Happy Valentine's Day. I'm Florida Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Ah, February. The days are short. The temperatures are low. Spring seems like a million light years away.

You know what would make me feel better? Eating my body weight in Whitman's chocolate samplers,

while my partner and I stare lovingly at the same screen.

And luckily, I can do that because it's Valentine's Day.

That special 24 hours meant just for candy and relationships and possibly disappointment.

To celebrate, we are checking in with the Kinsey Institute, which has been producing

studies on human mating, dating, and relating longer than any other scientific institute.

Justin Garcia is their executive director. He's also an evolutionary biologist, a scientific

advisor to Match.com, and he has a new book out called The Intimate Animal, the Science of Sex Fidelity, and why we live and die for love.

Justin, are you slammed on Valentine's Day? Are people just sort of like, we got to get Justin?

It's funny. I have a friend in the English department who wrote a book on zombies. And we laugh that Halloween is his busy season and Valentine's is

mine. So at the Kinsey Institute, you do this annual survey on singles in America.

Tell me a little bit about the survey and what you want to know. Yeah, so we've been doing the

Singles in America study since 2010 in partnership with Match, Match.matchcom, the dating company. They fund the study.

It's not people on a dating app. And we look at over 5,000 U.S. singles every year. We're collecting

our 15th year of data. And it's really, it's the largest study looking at U.S. singles.

We've got over 80,000 people in the sample now. And we look at the

attitudes and behaviors of single people. There's well over 100 million single adults in

the United States today. It's a huge demographic. Is that high? Yes, I love that you ask that.

In fact, it is. And as an evolutionary biologist, this is really

historically unprecedented to have so many single adults moving in and out of the relationships.

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