idea that Maybe there's someone else out there that I should have interacted.

Interesting. And we forget the golden rule of relationship science. The grass isn't necessarily greener on the other side. The grass is greener where you water it.

And that's the rule for relationship. What a beautiful sentence. And for a date, invest in that date. If you go on a date with someone, don't think about the hundred other options you have on your app. Get to know the person. Have a conversation. Ask about their childhood, about their lives, about their experiences. Invest in human connection. Um, it's why one of the things we've been looking at in some of our studies are second dates and how important they are. I'm a huge advocate of second. Everyone's nervous on a first date. Go on a second date, you know, unless your foot really says, "Uh-uh, go." I mean, really try to invest. Water the grass.

Yeah. I was just going to say, I think of the knee-jerk reaction to that scenario is that it's like there's some greed driving it, but I I would imagine there's just as much of this like loss bias we have.

Yeah. I don't know. It's like I deserve this great thing. It's like what if I picked something that was less like it's it's this weird loss bias thing.

We're just starting to collect some new data. Um it's not in the book. It's some new data that we're collecting on this idea of kind of se self-actualization. And one of the things I think we're seeing uh exactly is is is tied to this. More and more people are saying I need to be perfect to enter a relation. I need to bring this perfect self to the relationship. You have to be perfect in the relationship. I'm going to be perfect. You're going to be perfect. The relationship's going to be perfect. So, we focus so much on working on ourselves. And as a biologist, now all my all the therapists out there are going to say, "Yes, it's important." Not all of them, but I actually think we're working too much on ourselves. And this we're focusing so much on this idea. No, sometimes there's real issues. Sometimes people are dealing with depression, addictions exhaustion.

They should clean those up. Yeah. Clean those up. Yeah. But this idea that we need to work through all of our traumas or our our our wants and our needs before we engage in relationships.

Yeah. We got to come in perfect. Yeah. That you have to enter a relationship perfect. The relationship should be the vessel with which we make mistakes which we explore the world. We try new things with someone else with the safety and comfort and partnership of another person. This idea that you have to enter a relationship and say I know fully who I am. I want you to know fully who you are. How boring.

Yeah. Yeah, I was just going to say how boring. And where are you guys going together? Nowhere. There's nothing to be improved upon. I can't learn anything from you cuz I'm perfect and you're perfect. You're not going to learn anything from me.

Yeah. And the more we wait, so more and more people are waiting and waiting and waiting. So, we're delaying relationships. We have over 100 million singles in the United States today. So, we've got over a third of the adult population. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Some people are very

happy% in the book, you say. Yeah. Yeah. So, we have a a lot of people who are happy single and enjoying singlehood, but so many that we study and hear from are struggling with sort of moving in and out of relationships. Well, if you're waiting for everything to be perfect,

that's a losing game. It's not going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, the last thing I want to talk about in the Kinsey is is is the Kinsey scale. That's the other thing I think

because I think Yes. prior to this work, we thought there were three brackets basically.

Yeah. So, one of the great interventions from Dr. Kinsey in the in the first book was the Kinsey scale and that was thinking about sexual orientation on a continuum. I think he thought about it that way because he was a biologist because in the natural world everything's on a continuum. There's always variation. It's the ingredient that an evolutionist needs to do their work that there's variation of trait and it selects then for on that variation. So this idea that sexual orientation was a continuum at the time they argued 0 to six exclusively heterosexual predominantly heterosexual incidentally heterosexual.

What's incidentally mean? Um that would be every now and then. Yeah. So well it would be I think what what young people today would say like heteroplexible, right? this idea that you're primarily heterosexual or the reverse primarily homosexual, but then you have moments of um

maybe fantasy or a behavior or maybe it's kissing in a bar like bisexual sort of sort of. So bisexual is an interesting concept and term. Um so it doesn't mean sometimes people think bisexual people have to equally be attracted to men and women. Um that's not true. In fact, studies show that very few people are equally attracted to both men and women. Um, and whether we use bisexual or some folks use prefer other terms, there's so so much new terminology on how we think about our sexual orientations. Uh, some people use pansexual. There's sort of they they all have somewhat different definitions. So bisexual is this idea that you the by part you're attracted to men and women.

Both. Yeah. Pansexual is you're attracted to people, not kind of not with regard to a particular gender or sex. So So it's sort of like bisexuality. sound very similar.

That's an easy distinction for me to make. It's like I'm attracted to guys in this way and I'm attracted to women in this way versus the male female thing isn't even a part of the attraction.

Yeah. It's more like compassionate people. Funny people like I'm in the mood for this or that.

Yeah. Although if it's really smart people then we say you're a sapioexual, right? So there's all sorts of sapioexual. Is that what you are Monica? Sapioexual.

I love smart people. Yeah. All right. We got it. This is an So for Kinsey started this um idea that we could think about sexual orientation. And again, he wasn't thinking about identity. And the initial studies they were looking at behavior. So that that continuum was based on how many male partners you had, how many female partners you had, how many male fantasies, female fantasies. And the researchers assigned people 0 through six. Today we would do a study, we might use the 0 to6 scale, and you pick what you are,

but at the time it was a taxonomy. And and can I dare ask what did that average out to?

Um a majority of people in when you look at the distributions a majority identif would fall in the exclusively heterosexual. Okay.

Um what we saw then and what we see even more now is some um great work from Rich Seven Williams at Cornell University was looking at the the mostly heterosexuals and we're seeing more and more people um who are falling in that category. And it's why you'll see reports um for young people like uh today's youth is queer than ever. And what we're seeing is young people are more and more of them are identifying as bisexual, pansexual, queer, LGBTQ in this broad sense. Um part of that is this flexibility piece. They might primarily be heterosexual in their behavior and in their um aspects of their identity, but we're seeing more more flexibility, more openness to testing the boundaries of who they are and what they want.

Yeah. like maybe even they haven't engaged in any behavior that's heterosexual, but they're just like, "But I don't want to say I'm exclusively this because I don't know."

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And in fact, when you look at the data, a vast majority who identify as queer haven't engaged in any same sex behavior,

right? It's interesting. I feel compelled to repeat um my favorite joke I've heard recently on the show English Teacher. Uh our lead is identifies as gay. He goes to meet his female friend's new fiance and he immediately is like, "This guy is gay."

She's about to marry a gay guy and it's driving him nuts and they're at a party and finally he confronts the guy and the guy goes, "No, no, I'm 80% gay and 20% by." And he goes,

"So you're 10% straight." Yeah. Yeah. But there's 10% there, right? There's Well, that was like the interview um uh Barry Dillard did not long ago, right? And they said if it was he's um attracted to his wife, but if it weren't for her that he's also he's attracted to men, right? But there was something about his attraction was

to to his wife, it was targeted to a particular person. That's interesting that happen. I mean that's the that's the beauty and I think the messiness um of our romantic and sexual lives is sometimes there's a particular person at a time and a place. There's an inc incredible comedian named Rob Mhenny and his mother ended up marrying another woman and um he was talking to his mom about it and and she said about her partner, "Oh, she's gay as hell." But she's like, "She's gay. I'm not.

She's she's the only one. I like her, but that's the only one I've ever gone. I'm not a lesbian. I'm just in love with

Mary or whatever her name is." It's so interesting. I have a a colleague who um uh not at not at the institute u who is trans and what's interesting is she's been with her spouse um since before the transition. So initially she was a man married to a woman

she transitioned now she's a woman and we often talk about the experience of trans people and their how their relationships change and their sexualities often as a part of that change. We don't often talk about their partners if they're in long-term relationship. So her partner is is she a lesbian now or

exactly these are the questions. And and there's really interesting now in that case there's all sorts of arguments about um sexual orientation is actually a little bit more um uh less stable than gender identities, right? So there's there's some flexibility and it could be targeted to that person. You might say, well, she might say I wasn't I don't really am not attracted to women, but I'm attracted to you and I love you. Yeah.

And I think for me that's a story of how pair bonds of love relationships can have this incredible power of dictating our sexual lives.

I hate to say I'm curious about this, but I am. I am curious how more frequently a trans um woman's partner is fine with that transition versus a trans man's partner.

Interesting. I don't know. I think the social pressure and homophobia towards men is stronger.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I just wonder if that would be I I'm just curious. That would be a great

And that's couched in a lot of different things, particularly in our society. It's the history of HIV and AIDS. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that goes into that cultural pressure. Yes. But it is there. That's true for lesbian women, too. But there's um there have been quite a few studies from folks who study gender and sexuality that look at that that look that there's some unique stigma that gay men face and in their relationships

and then they try and um how those relationships are supposed to look. this pressure of like, are there supposed to be roles? Are there supposed to be um that's different, right? And and sometimes in heterosexual couples, we fall into gender roles. Now, they change in all sorts of ways. As many of us know in our home lives, the gender roles are not often what you necessarily think are um necessarily what they, you know, should be in all sorts of ways, but

right. Okay, let's get into I mean, we haven't even got I had some three questions before. I'm having too much fun. we got into uh the intimate animal. But um I do want to address one thing which is like and I'm going to speed through to and you really have to only answer the last which is like I I I imagine that the field this field in general probably struggled to be taken seriously and I wonder how hard it was to attract great researchers because it it it seemed like a perverted uh pursuit.

Mhm. Um like did we lose a bunch? But I'm mostly I want to go into why we're so uncomfortable. I mean there's religion of course but I wonder if do you have any other theory on why this topic it's like tied with money is something that is like so impossible for everyone to talk about. I have my armchair theories but I'm curious if you know

data wise why this is the impossible topic for people and I'm curious what your theories are cuz I think they're as good as as all of them.

I think our deepest insecurity is sex that we will not be enough for our partner who we love and that we will be incomplete in that way. And I guess because again we don't know how good everyone I can watch someone play basketball and I can rank myself. If I see my wife's ex-boyfriend and I look at him I have no way to his competency is still a guess of mine. So it's like a we don't know where and we're social creatures who are obsessed with status and hierarchy. So where am I in this group? It's impossible for me to know.

I'm scared. I'm terrible. And I just don't even want to [ __ ] talk about it. That's like one of my theories.

Yeah. And because and and we put this pressure of an outcome on our sexual activity. So you engage in sex with your spouse and you're saying um well did I have pleasure? Did you have pleasure? Was this reproductive sex? Did this time was it conceptive sex? Did we have did we make a baby this time? Um how was the pleasure? Did you get the kind of pleasure you wanted? Was there any pain? And was that what you wanted? And and you could maybe you want all of it and was that what you wanted yesterday? Is it what you want today? So we put all our pre all this pressure on ourselves in terms of are we having the kind of sex that we want to be having pel and um she's been talking recently you know it's these reductions in sexual frequencies you know maybe part of the issue is are people having are Americans in particular having the sex that they want to be having right now and that happens all the time that's not

necessarily a new pro problem. Yeah, but it does mean that there's a lot of pressure in terms of how we think about our sex. That pressure is a little bit different in a hookup or a casual sex encounter or sex with a sex worker or because there's something else going on. We did a study on hookups and your expected outcomes. And uh we found that women in particular had very low expectations of orgasm uh and pleasure and uncommitted sex because they don't necessarily have the ingredients that are that we know are associated with orgasm. communication.

Communication. Often there's a lot of alcohol and drugs and casual sex, particularly for young people on college campuses. Um, they don't necessarily know the person that well. There's not a lot of communication. Um, there's often not a lot of foreplay, but it was the experience. So, it wasn't that they didn't want the sex. It's just that their expected outcome from it wasn't necessarily what we think. Now, in a relationship like you're saying that you look at your partner and you go, "Is that is that is that what you want? Is that what I want? Is that what we want?"

Um, you know, where are we going with this? Is this about building our relationship? Is this just about having fun because it's a rainy Sunday? Is it a um is it because we're trying to reproduce? And um so there's a lot of pressure that goes into it. And some of that pressure comes from sometimes religious sources or cultural sources because in the back of our mind we're thinking about, okay, let's say you do want to start a family. You're think okay sex is for reproduction. I have this thing now, this biblical thing I'm supposed to be able to do. What if we can't do it? What if it doesn't work the first time, the first month, the first six months? Well, welcome to many people today who are trying to conceive.

All this this weight that sits on our sexual lives. Um, and then this other question of, you know, is it is it better than a former partner? Is it better than what you watched on your TV binge? There's a lot of expectations that we have

about our intimate lives. Now, I think that's true both for the sex part and for the love part. So, we have a lot of expectations about what is an argument supposed to look like? What is saying I love you supposed to look like? What is a kiss supposed to look like? Um what is cuddling supposed to look like? Some of it is from you know movies, pornography or I just looked at uh some data yesterday. There was something that looking at the behaviors for instance in sort of typical pornography that you see high rates of women experiencing pleasure but from behaviors that we know actually very few women associate with pleasure.

Then you go and try it in your real life and you go oh that didn't work. You didn't like that but I but I just watched a 100 clips that people really liked it. This woman could not stop orgasming with the same. You're broken.

Yeah. And and we forget that part of sex for most people in our lives is it can be it can be passionate. It could be fun. It could be funny. It could be silly. It could be smelly. It could be noisy. It could hurt your back. It can hurt your hips. Um you know, you pull your hair out. There's all sorts of fumbling that happens in our sexual lives that we don't talk about that, right? We talk about all this stuff. We talk about orgasm rates and we talk about all these um particular positions and

we can go on social media and find hundreds of things and some of it is advice,

but so so little of that advice gets into the real nitty-gritty when we study people's intimate lives. What's the real nitty-gritty of, you know, you're you're the kids are sleeping and you know, you've got the the half hour and you can't make too much noise or you're um you know, you you want to have sex with your partner, but the apartment is just so hot and you got to kind of let it cool down.

Yeah. If you already have a hard time reaching orgasm, add footsteps in your household to the mix and the just vague threat that someone's coming through the door. Even if you've locked it, why is the door lock like just add that to the mix?

Well, and I I love that because a little bit of stress, a little bit of risk, it can be

people like exciting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We can excite. That's why I remember the first time I taught a sexuality course, a student in my class said, "Um, professor, um, why is sex in a car feel so much better?"

And I thought like I was like, "Well, that's a loaded question." I also thought like I'm over six foot tall, totally speak for yourself. You know, this idea that a little bit of risk uh um or being caught, you know, is can be exciting, but too much risk, too much stress, um you actually get a different reaction. The nervous system responds differently. Um, one of the things I' I've said and I mention it in the book and in other places when we look at the natural world, we don't see two gazelle mating in front of a lion.

And when our stress response is so ramped up, you're in a burning building, you're probably going to not stop and make out with your partner.

Yeah. But a little bit of stress, someone could walk in, the elevator door could open, a parking could find you in your car.

That can be arousing. But too much the nervous system then goes into the a different response. You sort of go into the flight response. Now you're in the amygdala and you're not

exactly. Yeah. You're just This isn't This isn't do it from there. Yeah. It's also not conducive to social behavior. So we were talking earlier about how mating and and love and sex are a part of sociality. You're also not stopping to have a conversation in front of a lion or in front of a burning building.

Yeah. So part of um what Steve Porges, my colleague at the Kinsey Institute, calls neurosception. The for the brain to be able to engage in social activity, you need some degree of safety. And that's true for love and sex, too. So, part of all this that messiness of sexual experience, the the sounds and the smells and the and the feelings,

is do you feel safe with the person you're having it with to um explore all that together, to laugh through that together, to cry through that together?

That's why it's so intimate, cuz it is messy. Okay. So, we start your book finally, ding ding ding, the intimate animal, the science of sex fidelity and why we live and die for love. Um, you start by going with some colleagues to prompt Nevada to to visit some brothel. And I think you're probably intending to study one thing and then the menu of options gets your attention.

Yeah. I was in Las Vegas cuz we were collecting hormone samples in a sex club and a legal sex club in in Vegas. um uh as one does you know when you're when you're scientist on the road. I mean hormone samples is quite

well because there had been studies on like the hor hormonal responses to sexual activity but you get these laboratory effects of um so you we were in a non-laboratory setting and

you just draw blood after we did saliva we did salivary testosterone and estradile estrogen and

uh so that's what first brought us to Vegas then we decided to take the trip an hour out to Perump in the middle of the desert and uh there's quite literally a menu as you and uh The uh woman who was giving us a tour takes us through and I was so drawn to the u last item, which was the most expensive item. They called it the white whale.

$20,000. $20,000. And you and you instantly think, well, what is that? What does it involve?

I'm thinking a murder. Yeah. Yeah. What kind of like, oh, are the handcuffs made of silver? You know,

do you get to take that to go the handcuffs? Yeah. Is it longer? Like what what multiple people? And it turned out that the most expensive thing that people could purchase at a legal brothel was intimacy,

the girlfriend, the girlfriend experience. Oh my god. So the most money you could spend was couching your sexual event in terms of

pretend intimacy of you have. So you would actually you would sit down, you'd get dinner, there was champagne, you had a table, you would be at the cabana on the other side of the pool, you you would go on a date and

wow. Typically sex would also be involved, but you were couching all of it in terms of this relationship.

Oh my god. And it was this idea that if you hit it big and the in Vegas, you go out here and then and not just for some an hour of something wild. Now, that was on the menu, too. People were doing that. But the most expensive thing, the thing that was really desired

was couching that sex and this sort of relationship activity. Oh my gosh. And are you pretending like you already know each other or is it like first date like they're getting I don't you know what I mean?

You're going to have to pony up the 20k and find out that should have been your Christmas present.

First dates are bad enough having to pay $20,000. Wow. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. Yeah. And you say I mean if we could just define quickly so know what we're talking about that intimacy is in a nutshell the experience of closeness of feeling and being seen heard and known.

Yeah. That Yeah. And the other thing I wanted to read that I wrote down is we might not even recognize the need for intimacy as a biological drive perhaps because it lives in the shadow of our other primal urge our sex drive. So these are like distinct uh compartments of us, both essential and evolutionary.

And so through this, you um introduced this term intimacy crisis, that we're in an intimacy crisis.

So, how do we come to that conclusion other than the $20,000 price tag, which is a pretty good clue.

Yeah. Yeah. And in places like I think Japan maybe or some places where you like can cuddle, you just like go and you pay Yeah.

to cuddle. Yeah. Yeah. And there's all sorts of What's that like? I don't know. It like makes me so sad,

but I also like I get it. Yeah. I almost did a study a few years ago at cuddle parties. Um and I was also going to collect hormone samples.

You [ __ ] weirdo. You're hormone kit everywhere you go. It's great whenever I hear something funny like, "Can I get a cheek swab or some saliva?"

Now my friends have to tell me like, "Leave your kit in the trunk at the next cocktail party." And so we were interested. You're right. Right. Like so this there's these different things popping up all over the world. There's cuddle parties, there's um surrogates who would I mean there's sex surrogacy, but then there's uh which are often trained professionals um often work with people with disabilities on sexual activity. But then there's also these kind of cuddle surrogates who are people who are just cuddling. When we start to look around, there's all these little pieces of evidence that I think are telling us. So we talk a lot about this loneliness um epidemic and a lot of studies showing psychological lonely loneliness in studies and um one researcher suggests that psychological loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

There's that. But for me that wasn't enough cuz I thought well how is it that we're talking about the psychological loneliness but so many people we have a lot of connections. We have a lot of people around. How can you be lonely in a crowd right? How is and that the answer for me was about it was the the type of relationships we had. So the the depth of the connections we had and that's where intimacy comes in that people weren't feeling heard and seen and loved.

Known to me is the most operative word. Yeah. Like God and we want to be known.

Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes psychiatrists talk about being witnessed and it's this idea that right like we want to be

um that we want someone to know us. So we know we exist. That's the kind of evidence that we existed.

Yeah. And vice versa. We want to know someone. I think one of the things in relationships is we we want someone to to know us and we want to know them. Yeah.

One of the deepest prides you can have for me or at least speaking for myself is like

to even know someone better than they know themselves sometimes is a very rewarding feeling.

Yeah. And I think a lot of partners know each other better than they they know themselves.

Yeah. So, well, before I was traveling, I put out my wife's vitamins and I texted her this morning. I said, "Don't forget to take your vitamins." And she started laughing and she said, "I saw them. Thank you." Cuz I just know she'll forget. Uh which is okay. And I do things that she fills in. Yeah. Yeah. It's co-piloting. Yeah.

But do we feel like that can happen in not sexual or romantic relationships? Yeah. And I think that's where that's where things get complicated and where we struggle to sort of make sense of these relationships that we can have close like parents and children or best friends or or siblings or um we can have really close relationships of people we trust and and trust is a sort of a key component. And it's a key component of romantic relationships too that we often don't talk enough about how important trust is. So we know we can have trust in relationships um and that we crave that kind of that trust and that connection. Those are in our kind of our social maybe what we'll call friendships, right? These sort of social rel relationships, attachment, bonding types of relationships.

But then and then we can have these sexual relationships where we're attracted to someone and we want the sort of lust systems are going on. And then we have these attraction um uh passionate love systems and it's really both. So if you talk to people who are passionately in love, yes, they they have this sexual desire for their partner, but they also have a deep friendship with their partner. They can exist in isolation, but the special sauce that I think so many people are looking for that they desire in their relationships is that combination. Can I have someone that I'm both attracted to and feel this sense of um lust and someone I feel I can really trust?

Yeah. And sometimes those two systems are in conflict with each other. Right. So, and as you say, we are

socially monogamous creatures kind of in general. Yeah. And we are not necessarily sexually monogamous. So, there's quite a bit of tension there. So, yeah, break down the difference between those two. So when we compare ourselves to the other primates we were talking about or other or other organisms, only about 3% of mammals engage in this so-called social monogamy, form intense pair bonds. If we're talking about mammals in general, we would use expressions like uh mutual territory defense, mutual nest building, um dual parental care. So we engage in those behaviors. About 15% of primates p there's a larger number of primates in humans. We would call that romantic love, right? this this bonded relationship. Now, often we talk about monogamy, people just talk about monogamy, but for biologists, there's two different mechanisms when we talk about monogamy. There's social monogamy, which is the relationship structure that

territory defense, nest building, caretaking, support of each other. Kind of I'll add a shared identity. There's some Yeah, there's something about that shared identity.

Yeah, there's one psych psychological study called the um inclusion of the other and self. And you can actually take these two circles and you can ask couples um where as they get closer together where they start to overlap more and often in long-term relationships or loving relationships you you have a shared sense of self. You have the wei. I also think it's why it's so important when we think about relationships when we think about the science of relationships and also just functionally how we have healthy and satisfying relationships. One of the things that's really helpful for me is to recognize there's three entities in every relationship. There's me, there's you, there's us.

And sometimes they all have different things. Sometimes the us needs something that I don't really want right now. Maybe you don't even really want right now. But for our relationship, our life to be what we want to we're thinking about that. And that those there's always at any given time, there's you, there's me, there's us in our relationship.

Yeah. For me, it's like crazy pronounced in a very rare way, which is like I am me. I'm an actor. I go do things. I might be in commercials by myself. And then my wife is that thing. And then there's the us in a commercial which is a very specific thing and it's not either of us independently. But I think rarely does someone experience like something so

dramatic and obviously a shared identity which is like there's this other category. If you call to hire us, it's like what do you want? Do you want Kristen? Do you want tax? Or do you want them?

Mhm. I don't know. It's unique. Yeah. Yeah. So what we see in the um for biologists when we talk about monogamy we talk about social monogamy the pair bond and then sexual monogamy which is fidelity and few species that engage in social monogamy are always sexually monogamous because there is often an evolutionary advantage to having some diversity among your offspring. But if you're socially monogamous attaining that diversity often comes at the cost of damaging your relationship and your pair

bond. Mhm. So there's this tension between a desire for sexual novelty and sexual variation and excitement and at the same time the safety and comfort of the long-term relationship bond.

Mhm. Uh so I think that when we think of everything from being single and first dating and starting a relationship, maintaining a relationship, finding love again if you fall out of a relationship, that the tension between those two forces, that desire for a long-term bond and that desire for um novelty that explains a lot of the ups and downs of our relationships, a lot of the challenges. And it and it's rooted in something fundamental for biologists who study social behavior and mating. And it's that when we talk about these issues of monogamy, there's two different things. We don't just What are we talking about?

Yeah. Are you talking about sexual fidelity or are you talking about a relationship structure?

Yeah. Now, the relationship one tries to impose the other, which is interesting. If you're in sexual relationship with someone, often people want to turn it, we see this in the friends with benefit studies that often people want it to turn into a long-term relationship. Yes.

You're in a relationship with someone, you often expect there to be, not always. We've done studies on consensual non monogamy. You expect

And I'd argue it's gotten only blurriier. Yeah. Over the last 70 years. Yeah. Where marriages were primarily a social structure to create children and support a woman and the man worked and all these dynamics. Uh whereas now you are more and more two independent people choosing to be together that don't need one another.

Yeah. I just feel like that complicates it even further. There's kind of two things that are going on that are kind of wild. On the one hand, we don't need resources from partners in the same way. So not as many women are marrying because they need male pro bread winner providers,

which again this is brand new for humans. Yeah. Yeah. And we went from we needed a whole extended family to not die.

Yeah. To oh, we could get this done with five people to now you can get it done individually. It's all so radically different.

So our species has been pair bonding for over 4 million years. Um and and now suddenly this idea that um how this looks is differently so differently that on the one hand we're saying

okay you might be forming these pair bonds but what you want to get out what you need to get out of them is different. On the other hand, we also see what Eli Finkel calls the all or nothing marriage. Um or the suffocation model of marriage is the academic term. It's that you can turn to your partner and you say, "I want everything in this one person."

Yeah. This Esther talks about this a lot. Yeah. Take care of me when I'm sick and then want to have sex with me the next morning and then make me laugh and make me intellectually stimulated. And so the whole I'm doing this triangle on my lap because I'm thinking about the Maslo's uh hierarchy, right? and you you want your partner to fill up that whole pyramid and that's not realistic. It's not realistic because you just set yourself up for constant disappointment as opposed to having the village opposed to having friends and family and the and the community. So we are we have expectations of partners that um are often unrealistic today.

Yeah. Um but that includes in these domains of when we think about this tension between social and sexual monogamy that tension looks a little bit different in the modern world where we're saying okay I want to have this person I want to have this intense love bond with this person and um I don't want to share it with anyone else you're saying about your partner but then your partner is saying I want to have everything I want to have this intense love bond with you too but I want to also go experience the world.

Yeah. So, I will never be able to ask someone that would better be able to answer this question, but I'm so curious,

and we got to of course define better. I know this is a very tricky word, but I'm always so curious. What is better?

Mhm. For long-term outcome, for it to be in private and secret or to try to attempt to have some arrangement

like this thing exists. We know statistically many many people are not uh faithful, I guess, or whatever term you want to use.

And I just wonder which one's supposed to work better. I see like when I see people attempt the the latter, which is like, yeah, we're going to we're going to open it up. I mean, I definitely see some pretty predictable outcomes of that. And then you go like, I wonder if it's better in France, you know, where it's just like it's a secret and it's this like do we know which approach is better? are also clear. People find out and they get divorced.

Mhm. Yeah. Well, no. Like was it Midaran's mistress came to the funeral? Like there's these famous cases in France where it's like the mistress is at the funeral, no one gives a [ __ ] and it's like, oh wow, that's culturally different.

When we look at those cases, they don't necessarily represent most of a population. So sometimes we're looking at cases of people with a lot of resources um or celebrity status or who kind of occupy a different role in the in the sort of social scene

that things are tolerated differently. Uh so for instance when we think about um often I'll have historians say to me well you know you talk about the biology of love but in the middle ages and um people got married for risu for land except peasants. Peasants always married for love because they didn't their families didn't have land to swap. So you're you're talking about a certain sect of society

and trying to blanket statement the entire group. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But let's say the goal.

Yeah. Wants an answer. He's like give me Well, let's say the goal was to stay in the pair bonding for life.

Uh and then you you know there's going to be infidelity. What approach yields a better result?

Yeah. One this question of life of you know should your relationship be for life? I think that's uh um one of the things I'm curious about is a lot of people set that as their metric for success. I remember I ended a relationship with someone um uh years ago and I said it was a great run.

She looked at me like what what kind of I was like yeah I was like no I mean like it was a great pie poker. What do you mean you're on a good run?

Yeah. We were both crying but it was like you know it's a good run and okay so yeah let's unpack this. So there's a question of better. I I don't think infidelity is inevitable for all couples. I think it's um there's some couples that um experience it, struggle with it. Um and there's two ways we can think of um

sexual encounters outside of a relationship. I paused on on saying sexual encounters because sometimes it's emotional. Sometimes there's other kinds of infidelity, right?

Yeah. And so one is this case of infidelity when that's where it's not allowed. We have an expectation in our relationship or our marriage that it's us that we're socially and sexually monogous. Mhm.

Someone steps outside that that's a transgression. It's a violation of the relationship and there's all sorts of stuff that ends up happening, right? There's shame. Family gets involved. Sometimes lawyers get involved. Sometimes um it can really be because what's happened is there's been betrayal for the contract that you had. I don't mean illegal marriage in some cases. Yes. It's really about that's not what we were doing. That's not what we agreed to.

Yeah. And that can be really hard to overcome in a relationship because it's viewed as this

um you know how many rules do we have for our relationship and if this is one of the few and you've broken it um so so the issue with infidelity is really about trust often and some couples will work through to try and get over that and work through it and and that could be a challenge and it could stick with I remember talking to one couple who he had cheated on his wife 20 years ago. They were dating at the time. and they were in college at the time actually and she when they got in a really bad argument she would still say you're a cheater and he said it was 20 years ago right and so Dax you said so I want to get back to Monica's point but also Dax you said the you encapsulated an enormous amount of literature on infidelity and everything you just explained

that's that there are dozens of studies that look at sex differences and responses to infidelity and we know that on average men are more upset by sexual infidelity they're more concerned with this idea that their partners are having their female partners in heterosexual cases, men are upset that their female partners are having sex with other people and that they could have a kid. The argument, the evolutionary argument is what if they have a kid that's not theirs, that's genetically not theirs.

Yeah. That that infidelity results in siring offspring. Women on average are more upset by their husbands having sex with um other women and this idea that the husbands will end the relationship. Remember in a context like we were saying earlier in a historical context where women were more dependent on resources. Yeah.

So we used to say that men were more upset by sexual infidelity, women more upset by emotional infidelity and in in fact they were more concerned with those um those suites of issues. But then there were a series of studies that started to question those those findings and they said what about if we gave people a third option in all these studies and said I'm equally upset by both. M

and what you find is that underneath that underneath that men are asking questions about sex, women are asking questions about emotional connection

that they were actually upset about the same thing and that's that each assumed when when women were saying well I'm concerned about this emotional infidelity and the connection but then came because you're having all this sex with this person you're connected to and when men said I'm concerned about this sex and how good were they how big were they because you're in love with that guy that you're having sex with cuz he's delivering all these things.

Yeah. I guess it's like they both have fear of being left. Mhm. And then what mechanism are they focusing on that will drive them

away? The rale for it was Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we know that that that infidelity can be really devastating for couples and some get over it, many do. We did a study on motivations for infidelity though and and I think this was really helpful for us to better understand what was going on. And people always say it's oh you know this there's what's called the deficit model of infidelity and that's that people think that you engage in infidelity because your relationships there's a deficit it's not enough. We did a new study fairly recently. We found eight different reasons and almost none of them had to do with deficit issues. A lot of it was um situational

right? And so I often think about how we people will sometimes say well how do I prevent infidelity in my relationship? How what do I do to protect my relationship? And I often think you know I travel a lot for work. You guys travel a lot for and I think don't put yourself in in situ if you know that you don't want to engage in infidelity.

Yeah. Don't put yourself in situations that are challenging to your relation. Try and stay off crack. Don't swing by a crack house.

Exactly. Right. But you sort of you want to you want to think we we have the capacity with these big prefrontal cortexes to think about our relationships and think about how do we protect them? How do we

safeguard it all? Yeah. Safeguard is perfect way to say it. And that could be, you know, don't go don't go out dancing to 3 in the morning. You want to try to preserve your marriage. Doesn't mean you can't, right? There's I'm sure people are going to say, well, oh, I'm entitled to go out with my friends. You are. Yeah. Everyone's entitled to do whatever you want. But when we think about what are the challenges, the maybe the unexpected challenges to our relationships. We know that a lot of infidelity is situational and unexpected. One study of men who committed infidelity, more than half of them said, "I never I wasn't this kind of guy." I think it was twothirds said, "I was not I never would have if you would asked me a year ago, I would say I'd never commit infidelity. I'm not that kind of guy." Well, what happened?

Yeah. Right. And it's often not the relationship. More often than not, in our studies,

it was something about situations people were putting themselves. Yeah. Context. Again, we have this illusion of being a an immovable self that that doesn't change. We are who we are everywhere we're at. And we know for certain we're completely different people everywhere we're at. Mhm.

So it's like, yeah, the person that made that declaration sitting in that environment was truthful.

Yeah. And then the other person was in this situation. All of a sudden, we've got a little bit a different shade of that self.

Exactly. And and I still haven't answered your question. I'm sorry. So So that's the part of infidelity. Then the other part of the story is the um what we would call consensual non- monogamy or open relationships. And

I use the term cautiously. I'm picturing my friend Dr. Wednesday Martin saying right now, don't use consensual nominogamy because she'll argue who's who's consenting to it really. And but the term CNM is used um is this idea of an open it's sort of the contemporary term for open relationship an umbrella for everything from swinging to an open marriage to a so consensual non- monogamy is a term in the academic literature a lot. Um some people will use negotiated non- monogamy. um a bunch of different terms that we could use.

But this I think it's a good point that Wednesday brings up of who's you know are both partners really consenting to this and it makes an assumption about open open marriages

and is the third person consenting? Yeah. And sometimes they don't even know if they even know about it. We found in one of our studies in a national sample and we replicated it was about 20% of Americans have at some point had an open relationship of

No kidding. that month cuz I've been very public about having been in an open relationship for 9 years and I think I'm the only person I've ever heard say that out loud and that's insane. I would have guessed I was one of 300.

Yeah. Well, a lot did a lot experience it very short term and and often when they're young

doesn't bode well for how well they work. Well, that's the other part of it. So, we know that about a quarter you nailed it, right? We know that about 20 I think we found was 21% if I'm being exact in our studies found that they have tried this but how many are actively in it and that number is less than 5%. Which suggests that

suggests for most people it doesn't work and I think you I'd love to hear how you frame it too. It it takes a different kind of work.

It does and I think the structure is so incredibly important uh with how successful it'll be. Um

ours was very successful. I mean 9 years we lived together. We slept in the same bed every night together. We had a wonderful life together. And I don't think that was necessarily

the big reason we broke up. And but what I can admit to immediately is for me the sexual relationship in a long-term relationship is so challenging and requires so much vulnerability and so much communication that if you can be satiated in the much easier way,

it's going to be hard to not pursue that and and and and lacks on the servicing of your primary relationship. I I I found that that's I think if I had to say the biggest um downside of it all was we probably did not work on our own relation our sexual relationship the way we would have had we been monogous.

Yeah. Because there were these other outlets. It's easier. I don't have to be vulnerable. I don't have to say this doesn't work for me. I don't have to worry about hurting your feelings. Uh those are all hard things and if I have an easier option then that's you know I'm going to I'm a lazy human. I'm going to do that.

No, I would actually argue that it's a lot of it's work. I think that there's a lot that goes into trying to do that in a society that that's not the typical way we structure our relationships. There's a lot of emotional mental work and we can look at different pieces of folks who have open relationships but also cultures where people have multiple marriages or multiple spouses. It takes a lot of negotiation and even in those cases when we look at societies now there's certain like religious groups that have you know polygamous marriage but when you look at societies where let's say men can have multiple wives or the few that women can have multiple husbands

um that there's often a lot of rules about how you think about okay I got this a gift for this spouse I have to get a gift for that spouse I have to I had sex with this one I have to have sex with that one

and what when we look at open relationships there's something called compersion that can happen is that you have new partners that enter the picture and you focus so much on that one and sometimes you can forget about cultivating the relationship.

But for me, what's so insightful about when we look at open relationships, it for me it reconfirms this argument about social and sexual monogamy because at its core what we see more often than not, not for everyone but more often than not is trying to negotiate around a primary relationship. Now some people like people who are polyamorous would argue that they have multiple equal so polyamory they have multiple love bonds

right what I see in practice when we look at the data is that people are often negotiating around primary relationships and I think that those people that are really able to do it differently I'm convinced that they um that their brains work a little bit differently not not broken just different

so you're saying you think in poly relationships for the most part even though It's stated like these are all equal relationships. Mostly they're not.

Yeah. So I think what um when we when people talk about poly in the broad sense now when you actually go to a poly community they'll often say no that's not really how it works. But when we talk about it broadly there's this sense that it's the equal love for everyone and in some ways that's hard for the human brain. So when we define romantic love, when psychologists define romantic love, they use expressions like um uh obsessive thought, intrusive thinking, focused attention, it's pretty darn hard to have that for multiple people.

Right. Right. So particularly anytime, not even not just going from like day to day to have it, but just to try to carry that at any time. So, what we really see when we kind of look under the hood a little bit in these relationships is there's often a primary. Um, or you'll see people will say, "Well, I have three spouses or I have three relationships, but you know, it's it's Veronica who I'm with for 20 years. She's the one I really go to when I'm in trouble." Or it's Bill who he really um he understands if I'm sad, it's only Bill that can kind of get me out of that. There's something unique about a a pair bond. And I think in cases of polyamory and in some less so in sexually open relationships where it's just you having sex other sex partners

but in poly it's not that there's not pair bonding is that there's a series of pair bonds but there's often one um I would argue there's a hierarchy that seems more dumb. There are some people who disagree with me but that but that that's what we're seeing in our in a lot of our research

because you know everyone's I think that's like a question people they ask it on the bachelor all the time. Um, can you be in love with two people at once?

And I think a lot of people have different answers on that, but I I kind of think maybe research suggests no.

I think that there are people who can. Yeah. I think for the vast majority of people, it's pretty darn hard to be romantically in love with more than one person at a time.

Will I add again, it's all about context. Yeah. Are all three of you living together?

Yeah. That would be very expressed in my opinion. Yeah. that hierarchy. Yeah. Are you in China half the year and in Russia half the year and you have a partner in China and you have a partner in Russia? I do think that might be equal. It's like you're kind of in two different monogous relationships

relation. I mean functionally, right? You're sort of because part in those cases and and I think this it's interesting you said this sort of don't ask don't tell. Some of that we see are when couples are physically separated. Also, if you're on the road a lot for work or if you're because part of what we also know is that our mamlian ancestry desires is physical touch and connection.

So, when you can't get that from your primary partner, um you might say, "Well, you're the one I go to with all my secrets. You're the one who I have this deep bond with. You're the one who I love,

but I also have this other stuff that I need." Yeah. I want to eat at Houston's, but if there's not one in the town I'm in, I'll go to the next best steakhouse, you know? and next best. I think that's like sort of the the whole point is like that's next best and then you know if it's like push comes to shove

your jobs in China and Russia they all go away. You have to find a you have to pick a place.

You're going to pick that primary relationship. Where you going to eat? Where you going to put your head down at night? There you go. Exactly. Um, so what we see is people are but people are trying to navigate this and um and now when you're in certain cultural systems that permit permit it um that's different but what's interesting is even in cultures where people can have multiple spouses a vast majority some of the anthropological evidence suggests about 85% of people still partner off socially monogously. Wow.

So even if it's permissible it's not something that's done by everyone. Yeah. If you look at hunting and gathering uh societies, you had like you were generally probably pair bonded with someone of the same status

and then you might have had multiple wives that were lower status. There would be a social status hierarchy among the wives

which is fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting you bring up this point of status, right? And um because we also know that that goes a lot into both kind of choosing partners and trying to maintain partnerships and does your status change over time? Um there was a study out of the University of Michigan that when people are on uh dating platforms that they often look for a partner that's 25% higher in mate value. Researchers assign mate value to so we kind of punch above our weight as it were for the stars. Exactly. This is a context we all should be aspirational

but there comes a point when you want to say okay you've been aspirational. You know, you also have to get realistic about

mating is a market and it's you bring a you bring a bunch of different things to the table. And it could be your your physical traits, your intellectual traits, it could be financial resources. For me, I I think that's fine. I've often had people ask me, "Well, how do I know that they love me and it's not my money?" Or, "How do they know? What if it's just the sex?" Or, "What if it's

or if they're a fan of the show?" Yeah. Exactly. And they watch it all the time.

So, you've wandered into an argument. So, she has a rule. you would never date a fan on the show.

It's not a rule. It's just I'm just not attracted to that. Yeah. And I and I said,

well, my two points are like a, you're not a character on a TV show. Like they're actually seeing you, which is already like I can see where you're the lead of a karate film and someone falls in and you're like, I'm not that.

Yeah. You're not that. There's some fraud, some fraudulence feeling, but in this case, it's you.

Yeah. And then my other point is like and maybe they come for that but you can't stay for that.

Yeah. What do you think about that? Well, I think there's two elements like I think is it is it like a fan who like tracks you down and says I've watched every episode.

It's not a nut. It's like a normal person who likes this show and is attracted to Monica.

Hard line. It's not a hard line. He made it a hard he's No. If they lead with I'm such a fan,

that's that is a harder thing for me to overcome. But it doesn't mean it can't happen. It's just like okay because it really is like yes you you know me.

Yeah. You don't you think you do you know a lot about me. You know a lot of things about me but know as we talked about earlier knowing someone really really knowing someone is not that. Is that maybe part of the trigger is they come in with the familiarity that that they know you but you're like I haven't allowed you to know me.

Not to mention I don't know you. So immediately it's like there's a weird um imbalance

imbalance and like yeah there's an overfamiliarity that comes from them. You feel vulnerable. They know all these things that you don't you don't even talking to me like like we've been on 84 dates and like I don't know anything about you. Are you a murderer?

I'm not ready to talk to you about I don't know. It's It's complicated. I have a thought exercise. So, what if not um I'm a fan of the show, but what if you know that episode 3 weeks ago, I heard what you said and it was really thoughtful and I thought you brought up some points that I had never heard anyone else bring up.

That's much better. Right. So, much better tip to listeners. Yeah. But part one of the things one of the things that we're gonna get we're going to send Monica's information is very long and so so this idea that one of the things we know we tend to be attracted to people that we think are attracted to us. So it's actually one of the strongest things that

that is not how I am. Well, well, and but in long-term relationships, it's why it's really important to let your partner know. Sometimes we can get in a routine and we just say like, "Of course I'm attracted to you. I live with you." Right? But to really wake up and say, you know, you're uh what whatever that attraction is, if it's physical, you look beautiful, you look handsome, you look you're so smart, I love

in dating. Yeah. Those affirmations and and early dating can be important of of letting someone know why you like them.

Yes. And I think that there's a difference, right, of this like I followed you. I'm I'm um I I'm a fan and and I don't know that and we want fans in our relationships. We want

Well, we don't. Exactly. Because are they Did they hear you? Back to what you said earlier. Did they Did they witness what you were saying?

I agree with you. You shouldn't be a fan of your partner. I get asked this all the time in interviews like you must be so blown away. And I'm like, no, I don't. I don't look at my wife like you do. And I don't think that would be healthy.

Um but I admire and I respect her. Yeah. Okay. I do. I generally do a much better job at servicing people's book and your book is phenomenal. But I think the easiest way for me to uh lay this out is I think the way you design the chapters says a lot

because it goes in progression in my estimation of a relationship. Yeah. So it's need

which we talked a lot about. We've talked a lot about evolution and biology. crave, search, date, mate, nest stray break, care, and love. Again,

this is like the full gamut of what we could expect. Yeah. When exploring intimacy.

And so, I guess is there of any of those topics, one that we haven't hit that you would hope that people would know is in there? I think for me the reason I was um so excited to write this book was when we look at all this literature, all this evidence that we have in my lab at the Kinsey Institute and the field of sex research and relationship science and how does it all come together and using this evolutionary lens, how does it all come together to understand that we are this intimate animal that our romantic lives, some of the most consequential decisions we make in our life as the partners we're with and and how long we stay with them, the things we do with them. um the experiences we have with them that there's a science behind it. And if we know that science, we can enjoy it a little bit more. It could be more satisfying. We also know what to look out for. And we also know um like so the breakup chapter, the the

break um for me understanding this idea of the pain that comes with romantic dissolution and rejection to understand there's a science behind it.

Yeah. Tell us what that science is. Yeah. We'll have to end on a happier note, but I think this is a this is an important part. Well, you're dispelling these stereotypes right out of the gates, which is like women mourn longer and they take it harder and they

men mourn longer. Yeah. Yeah. Men mourn longer. Men are much more likely to commit suicide after a breakup than women.

Wow. And women are more likely to end the relationship than men. Yeah. So, there are predictable patterns that we see in the literature uh in the academic literature and the evidence that we see. But breakups uh are so intense and actually colleagues of mine put people who had just gone through a romantic dissolution into an fMRI brain scanner. Oh yeah.

And when they look at the brain, um, first they see pain. When people tell you that they're experiencing heartache and they feel pain, they have physical pain. It's in the nervous system. It's in the brain.

But it also looks like someone when you show them pictures of their beloved, it looks remarkably like someone going through cocaine withdrawal.

Wow. So this idea that when you take away a partner, even if they're the one who did the breaking up, this idea that when you when you separate a parapon, mother nature helped us evolve, right? these intense parapons and they're so intense that when you try to break them it, you know, she takes her pound of flesh, right? It it hurts. Um, and that I think is a is a testament to what people go through when they go through breakups.

And so often we'll say, "Oh, just get back on that horse or stop talking about him or her or them." Or

that's not necessarily good advice. And I I think I wish one of the things I write about in the book is I wish that we gave ourselves more grace to mourn the end of a relationship. We do if someone dies, right? It seems to be culturally acceptable. Someone dies, you can mourn them. You can have their picture up for a couple years.

Yeah. But if you just go through a hard breakup, this idea that you're not supposed to talk about them as if you didn't have this love relationship that influenced so many things in your life.

Do you think some of this is driven by the timetable we feel like we're on? like, okay, I'm I'm in so much pain. This this relationship ended, but also I'm 29 and I got to meet the next person within the next year so that I know I'm with them so I can start having kids. Like, do you think there's this pressure?

Mhm. Yeah. That makes that seem like a pragmatic and and smart decision to just keep it moving.

Yeah. So, we do know that there are there are patterns depending on age. So that um young people so when you're in your reproductive years sometimes researchers will say there's more pressure to sort of move on to um on average there's more pressure to move on to kind of quicker.

My biggest panic at the end of that 9-year relationship is we were going to start having kids when she hit 30 and I was 31 and that was the plan for 9 years and we broke up virtually right then and I went oh my god my whole plan for having children which I know I want more than anything

it just went away. Yeah. And what you know, oh no, I love that you bring this up because I think the mistake is that that is a pressure that women alone have and and we know that's not true. Women have different pressures. There's realities of biological clocks. Now with technology, there's different ways to work around that, right? If you have the resources again to work around them

and but we uh know that men have it, too. I'm really interested in this idea. I remember I remember a bunch of my guy friends all around the same time all had this sort of like um baby fever in our kind of mid-30s and everyone's like I want kids. I want kids. It's like like where did you I haven't heard about this. I haven't watched this movie right with but there was this this desire to kind of find the right relationship and men saying to each other like well I don't want to be too old at graduation. I want to still be able to run around a park. I want to now we had a long runway. In some ways it brings um some benefits often of wisdom sometimes financial resources and you have this you have the maturity the patience and we're seeing more and more of that pushing back reproduction.

So when we think about the consequences of these relationships of the different points in our life. So sometimes we're reproductive years we might try to move really quickly but we see the same thing. We're seeing more and more uh evidence of people who are dating and having sex late in life after 55 and 60. There was one study of of a retirement community of like men in a retirement community and it was like one guy for every like four women and they had the village.

Yeah. And then you see high rates of sexual activity, high rates of sexually transmitted in

that place the village in Okchobee, Florida or whatever had the highest rate of STD. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's real. These aren't like myths. It's um people are fumbling through like just like teenagers, right? Fumbling through which I think in some ways is there's something

charming adorable. That's adorable. How at every part of our life that the pull of love and sex, the pull of intimacy really

and and whether there's more or less sex involved, but the pull of this connection of this intimate connection with another person um

is with us all through these different stages, through the pain of breaking up, through the excitement of first love late in life where we're sometimes doing it again. Doing it again comes with different challenges. often by definition of doing it again, we tend to be older. So we're often looking at people who are um sometimes in 30, but often we're looking at 50, 60, 70, 80. Um different challenges in relationships and the how the body ages

um and including sex is different and what happens after menopause. A lot of attention to that now

and same for men with erectile functions as we get older. So all sorts of stuff going on on that front. my colleagues uh the late anthropologist Helen Fischer and Amanda Guesselman at the Kinsey Institute we had been looking at different age uh patterns um both for um dating and sexual activity and what we found as people got older they were least likely to settle they were a bit more sure of what they wanted and needed and in their relationship partners if they were dating again

but also what we found is when we looked at um orgasm actually and and sexual activity

that although sexual activity decreased as we aged for women in particular it will for for both men and women if you control for sexual dysfunctions um and medication use medications that often have side of sexual side effects you don't get this precipitous decline in sexual satisfaction and women in particular when they hit menopause there was actually a slight uptick in orgasm. So that's paradoxical maybe if you're thinking well that's not what we think about what happens to the body. But what was also happening was people were changing their behaviors. They were engaging in more foreplay. They were maybe using lubricants on average maybe using hormone hormonal replacement therapy.

So on average they were doing things that had they done 40 years ago more foreplay probably would have had higher orgasm but now they kind of had to because the bodies were changing. So it's a mixture of experience and how our bodies change. And um I think later life love and sex has a has a lot to teach us. When I used to teach in the fall semester I would tell my students when you go home for Thanksgiving ask your grandparents about their their advice on love and sex. And they would be like are you crazy?

Yeah. And I'm always shocked. I always I used to say to the dean was a friend of mine. I said one day I know I'm going to get called in your office for this.

Some alumni like big donor. You want to explain to me why my grandkid just came home from your university that I'm funding and asked about my love life with their grandma.

That was a director. I'm not in the classroom anymore. Sorry. Do whatever you want.

Yes. Um well, Justin, my gosh, this was like wind in the sails. This was such a fun episode. It makes me want to keep doing this job until I'm dead. Uh the book is The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex Fidelity and Why We Live and Die for Love. And I hope everyone reads it. It's beautiful. You're wonderful. What a delight.

Thanks for coming. Thanks so much for having me. It was great. All right. Be well.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Justin Garcia (on the science of sex) | Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard"?

Dax Shepard (Host), Justin Garcia (Guest).

What is "Justin Garcia (on the science of sex) | Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard" about?

The discussion centers on Justin Garcia's insights into sex research, emphasizing the historical significance and unexpected location of the Kinsey Institute in conservative southern Indiana. It delves into the complexities of personal relationships, the challenges of parenting, and the evolution of societal perceptions regarding sex and intimacy.

What is mentioned in this Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard episode?

39 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Kinsey Institute, Justin Prince, Alfred Kinsey, Intimacy, The Intimate Animal, Monogamy. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Justin Garcia (on the science of sex) | Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard"?

The episode runs 1 h 42 min; the transcript is about 21,439 words in 402 timestamped sections.

More from Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated February 11, 2026.