When people learn that I study intimacy and human sexuality for a living – as an evolutionary biologist and sex scientist, I have devoted most of my professional life to researching romantic and sexual relationships – they tend to tell me things. Personal things. Private things.
Not long ago, on a flight to Vancouver, I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me, Ginny. Over a few chardonnay miniatures I learned that Ginny had struggled with depression since her mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease a few years earlier.
At the suggestion of her therapist, she had started taking dance classes in the evenings. It was working wonders, and when some of her classmates suggested a trip to a dance festival in the Caribbean, she leapt at the opportunity.
On the last night of their trip, Ginny and three of the women from her group wandered into an open-air club on the beach. Almost immediately, she locked eyes with a dark-haired man on the other side of the dance floor and found herself moving in his direction.
Ginny – married for ten years to a husband she loved – had no intention of ever speaking to this man after that night. ‘But in that moment, all I wanted was to dance with him,’ she told me.
So, she did. They did. All her senses were engaged as their bodies moved together, her arm suddenly around his neck. She felt his hands on her hips. Tasted his sweat in the air. Sensed her heart beating faster.
By the time the lights came up, Ginny was startled by the intensity of her attraction. This man, whose movements were so in sync with hers, seemed to know her so well.
Except that they didn’t know each other at all.
There is no such thing as a ‘soulmate’. Statistically speaking, there could be thousands and thousands of people out there with whom we could have meaningful, exciting and intimate relationships over the course of a lifetime
We can learn a lot about each other when we dance. By watching the way a person moves and keeps a beat to music, we can sense whether their rhythm aligns with our own and assess their physical compatibility
Dance can be a key component in developing attraction – as many contestants have discovered to their peril on shows such as Strictly Come Dancing, which has led to the collapse of several relationships and the start of new romances with dance partners, spawning the phenomenon dubbed the ‘Strictly curse’.
The fact is many of us have experienced first-hand the wave of sexual desire triggered by a dance – as did Ginny.
We can learn a lot about each other when we dance. By watching the way a person moves and keeps a beat to music, we can sense whether their rhythm aligns with our own and assess their physical compatibility – in some cases, even their personality and health.
While dancing with a partner, as we touch and hold each other, inhaling the other’s (potentially) pheromone-packed sweat, we match each other’s heart rates and movements in a way that often speaks louder than words.
That feeling of connectedness on the dance floor is what scientists call behavioural synchronisation, which is very much a part of how evolutionary selection pressures have shaped social behaviour in the natural world.
We can see this adaptation executed to perfection in the stunning displays of a starling murmuration, in which a flock of thousands of birds will swoop and dive through the sky with such magnificent precision they appear to move as a single being.
Ultimately, what draws one human being to another – whether that plays out across a crowded dance floor, through a dating app profile, or on a blind date with your grandmother’s neighbour’s nephew – is a feeling of connectedness.
When you ‘vibe’ with someone, as my students say, it’s because you are experiencing a sense of connection on a physiological level.
Dr Justin Garcia is an evolutionary biologist and sex scientist
Our autonomic nervous system, a network of nerves that regulates a number of bodily processes – from sexual arousal, heart rate and blood pressure to respiration and even digestion – has evolved to respond to other human beings in both positive and negative ways. So, just as you might vibe with one person, another might give off a ‘bad energy’.
To both want and be wanted by the same person can be intoxicating. The American poet Robert Frost was on to something nearly a century ago when he wrote: ‘Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.’
Research has identified a subset of people who are ‘super synchronisers’ – those with an uncanny ability to identify and respond to the behaviours and bodies of others, synchronising to the physiology of whoever is in front of them.
Unsurprisingly, people with this unique and powerful social skill were rated as more attractive in a speed-dating experiment.
As Ginny reflected: ‘It was like my body knew him, even though we had never met before. It was so much more intense than just a flirtation. We had a connection.’
But did they? Had Ginny just met her ‘soulmate’? The right yin to her yang?
Realistically, there’s every possibility that Ginny’s dance partner went on to salsa in perfect sync with someone else the following night. Yet for Ginny, the feelings endured. Although she and her dance partner did not have sex that evening, and she returned to her hotel room alone, she still wonders what would have happened if she had given in to her desire – just for one night.
The romcom idea of destiny is a fantasy
Despite what Disney princess movies and every romcom ever made would have us believe – and what Ginny felt that night under the Caribbean stars – there is no such thing as a ‘soulmate’. Statistically speaking, on a planet with a population of some eight billion, there could be thousands and thousands of people out there with whom we could have meaningful, exciting and intimate relationships over the course of a lifetime.
The idea that there is one, and only one, person out there who ‘completes’ us is romantic and alluring, but it’s also a fantasy. We are not born to fulfil one particular preordained romantic destiny; the human heart is so much more complex and resilient than that.
Even if we have one partner for decades, we inhabit multiple relationships with them, as we, our partner and our partnership change over time.
Psychotherapist Esther Perel makes this point well. As she puts it: ‘Most of us are going to have two or three marriages or committed relationships. Some of us will have them with the same people.’
One woman I spoke to, a Buddhist who recently lost her husband of more than 40 years, told me that when they married, they agreed to check in with each other every five years and make sure they both wanted to continue being married to each other.
And check in they did – eight times in total over the course of their long, changing, and ultimately happy and satisfying marriage. They never formally renewed their vows, but they did make a conscious decision about whether the people they were, at each five-year milestone, still wanted to walk the path of life beside the other.
Stock up your stall at the ‘meet’ market
Apart from a few deft moves on the dance floor, in what other ways can we attract a potential partner?
There’s a good term to describe how we humans, in the mating market, tend to take whatever resources we have at our disposal and display them to a potential mate, and that’s ‘peacocking’.
The analogy is spot on. What are flashy sports cars but fancy feathers that act as symbols of a person’s style and wealth?
Not everyone chooses, or can afford, such an expensive type of peacocking, but we all find ways to shake our tailfeathers in order to win the dating game.
‘I’m with my partner because she’s more attracted to me than anyone else in the world and can’t get enough of my personality,’ is a nice fairy tale, but it usually isn’t the whole story.
If we think of potential mates as composites of various qualities, we can be a little more humane in our judgments of others’ shortcomings. And there are good reasons to not be too obsessive over needing to check off every quality on your preferred-partner checklist.
The first is population demographics: if you are especially restrictive in the combination of traits you want, the reality is that there may be few to none who actually meet those strict criteria.
A viral TikTok video in 2024 showed a variety of users – some jokingly and some seriously – declaring, ‘I’m looking for a man in finance, with a trust fund, 6ft 5in, blue eyes’. But when you run the statistics on finding a partner with those particular characteristics, as one user did, there appear to be only two single men in the entire country who fit the bill.
The good news is that even if you’re lacking in power, money or a great pair of legs, if you’ve got a sense of humour and you’re dependable, you still have plenty of desirable assets to help you stock up your stall at the meet market.
Yes, physical attraction matters a great deal. But the qualities that satisfy our emotional and psychological needs matter just as much, if not more. One large survey asked more than 200,000 people in 53 countries to rank mate preferences across 23 categories of traits. Across the board, the top five preferred traits were intelligence, humour, honesty, kindness and overall good looks.
Women rated honesty and dependability higher than men did, and men rated facial attractiveness higher than women did.
Our own research confirms that whether you’re gay, straight, trans, old, young or somewhere in between, kindness is a quality that is universally desired in a partner.
The data is unequivocal about one other quality humans prefer in a mate: we seek partners who can lead us to self-expansion. Universally, we find growth beyond the self, new experiences and new ways of thinking to be alluring aspects of partnership.
The things people are looking for in a partner run the gamut from companionship to safety to sex, and the body and mind respond differently to environmental stimuli. This is why a person’s sexual orientation, identity and preference may be heterosexual, but in certain situations his or her behaviour may be bisexual or even exclusively same-sex.
These scenarios complicate outdated simple models of sexual orientation, suggesting that preferences are not static, and that what one wants – and ultimately what one experiences – depends on all sorts of internal and environmental factors.
Why zip-lining could be a perfect first date
Once, I’d been enjoying a texting and long-distance flirting relationship with a woman for a while, after we’d met at a work event. When she told me she was planning to be in my area one weekend, I immediately set about planning the perfect date.
What did I arrange for us to do? We went zip-lining! There was a reason I had planned this activity, as opposed to dinner or a movie.
The goal of any first date, even the first few dates, is to get to know someone a bit better, to bring that initial chemistry to a simmer and, if you’re lucky, to a boil.
I took my date zip-lining because it allowed us to walk and talk while experiencing something novel and exhilarating together.
There is a psychological principle, known as ‘misattribution of arousal’, that we might put to good use in the dating arena. I knew what we were doing could arouse certain inescapable feelings of excitement, and that those could then work to my benefit when I was in the business of trying to impress.
Zip-lining is a thrilling experience and my plan was that, by doing it together, the very notion of being around me would be perceived as thrilling, too.
Yes, this is how sexologists approach first dates.
I stress, however, this was not nearly as sneaky as it might sound. My zip-lining partner, a behavioural scientist herself, also knew about the phenomenon.
There are other, less stressful ways of getting the most out of a first date, however. In 2015, The New York Times ran a column, entitled To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This. It apparently tapped into some of our collective anxieties and quickly went viral.
The writer told the story of using a set of increasingly intimate questions to get to know a potential romantic partner.
The 36 questions were developed many years prior as an experimental research tool by psychology professor Arthur Aron and his colleagues, and designed to accelerate close connection between two people.
They start with ‘easy’ ones such as, ‘Would you like to be famous? In what way?’ (No 2), but lead inexorably to, ‘If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?’ (No 33).
The purpose of this task was to help the pairs develop a close bond in a short period of time, by accelerating through the moments of connection that would otherwise naturally occur as a friendship or relationship develops.
The New York Times writer who tried this test answered honestly and thoughtfully, then… fell in love.
One indisputable truth about dating is that it is a highly efficient process by which we learn about other people. Because humans form preferential social relationships, most of our interactions are with people we don’t necessarily know very well.
You might see a neighbour or colleague every day for ten years and never know that person as well as someone you’ve just met on a date.
Exercises like asking those 36 questions are designed to reveal the most interesting, truest things about a person, and self-disclosure, trust building and mutual appreciation accelerate closeness.
If you’re doing it with someone you’re attracted to and if you’re psychologically available, it can also be a shortcut to building romantic feelings – with no need for a zip-line!
Dates they are a-changing
A big shift in the evolution of human courtship occurred as recently as the mid-1990s, with the launch of the first modern dating websites. Using apps is now the primary way young people meet.
Another trend we’ve observed is that people today are taking more time with the process of getting to know their partners than they have in previous generations.
While they may be having sex earlier in relationships, they’re also being more careful with their hearts – a phenomenon we call ‘slow love’. Moreover, data suggests that Generation Z and millennials (the two groups together comprise adults under 45)are dating less, having less sex and marrying much later compared to their parents.
Another phenomenon that has emerged from our data is the concept of the ‘sex interview’: roughly two out of five people have had sex with a potential partner before the first date.
This is done partly to determine whether they are worth the investment of getting to know each other via dating.
When it comes to their first sexual experience, we’ve also seen that, relative to their parents’ generation, young adults today are more likely to engage in their first oral sex experience before ever having penetrative sex – one great example of what sexologists call the ‘hierarchical reordering’ of sexual behaviour.
Just a few decades ago, oral sex was thought of as something more vulnerable than intercourse that you might only do with a partner you’ve grown quite close to. But for many young people today, oral sex is viewed as the less intimate and risky option.
Then there is the sending of sexual images – the notorious ‘d**k pic’ – which, we’ve found, plays a significant part in early courtship behaviour today.
In our sample of more than 4,200 single adults, we found that nearly half of women across sexual orientations and ages had received an unsolicited picture, and so had two-thirds of gay and bisexual men.
Unsavoury, yes, but perhaps not all that surprising. There has always been misalignment of intent in courtship. Prospective partners have always been in danger of misinterpreting signals – or lack thereof.
Think of it this way: 50 years ago, a man might misread a situation with a woman he had recently met as a romantic flirtation, then make the embarrassing decision to send her unwelcome flowers or gifts. But in today’s currency these overtures can be more extreme and threatening.
Searching for a partner is where the journey begins, and most people exercise relative preferences.
But new cultural norms and the internet – especially the availability of dating apps – have now changed courtship, shaping and reshaping the ways in which we seek out and connect with potential mates.
We are a species in flux. With more opportunities, the search for a mate has simultaneously become both easier and harder than ever because the human brain hasn’t evolved to choose from so many options.
To truly build fulfilling, and lasting, intimate relationships, we must not only figure out what qualities we truly desire in a partner but also stay focused on the person in front of us long enough to learn if they’re dancing to the same tune.
Adapted from The Intimate Animal by Dr Justin Garcia (Penguin Life, £20), to be published February 12. © Justin Garcia 2026. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid until February 7; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937
