The Science of Getting the Ick, Explained

Somewhere between a shrug and a breakup sits a feeling most people cannot quite name: the ick, that sudden lurch of disgust at a person who, a minute ago, was perfectly kissable. Podcast host Liz Moody asked 700,000 listeners to describe theirs (00:00). The answers ranged from a golf stance to rudeness toward a waiter, and they led her to the first peer-reviewed study of the phenomenon, which defines the ick simply as a sudden feeling of disgust (01:03). The study's first finding is almost too obvious to be satisfying: people who are generally easier to gross out are also more likely to get the ick (01:21). Moody's own marriage supplies the control group. She has a lower disgust threshold than her husband Zach, which is why he, not she, cleans up after the cat (01:28).

Disgust, it turns out, is not one emotion but three, each with its own job. Pathogen disgust keeps people away from raw chicken, vomit, and anything that might carry disease (02:16). Sexual disgust is tuned to flag traits that would make someone a poor evolutionary bet as a mate (02:42). Moral disgust is the one that keeps a society from falling apart: it fires when someone lies, cheats, or steals (03:06). Mapped onto dating life, too much tongue during a kiss reads as sexual disgust, rudeness to a waiter reads as moral disgust, and chewing with an open mouth reads as pathogen disgust (03:27). The system works. The trouble is that the alarm is calibrated for a world of real pathogens and real threats to group survival, and it goes off just as readily for far smaller things.

"The alarm for disgust in our brain is way too sensitive. It's like that smoke alarm in your hallway that goes off whenever you lightly burn your toast." (Liz Moody, [04:15])

Moody names four reasons the alarm misfires. The first is attachment style, the pattern formed in childhood that shapes how safe or unsafe closeness feels. People who lean avoidant experience closeness itself as a kind of danger, and when a relationship starts to feel safe, the nervous system can respond by hunting for a flaw, something to justify pulling back (05:18).

"When that happens, your nervous system will often look for a flaw in the other person so that you have a reason to pull back so that you can feel safe." (Liz Moody, [05:18])

The second reason is perfectionism. The same peer-reviewed study found that people who score higher on perfectionism are considerably more likely to get the ick, because they are already primed to spot flaws, in themselves and in everyone else (06:45). The study's authors put it plainly: the ick may be less about genuine incompatibility and more about unrealistic expectations (07:00). The third reason is simple abundance. One study on dating apps found that the odds of accepting a profile dropped 27 percent between the first profile a person viewed and the last, meaning swipers get close to a third pickier as they go (08:20). More perceived options make smaller flaws feel more disqualifying. The fourth reason is stress, which Moody says shuts down the part of the brain that thinks critically and also the part that can read real intuition. Until the nervous system settles, what feels like a gut feeling is often just anxiety wearing a disguise (09:28).

"If our nervous system is not in a state of relaxation, it is almost impossible to trust our gut because our gut is so frequently misfiring with anxiety." (Liz Moody, [09:39])

Moody argues that at least three of these four dials have been turned up by modern life. Constant visibility, the sense of being perceived at all times online, raises the pressure to be flawless and makes other people's imperfections feel less tolerable by comparison (15:44). An endless stream of dating-app profiles manufactures a feeling of infinite option (16:09). And a life spent reading news and worrying, rather than acting, keeps thoughts circling in the anxious, self-referential loops the brain produces when it is not occupied with a task, what researchers call the default mode network (17:00). None of this means the present is harder than the past in absolute terms. It means the specific flavor of modern difficulty, mostly cognitive rather than physical, is unusually good at keeping the nervous system keyed up, which is exactly the condition under which the ick alarm misfires most.

The Override Switch

There is, however, a counterforce, and it is almost embarrassingly simple: love. Citing research from the Gottmans, the married psychologists known for decades of research on marriage, Moody describes a filter effect: when a couple is doing well, minor annoyances get reclassified as quirks (18:15). A sock on the floor in a happy marriage is cute. In an unhappy one, the same sock becomes evidence that a partner is selfish. The effect shows up elsewhere too. Mothers rate their own baby's dirty diaper as far less disgusting than a stranger's baby's diaper (19:00), which suggests the filter is not really about the object at all. It is about the relationship surrounding the object.

Moody turns all of this into a practical audit, six questions to run before deciding whether an ick is signal or noise (20:20). Did it appear right as the relationship started to feel close, which points toward attachment anxiety rather than a real flaw (20:32)? Is the nervous system stressed, overwhelmed, or exhausted right now, in which case the feeling should wait until it calms down (21:14)? Has this been happening with a lot of different people lately, which can point to perfectionism or too many options (21:59)? Is the ick about how someone treats other people, since moral icks, like rudeness toward a service worker, are the ones worth taking seriously (22:20)? Can the trait change, and is the person willing to try, given that communication and respect matter more than the trait itself (24:18)? And if the trait is permanent, could it be lived with happily, turned from an ick into a quirk (25:10)?

The fourth question leans on a striking finding. The largest study ever conducted on relationship happiness pooled 11,000 couples across 43 separate studies and found that a partner's individual personality accounted for as little as 5 percent of how happy someone is in the relationship (23:09). What mattered far more was how much appreciation a person felt, how conflict got managed, and how committed the partner seemed, in other words, treatment rather than traits. That is one reason Moody treats moral icks differently from the rest: someone careless with a stranger's dignity is giving information about how they manage power, and power is the thing partners actually live inside.

"Every time you get an ick, that actually is important information. But it might not just be information about the person that you are getting the ick about." (Liz Moody, [25:33])

That reversal is the real argument of the episode. The ick is not a lie detector aimed outward. It is a readout of a nervous system, tuned by a childhood, a stress level, a number of open tabs on a dating app, and whether love has been allowed to do its filtering work. Treated that way, disgust stops being a verdict on a partner and starts being a question about the self, one worth answering honestly before it answers for a relationship that a calmer week might have saved.