Instant Genius - What happens in our brains and bodies when we fall in love

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

The chances are that if any of us were asked to describe what it feels like to be in love we’d turn to art, poetry or music to help give us the answer. But what does science have to say about this uniquely human experience? In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist and sex researcher based at the Kinsey Institute in the US, to talk about his book, The Intimate Animal: The Science of Love, Fidelity and Connection He tells us how the evolutionary history of human pair bonding led to the development of our feelings of love, how and why we seek certain characteristics in our romantic partners, and how our attitude to relationships has altered due to changes in thinking, culture, and technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor of BBC Science Focus. The chances are that if any of us were asked to describe what it feels like to be in love, we turn to art, poetry, or music to help give us the answer. But what does science have to say about this unique? uniquely human experience. In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist and sex researcher based at the Kinsey Institute in the US, to talk about its latest book, The Intimate Animal, The Science of Love, Fidelity, and Connection. He tells us how the evolutionary history of human pair bonding led to the development of our feelings of love, how and why we seek

certain characteristics in our romantic partners, and how our attitude to relationships as altered due to changes in thinking, culture and technology. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. So today we're talking about your new book, The Intimate Animal, The Science of Love, Fidelity and Connection. So as the title suggests, I mean, really the starting point for the book was an investigation of human intimacy.

So personally, you know, once I started thinking about the word intimacy, I thought I had a pretty clear idea in my head of what it meant. And to be honest, I hadn't really given it much further thought than that. So to get it out of the way I've been in a romantic relationship for 23 years with my partner, and I just thought, well, you know, surely that just means that, you know, we live together, we spend a lot of time together, we share our thoughts, we help one another, we're affectionate and so on. But on reflection, that seems like a bit of a trite answer. Now, when's I start analyzing it?

So how did you begin thinking about intimacy through a more sort of scientific lens? And did your views change and evolve as you dug deeper and deeper? Oh, I love that you ask this. And it does get at the heart of the relationship as an academic researcher and our personal lives. And in many ways, I avoided research, me search, we sometimes call it. But it does. you can't help but your experiences in your own life start to flavor the questions you ask in your research and vice versa the things you find in your studies you know we did one study on 50,000 people

looking at what keeps passion alive in couples you can't help but try to take some hints away from that to improve your own your own life but I guess the question of where we started is a little bit before that before my also my current relationship my current marriage so I had started I was in I was trained as an anthropologist and an evolutionary biologist So I was doing my PhD in biology, evolutionary biology and behavior. And I was really interested in the evolution of social monogamy. I was interested in when our ancestors started forming pair bonds, what we call pair bonds. And the technical literature, we might call romantic love and humans.

And how was it that we had the capacity to form these intense bonds? So as a biologist, it's really an interesting question because only about 3% of mammals form these pair bonds. but about 15% of primates do. So the fact that we even have the capacity in our brain to form, you know, an earthworm probably can form a pair bond, that we have the architecture in our brain to allow us to fall in love with someone. I found remarkable. And I was interested in that.

And then from there, I had the central question of social monogamy, which biologists defined as, we define it as mutual territory defense, mutual nest building, mutual raising of offspring. you hear that mutual piece a lot, it really means that you have a partner that you're going through these different life challenges with. And it's part of what we call preferential sociality, that mammals tend to not just be friends or mate with anyone. And most species don't, but you pick one.

So you pick your kind of friend network, your individuals you like to socialize with more, and then you pick a mate within that. So that's how I got started. I was really interested in this question of social monogamy, of pair bonds. And it looks like in our species that evolved over four million years ago. So we, we have been engaging in these love relationships for a very long time. And at the same time, you know, as I started studying it, I realized there were all these interpretations. There were people who thought that love started in the romantic era or in the Renaissance or in there are people who thought that, you know, love wasn't biological, was fully social and cultural. And then another question that really shook me was I was on a

college campus, and at the time people were just starting to look at hookup culture and casual sex. And I remember looking around and saying, how is there this literature on human pair bonding and then walk around a college campus? All these people are having one-night stands. How do we make sense of the world? So some of my early work was actually on hookup culture, and it was really, at its core, a theoretical question for me. How do we reconcile this academic studies, this idea that humans are driven by pair bonds? But then also the reality of, but we have a lot of, but we have a sex outside of relationships, even though most sex, most reproduction occurs in long-term bonds. So for me, it really started with this initial theoretical evolutionary question. And then

from there, I started looking at long-term relationships, social monogamy, non-monogamy, infidelity, hookups. But at its core, I still have that same kernel of understanding what drives us, what motivates our species to form these remarkable pair bonds. You've mentioned quite a few things that we're going to dig into a little bit deeper. But let's stick with pair bonding playing a key role in human evolution. I mean, and really that all makes sense. You know, we have our young as a species take a long time to develop into adulthood, take a lot of looking after.

And so you sort of think, well, being able to spread the load is going to be beneficial. But when you're talking about intimacy, in the book, you write a lot of things that are going on within our brains that happen when we make these interactions. which I think is really, if we start there, this is a really key sort of interesting point. It's something that I knew nothing about. So can you give us a sort of Cliff Snott's version of what's going on? Yeah. So there's so much going on in our biology when we connect with other people, particularly when it's a romantic or a sexual connection.

And one way I sometimes think of it is you can walk into a crowd. You could walk into a subway. You could walk into a theater. And you could look around and there's lots of people, lots of people of different personalities and body types and dress and ages and genders. We don't just really become friendly with anyone in that crowd. Sometimes we meet someone. Sometimes there's a moment.

They say, like, oh, we met at this event and you connect with someone. And sometimes you find a partner. You're attracted to someone in that crowd. We shouldn't take for granted that that is something deeply biological, that you can kind of be in a crowd of people. and you don't want to just know, know or date or mate with anyone there, that there's this preferential pattern. There's one part of our biology that we invoke all of the bodily senses in that process.

We're looking at someone's body language, the tone of their voice, their social networks, their smell, if you're close enough to their taste. You invoke all of the bodily senses in this sort of detection of another individual, especially if you're in this sort of mating mind, if you're in this idea of searching for courtship. The courtship process involves so many. Now, all of those innervate into the brain. When you smell someone, there are debates about whether it's pheromones,

scientists debate whether or not we really have the olfactory bulbs in our brain to detect pheromones. But we know that smell matters, whether or not, you know, we could have a technical argument about pheromones, but we still know at the end of the day, smell matters, odor, hygiene, personality, all these things. That's all the brain is processing all of the sensory information. That's one part of the story. Then there's another part of the story that if you connect with someone, that there's a cascade response that happens. So we know that if you start to feel attracted to someone, you get this dopamine rush in the brain. And dopamine sometimes is called the pleasure.

You know, hormone, it's a neurotransmitter in the brain. And it's really, what really dopamine does is it's this idea of a future reward. You start to crave something or someone. That's why it's been associated with addictions. You have these cravings for more of something. And then you get a plunge of serotonin, which is why some people get butterflies in their stomach, clammy hands. They have a hard time finding the right words.

In another context, that's anxiety. If you had all of that while you were taking an exam, you'd say, oh, my gosh, get me out of here. And so we have different physiological things that are happening. I mean, there's also oxytocin the so-called cuddle hormone. It's a neuropeptide. That comes usually later as you start to build an attachment. with someone. Or it also gets released with orgasm, so it could also happen if you're having a sexual event with someone, or at least one that's pleasurable. And so we have this physiology that is so

part of our social behavior, because we're a social primate. We're a social animal. And that social behavior is really important to our story, to our evolutionary story of how we survive and how we thrive as a species. So all of this different stuff is going on in our nervous system, in our brain, as we kind of look through a crowd and hone in on some people that we maybe want to be friends with or maybe even more we want to be partners with. Yeah, so let's have a look at that then. So as you say, though, we're all social animals. We crave social interaction.

But how does this drive for sort of, what would you say, regular platonic connection, differ from something that becomes more romantic? When we think of all the different type of social relationships, One way we can think about it, one way a lot of researchers when they think about romantic love, the science of romantic love, they've tended to use this sort of triarchic theories or these triangular theories. And it's interesting to me because some of these researchers with really different disciplinary backgrounds have you come up with it. So Helen Fisher, the biological anthropologist, used a triangular theory. Robert Sternberg, the social psychologist, a cognitive psychologist who's triangular theory. Bill Jenkoviac, a cultural, social cultural.

Anthropologists also used a model with three. And what that is, what we see over and over again, is scholars have suggested that there's sort of three points. And I think this gets at your question about friendships and general social interactions. One is that when we're looking for a romantic partner, we're one, we're motivated by the sex drive or lust or libido. We're motivated for this sort of mating piece of it,

which is maybe the most obvious part of the evolutionary story. story in terms of survival reproduction. That's one piece, is attraction. So there's sexual drive, the sort of sexual attraction, and then there's this romantic attraction, this love piece that you could feel towards a particular romantic partner. And then the third is friendship, and that's the commitment or the attachment pieces. So then we start to say, okay, there are these three, in the best case, you want a relationship that is your friend, that you have an attachment relationship with, that you feel romantic and

passionately connected to, but then you also have sexual attraction to. So when we look at those three pieces, then they come together. And then we can also understand how we have lots of relationships that sometimes fall into just one. Many of us have friends, and they're deeply important, their attachment relationships, but we don't particularly have romantic or sexual interest in them. And sometimes, I mean, I think in many ways, this also helps us understand a challenge so many relationships have. You can have maybe really fiery sexual attraction to someone, but you're kind of missing the friendship piece or you're missing the romantic piece. Those are really challenging relationships because you think that they're so exciting because the flames burn so

hot. So you're almost tricking the mind into saying, well, this is so, this is an intense relationship. This is so passionate. But you don't have any of the other ingredients that we know that we're motivated for for connection and for longevity in a relationship. And then sometimes you can have the deep romantic bond, someone you're deeply committed to that you actually quite love, but the sexual attraction has been extinguished. So we know that those three pieces, they don't always exist, but we're motivated. People around the world are motivated for have relationships that have all of those. And each of those also has their own neurochemistry in terms of what's activating in the brain when we feel that for someone. So undergirding, I shouldn't say all, but maybe what we would

call healthy romantic relationships is that friendship component, that someone, and I think that is so important because in many ways, hidden in there, hidden in the friendship piece, is what's most vital to a long-term romantic relationship. And that's someone you can trust and confide in. That's at the core of friendship. In fact, in our studies, we do this big study. We survey 5,000 U.S. singles every year. For the last 15 years, it's called Singles in America. The study is funded by Match, the dating company, Match.com. And we have asked people, what are you looking for most in partners? Is it attraction?

Is it humor? Is it someone who, you know, is sexually confident? What is it? And what we've found, particularly in the last few years, what comes to the top of our list for both men and women, and this is consistent with other big multinational studies, the number one thing singles are looking for in a romantic partner is someone they can trust and confide in. More than everything else, more than sexual romantic attraction, more than all.

all these other traits. And that I think is at the core of really that friendship piece in our relationship. We want someone we can trust that we can weather uncertainty with. You want a co-pilot in life that you know can take the wheel when you need the help. That's really what undergirds all of this. Some people never stop being part of what's happening around them. They stay curious, engaged, connected to ideas and to others. That's what defines life at Villa Gardens in Pasadena.

It's a community shaped by conversation, culture, and a shared sense of curiosity. So when the conversation turns to what's next, it doesn't feel like stepping away. It feels like staying exactly where you belong. Explore your options at villa gardens.org, a non-profit life plan senior community within the Front Porch family. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio, and Trocule. With over 100 years of combined expertise, name, and focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in hi-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering,

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When people answer these surveys, they're really talking in ideal situations, ideal scenarios. But of course, what they end up doing is often a little bit different. You know, there's a bit of a gap between what people say they want or say that they want to do and what they actually end up doing. So, you know, how do we navigate this gap between, I was going to say desire and sort of ideal or practicality? Is that a yawning gap or for some people? Or does it vary from person to person? Is that a common thing?

It does vary from person to person. But I actually think you've also touched on what one of the greatest challenges. are for people, for dating people today when we hear that people are feeling a little bit overwhelmed. So I want to come back to that because I think your question touches on one of our major challenges in dating culture today. So we do know that there can be a disconnect. In the academic literature, we say the difference between your mate preferences and your made choices, exactly what you want and what you actually choose. And part of that has to do with how everything kind of comes together and what we bring to the table. And when we look at forming relationships, when we look at courtship process, we have to keep in mind that courtship is a two-way street and that we, but we, us and our partners we try to attract, we bring our certain things to the table.

That could be your personality, that could be your intelligence, it could be your wealth, it could be your empathy. There's all sorts of different characteristics and resources that we bring. And sometimes there's a little bit of a misalignment and what we want and what we can. actually acquire is sort of not so different from another kind of a market. One great example in a study done by a colleague of mine at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth Bruch, she found that when you do an analysis of partner preferences and you assign people what they call a mate value score. So take a person and then researchers assign based on all these different how you look, what resources you have, you're given a score. On average, people try to find a partner on a dating app that has a 25% higher

mate value than themselves. So we all punch above our weight, which makes sense. It's one of the grandest decisions that we make in life that you want to find someone who you feel is maybe a reach or is great. But that can also be a challenge because those people are doing the same thing. We're all looking for someone that's a little bit higher up in our and what we're able to bring to the table. That can be a challenge. So that's one piece of the puzzle is that what we're looking for sometimes not aligned with what we're bringing to the table. And then the other is how we are handling competition, that within a particular market, there can be, you know, like I'm in a college town.

There's always a certain number of single adults here. And now an hour away, if I go to Indianapolis in the city, suddenly there's thousands and thousands more people. That's true for people all over the world. What's your geographic limitations? And I think particularly in a world that more and more people are using dating apps and websites, that makes a big difference. you could say, okay, I'm dating in London.

I'm not going to date someone who's an hour and a half away in the countryside. But someone in the countryside might say, I'm totally happy to date someone in the city because I want a bigger radius. Well, there's a myth alignment there. And that happens all over the world. And so that's the other piece of it. And then there's a third piece. And that's what psychologist Eli Finkel is called the suffocation model of relationships,

or he wrote a book called The All or Nothing Marriage. And that's that when we think of what we want in a relationship that used to be, but we almost think of like Maslow's triangle of needs with the things we need in our lives, that we used to look at our ancestors, would look at our relationships as having a mixture of want and need, but they helped us in our life. They helped us survive and have a home. But today, we expect our partners to kind of do the work of a whole village.

We want them to love us. We want them to give us emotional comfort. We want them to tell them all of our work stories. We want them to help us with our careers. We want them to take care of us when we're sick. We want them to still have sex with us the next morning after they took care of us when we were sick. It's sort of heavy, heavy expectations that our partners can do this everything. And that has really started to dominate what we see in relationship psychology and studies all over,

most especially in developed Western world. So that's different from our evolutionary history. People certainly had a love response that was happening biologically. but there was also other things that would get bound up historically in making decisions. Now, we shouldn't confuse that with this idea that, you know, relationships were always transactional. There's been some wonderful writing, for instance, in the Middle Ages, peasants always married for love because they didn't have land that they had to worry about trading. And so love bonds were happening throughout human history.

But all the other kind of complicated pieces about what do you actually need, what do you need help with, where are there resources at stake, family members that are influencing all this. So I think when we look at all of that, okay, I just threw a lot out on the table. But when we look at all of that, together it tells us we're navigating our relationships and we're navigating trying to thread a few needles that are pretty tough here. And that's where we see some of the challenges. But as you know, as I really believe, the more we understand the science, more we understand what's going on in our brain and what we're looking for,

we can thread those needles. We can find relationships that are fulfilling. Part of that is taking a step back and saying, what am I actually looking for? And is it realistic to think I'm going to find one person who's going to do all of this? So let's have a look at that then. So you mentioned that, I personally love the idea of medieval peasants marrying for love. That's warm to my heart. But you know, you're saying threading that needle then, let's say long term or otherwise. So this has changed hugely over the last few decades. I'm middle-aged. I met my partner 20-odd years ago.

And we met at work. I mean, how boring is that? But these days, the dating pool, can I call it that, seems to be much wider with the advent of these apps. You know, I don't know, I can only speak for myself, but at the time I met my partner, I can't say I was necessarily looking for a romantic relationship, you know, it just sort of happened.

But now we've got these things where we're putting ourselves out there, if only digitally, we're putting ourselves out there. Almost everyone that's single these days seems to be on an app. And I mean that from all ages, as you talk about in the book. So, you know, how has that shifted things? You're right. We see in our data in the United States and certainly in some of our other data that we have in particularly, and we've collected data in UK, Japan, Netherlands, Germany.

India, Turkey. Anyway, we've collected data in a lot of different places. We're seeing more and more people using the apps and websites. And particularly in the U.S., it is the most common way singles are meeting partners. I think in our last round of data, about 6% met in a bar or club, their most recent first date,

and around 40% met through an app or a website. So it's just the most common way people are connecting. You hit on something, I think, that there's a little bit more there, this idea that meeting someone at work, a couple of things are going, on. One, we're seeing more and more companies trying to regulate whether or not you can date in the office. I know this is much more, I think, on the States end, but we see it more and more. In fact, I sometimes do a guest

lecture on the business school here at Indiana University, and it's about this idea of love contracts. A lot of companies do that you have to disclose right away if you start a relationship with someone. And what's challenging for that, particularly for young people, is they're not always aligned with what's happening. So maybe it's they went out once. Maybe they meant if you connect. on an app, do you disclose it? To your boss? If you went on one day, do you disclose it? If you had a hookup and you slept together one night, do you disclose it? You know, what's the long-term plan? What's the, was it a one-time thing? I'm not suggesting whether it should or shouldn't be the case, but there's just a lot of complicated factors there. But the idea of meeting someone from work,

it does make sense. Humans practice what we call homophily. And that's the tendency to be attracted to someone who's similar to us. So meeting someone at work or a similar professional interests actually makes a lot of sense. It's why sociologists have found that we often date someone of the same religion or the same ethnic background, same socioeconomic background. We are attracted to people that we have some commonalities with. Although interestingly, in all of our studies, we're seeing that homophily is changing and that people are more open than ever before of dating across religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, more than ever before in our data. However, there's new categories that they're much more focused on. In the U.S., they're much more focused on political orientation.

So they're open to dating someone of different race and religion, but not necessarily a different political party. So there's those sorts of things that are going on of how, in some ways, what's interesting about that is we haven't lost the tendency for homophily for looking for someone of who's like us, but the piece that's most important has changed. So that there's that's happening. But you're right. We think of like how people connect. Now you're talking just a few decades ago, but when we look at, let's say, over the last century, we know that in the early 1900s, family, for instance, were very much involved. So maybe your employer wasn't, maybe unintentionally involved in your marriage set up. But we know that family would be involved, that you would pick

someone up, particularly young heterosexual contexts, young men would meet a young woman, go to the house, meet the family. Very early on, family would be weighing in on courtship process and decision, including whether you could leave the house. Could you go on a date outside the home, right? And that to me itself is interesting. There's not a species on this planet. We're kin, where family is as involved in mating as the case for humans. Our friends and family, particularly my family, have a huge influence on the partners we choose and the partners we stay with. I would say more than any species. All of that together tells us that, there's a lot going on in terms of these social contexts, but also that what's changed with

technology. So more and more people using these apps and websites. And the challenge is, in some ways, the apps are this remarkable opportunity. If you want a pickleball partner, you can go on and you can find a pickleball partner. If you want someone with the same food allergy, you can go on and find someone with the same food allergy. It's a remarkable opportunity to use technology to connect. That's especially true for gay men and lesbian women. It's actually a lot safer in certain places for them than, let's say, just walking into a bar to try to pick someone out. And in our mostly national study, we found that particularly women in India and Turkey, and those countries that were less gender egalitarian, they found dating apps to be much

more safer because they could control the experience more. So I think there's actually a lot of good things we can say about the apps and the technologies. At the same time, they're divorced from courtship process that our species has evolved over millions of years. and that's back to this point of invoking the bodily senses, watching someone's body language, seeing how they interacts, hearing them, smelling them. So that's a challenge.

So I think one way we can think about the technology is that they're great introducing apps. They're great to just search and find people. Then we need to let the highly evolved human brain do what it does best and try to sort through that. But tucked in there is a big challenge, and it's a challenge that our ancestors didn't face. And that's that the other great part of the opportunity of the technology is that it's more data than our brain is really good at processing.

And it's so many people. So we lived in small groups of about 150 people in human ancestral times. Today, you can be on an app. You can connect with someone. And you're maybe not sure. You don't necessarily feel motivated to give it a try because you know you can find another 2,000 people before. your next coffee break. And so this idea that we have so much opportunity in these apps and websites, that plays a trick on the brain. And we have to really try to, I think, to be successful in these

dating apps. We have to really figure out how to control that tendency. And what happens, it goes back to this point about the all or nothing marriage, this idea that we want our partner to do everything. What happens is we look at people and we go, well, you're great, but can you do 100% of everything that I want. And we're a little too quick to say, well, no, you can't, but I can find another thousand people. Surely there's someone in that list that can. And the reality is, you are unlikely to find someone who checks every single item on your 52 item list, right, or whatever along your list is. That's just, we know that that's not realistic. People are dynamic. One of my friends will often say a healthy relationship is someone whose faults you can live with. And we know that

our relationships are dynamic and this idea that you're going to find you looking for all of these traits and maybe don't have flexibility. Well, why would you have flexibility if the brain is telling you? You have so many options. This is an unlimited resource. You will find what you're looking for. It actually is a lot like how we forage for food. We just going to keep finding the perfect one. And I think that in that sense, we have a mismatch between our evolution and the current technological environment. But it's a mismatch we can control when we know about it. When we know about it, and then we can say, slow down, read profiles more carefully. Don't be so quick to discount someone because you don't like the way they held their fork at lunch. And there's ways we can work

through that to find joy and happiness. So let's move on from that to actually meeting in person. Say whatever way we've met, like in my day, it was friends would say, oh, you really like this person, you're going to love them, you know. And they set up a fake date. Never worked. But, you know, say we've made a match alone, we've been talking a little bit, or we've met in another way at work or something, and we're going on a date. You mentioned that factors such as novelty, anxiety, and even fear can sort of heighten our responses to this.

And I've read that and I thought, well, what happened to just go for a nice dinner? You're a traditional gentleman. And we can think about, I think you're right. And when we think about how we can kind of biohack, how we can use what we know about how the brain is processing information in our dating lives, a little bit of fear, a little bit of, you can get what psychologists call misattribution of arousal. And this was first done in this really wonderful study where men would walk across a wire bridge and they would get nervous doing it.

And at the other end, there was a researcher who would say, thank you for participating, you know, fill out the survey. And then in some, they would have a researcher, what's called a confederate, someone on the research team, they would have an attractive woman on the other side of the bridge. And she would give them her phone number and say, if you have any questions, follow up. And when this bridge was stable, she didn't hear from any of the men. When the bridge was unstable, more of them called her afterwards. Because the feeling they got crossing that wire bridge, when their heart rate started to go up

and they had that sense of stress and anxiety. And then they look at this woman and then they go, I think I'm falling in love because they have that physiology and they're attributing it to someone else. So a little bit of that in dating actually can help because it can start to, you associate that feeling with a person. And I don't think it's a bad trick. It allows you to really imagine, you know,

often in early dates we're nervous. We don't really say everything we want to say. We're trying to put our best foot forward. So engaging in a little bit of something that gets the nervous system going, whether you're going going to play a sport, you could be a little bit frightened. That can help you really look to the person and say, well, are you someone I want to be with when I'm afraid? Knowing that early on can actually be pretty helpful. You know, what do I feel? How does my body feel when I'm around you? And funny enough, it's not just for new dates. We know that long-term relationships, long-term couples,

those that do things in the context of each other, they take vacations together. They experience novelty together, that can really help keep passion alive, including 20 years down the line. So helps on a first date, helps in a long-term marriage, but you want to do new things, novel things, things that get the nervous system moving in the context of your partner. And then the best case, they're the person that makes you feel safe in moments that you feel a little bit of fear. They're the person you hold on to. So you sort of mentioned that. Does that feed into a successful long-term relationship. Yeah, I mean, you don't want to be scaring your partner all the time. You could totally overdo it. You want to be careful about that. But a little bit of,

it's really novelty or sensation-seeking. That does feed into a long-term relationship, especially when you associate it with your partner. Now, that could be something big. We go, we go on vacation to a new country every year. It could be something simple that we take a walk every day after dinner and we take a different, you know, we go a different direction every so often. and we go to a different part of the neighborhood. Maybe we hop in the car and go, you know, drive 15 minutes and take our walk. Novelty can be easy to attain, but we have to go out of our way to do it, especially with our partners.

We know that in some ways that's the special sauce to keep a relationship feeling connected long term is really carving out, being intentional about your partner, carving out time for them, and especially if you're experiencing novelty studies have demonstrated this. So in the book, you talk a lot about monogamy. Not always a relationship between a long-term relationship between a couple is consensually monogamous. You know, that does happen. But sometimes it is by, let's say, trust, but that doesn't always work. So, you know, what's going on there?

You know, is it just that temptation at times is too great for our biology? Yeah, I think at its core, as a biologist, when I think of monogamy, I'm always thinking of two different pieces. And that's social monogamy. That's the relationship structure, the pair bond, mutual territory defense, nest building, all of that stuff. And then sexual monogamy, which is fidelity. And they're actually somewhat different levers when we think of our relationships. And they're different mechanisms in the brain and they're different evolutionary pressure. So we evolved to have this partner, this co-pilot, to whether life with, to whether uncertainty with, I actually have argued that it really having a pair has allowed our

species to respond to change in the social and physical environment. Then the other part of that is sexual exclusivity. Now, if you're in a pair bond with someone, we often see an attempt to focus a sexual exclusivity. We tend to not want our partners to be mating with other people, for the most part. But that can also come with a challenge because we also evolve this desire for novelty, particularly sexual novelty. And it's true of both men and women. For a long time, people thought this researchers thought this was just men. We know more and more. It's true of both men and women, this desire for something exciting. And maybe for some people, that can become a new partner or another partner, but they don't necessarily want to end their primary relationship,

person they love. You know, in best case, their relationship is with someone they love. So how we navigate that, particularly in the long run, relationships can start to feel stale. And we start to say, well, I love this person. I have a life with this person, but I'm desiring all these other things. That can happen. It's actually pretty common for it to happen. Most couples see his transition from more passionate to companion and love somewhat early, about 18 to 36 months. But then long term, you're with someone for 10, 20 years, you've had kids, you've had life experiences, you've had ups and downs.

That happens somewhat naturally. but I think we can, we have the capacity to, I know we can, we have the capacity to rein that in. And for those people that we talk to, we've done studies of couples that have long-term passion, 20, 30 years into a relationship, there's a set of things that they do that I think all of us can emulate. And that they have intentionality about making carve time for each other in their sexual lives. They do things like they engage in more kissing. They also, we found more kissing, more oral sex. And we also found more. found that they did things like light candles and read, you know, magazines with tips for relationships. And at first I thought, are they getting actual tips in these magazines?

Or are they, you know, is it the particular scent of the candle? And no, it's not. It's really about saying, I'm going out of my way to set the mood in our house or in our bedroom. It's all, it's, these were all these hints of people, people who are just intentional about saying, I want to focus on our relationship today. I'm going to, you know, adjust the lighting and the candles and the, whatever it is, fresh flowers, and I want to just be clear that I'm thinking about you and I'm thinking about us. And I think that's this important piece. One of the things I write about in the

book and the intimate animal is that in all of our relationships, we can think of three entities in any given time. There's me, there's you, and there's us. And when we appreciate those three balls we're all juggling in our relationships, sometimes there's things that, you know, we need to do for the relationship for us. And then sometimes there's things I really want, there's something you really want, and how we balance all of that. And when we look at those people

who long term have satisfaction in their relationship and passion in a relationship, that they're cultivating all of those, me, you, and us. And that includes really focusing on trying new things together, carving out time for each other. So I think that doesn't have to be hard.

That doesn't have to be an enormous challenge. they could be little things that people do, and in fact that we see in the studies that they do do, and they can work. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Justin Garcia. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed,

check out his book, The Intimate Animal, The Science of Love, Fidelity, and Connection. If you liked what you've just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Incident Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus? The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice.

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