The Love Issue
Listen to the podcast on Inkandescent Radio
Lovestruck: What Would Helen Fisher Do?
February 14, 2023 — WoMed co-hosts Danielle Maltby and Jackie CamardoIt’s celebrate Valentine's Day with sex scientist and one of Match.com’s Chief Scientific Advisors, Dr. Helen Fisher, to discuss personality styles and dating trends. What's your style?
Why We Love: A tribute to Dr. Helen Fisher, a scholar and a friend
By Hope Katz Gibbs, Publisher, BeInkandescent magazine
It is with a wide-open yet sorrowful heart that I share that our friend, brilliant scholar, and down-to-earth badass, Dr. Helen Fisher, died peacefully at her New York City home on August 17th, 2024. The cause was endometrial cancer. Despite growing weak in her final weeks in hospice care, Helen completed her manuscript for a book focused on her personality research, Thinking Four Ways: How to Connect With Anyone Using Neuroscience. She submitted it five days before her death. It will be published in the US by Alfred A. Knopf and in more than a dozen foreign editions.
One of America’s most prominent anthropologists, Helen is the author of six internationally best-selling books on the science of romantic love, attachment, adultery, divorce, and the evolution and future of human family life. She spent her life investigating the biological basis of personality and how to use brain science to build teams, spark innovation, lead more effectively, and “win friends and influence people” at work, love, and life.
Click here to read her obituary in the New York Times.
I have been writing about Dr. Helen for years. She was the keynote speaker at the World Future Society Conference in 2008 when I was publicist for an international futurist think tank called Social)Technologies. Her speech was riveting, and I knew I needed to interview her. At the time, she was writing Why Him? Why Her?: . When I asked if she’d be open to talking, she repeatedly said she was too swamped to take the time. I can be persistent. Finally, in the fall of 2010, she granted me an audience. I traveled to her apartment overlooking the Frick Collection art gallery in Manhattan, and as we sat in her kitchen sipping black coffee, she shared the story of her journey. In the years following, I kept up with this truly amazing woman, watching as she spoke around the world, was featured in top-tier publications and TV talk shows. I was also intrigued by the evolution of her relationship with Match.com, which hired her to help them answer an age-old question: why do you fall in love with one person rather than another? Based on her research, she penned the questionnaire for Chemistry.com.
If you are curious about your anatomy of love, click here to take Dr. Helen’s love personality test.
Here’s my favorite bit of advice from her book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love: “Commit. Listen actively to your partner. Ask questions. Give answers. Appreciate. Stay attractive. Keep growing intellectually. Include her. Give him privacy. Be honest and trustworthy. Tell your mate what you need. Accept his/her shortcomings. Mind your manners. Exercise your sense of humor. Respect him. Respect her. Compromise. Argue constructively. Never threaten to depart. Forget the past. Say no to adultery. Don’t assume the relationship will last forever; build it one day at a time. And never give up.”
What is love? Why do we pick the people we choose to love, hire, befriend? Is there really love at first sight? How did love evolve?
To answer these eternal questions, Rutgers University professor and anthropologist, Helen traveled from the desert outback of East Africa, to Tokyo, to Iran, and back to her home in New York City, to determine if one culture perceives love differently than another. She then used fMRI technology to look inside the brains of 50 men and women who said they were madly in love.
Her perspectives on love, sexuality, women, and gender differences have been featured in Time magazine, NPR, NBC, the BBC, and CNN. She has also authored five books: “The Sex Contract,” “Anatomy of Love,” “The First Sex,” “Why We Love,” and her 2010 book, “Why Him? Why Her?” Helen is currently working on a new title about why we choose one partner over another.
The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
In her book, Why We Love, Helen explains that everywhere in the world, people fall into romantic love. “Like the craving for food and water and the maternal instinct, passion is a fundamental human drive,” she says. “Courting and winning a particular mate is one of our most profound urges.”
Helen took the question to another level in her next book, Why Him? Why Her?, and analyzed how people can find real love by understanding their personality type. The research for that book became the basis of the Chemistry.com questionnaire that matches people with compatible brain chemistry.
We begin our discussion with Helen by talking about that eternal question: Why do humans love? Helen says there are three basic mating drives that inhabit our brains:
- Lust: The craving for sexual gratification, which emerged to motivate our ancestors to seek sexual union with almost any partner.
- Romantic Love: The elation and obsession of being in love with a mate, which enabled the ancients to focus their attention on a single individual at a time and to conserve time and energy.
- Attachment: The sense of peace and security one feels toward a long-time mate, which motivated our ancestors to stay together long enough to rear their young.
Although Helen admits that the magic of love cannot be underestimated, she is convinced that humans’ need to procreate is the primary motivator behind all of these mating drives.
“If you have four children, and I have no children, your genes are going to live on and mine are going to die off,” she says. “ So we all know deep down inside that our sexual behavior is going to have important consequences.”
The Science of Mating
But what, exactly, is going on in the brain when we experience those feelings of lust, romantic love, and attachment?
Helen had initially hypothesized that romantic love was associated with elevated levels of dopamine and/or norepinephrine, two key neurotransmitters. After interviewing and using high-tech tools to test dozens of men and women, her theory was confirmed when the fMRI showed activity in the ventral tegmental area (VTA). This brain region is part of the reward system.
“Called the reptilian brain, or R-complex, it evolved long before mammals proliferated some 65 million years ago,” says Helen, noting, “This result was what I was looking for.”
The reason, she explains, is that the nerve cells in this portion of the brain have tentacle-like axons that distribute dopamine to many brain regions, including the caudate nucleus. “This sprinkler system sends dopamine to many brain parts, it produces focused attention, as well as fierce energy, concentrated motivation to attain a reward, and feelings of elation, even mania — the core feelings of romantic love,” she says.
As a result, Helen was able to observe chemical changes in the brain as her subjects looked at the photos of their loved ones, giving her an insider’s view of some of the chemical underpinnings of love.
Why Him? Why Her?
After these findings were published, Helen was asked by Match.com to become the scientific adviser to a new sister site, Chemistry.com. Using her fMRI research, she crafted the “Chemistry Profile,” a personality assessment and matching system, which includes dozens of questions ranging from “is your sock drawer ready for public inspection?” to “Are your friends the social crowd, intellectuals, adventurers, or activists?”
Other questions ask the test taker to identify a mate’s ideal body type, fitness regime, favorite Friday night date, and religious preferences. While the questions may seem straightforward, the answers identify which chemicals are most dominant in the brain: dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and / or estrogen.
- Dopamine-Driven Explorers: People with naturally high levels of dopamine tend to be risk-takers, novelty-seekers, artistic, creative, and curious. Helen found that 26 percent of the 40,000 men and women she polled fell into this category.
- Serotonin-Driven Builders: Those with a lot of serotonin tend to gravitate toward the traditional. They are calm, social, popular, loyal, conscientious, and tend to be organized and enjoy rules. Often, they are pillars of society and good in business. About 29 percent of the population polled fell into this category.
- Testosterone-Driven Directors: This group is direct, and skilled at understanding rule-based systems. They tend to be highly analytical, logical, emotionally contained, bold, and ambitious. They account for about 16 percent of the population.
- Estrogen-Driven Negotiators: Those with high amounts of estrogen have good people skills, an active imagination, are altruistic, idealistic, and nurturing. They tend to see the “big picture,” but are not very detail-oriented. Approximately 25 percent of the people polled fit into this category.
“Although everyone has a combination of chemicals, one or two tend to dominate,” Helen explains. “Consistently, though, dopamine-driven Explorers go for each other, as do serotonin-driven Builders. And testosterone-driven Directors and estrogen-driven Negotiators are happiest when they mate [each other].”
The reason, Helen says, goes back to our basic drive to survive and propagate the species. “If you are good at seeing the big picture, as Negotiators are, you need someone who is analytical and detail-oriented to help you survive, so you look for a Director. Similarly, if you are a traditionalist who is calm and really likes rules—as the serotonin-driven Builders are—you’ll want to mate with someone who looks at the world in the same logical, rule-based way you do.”
The Future of Love
Helen’s research leads her to a few forecasts about the future of love and relationships.
“Since women started returning to the workforce a few decades ago, the balance of power between the sexes has shifted,” she notes, explaining that for centuries in hunting and gathering societies, women were on an equal footing with men, going out to gather the evening meal and being equally responsible for the survival of the family and community.
“But with the invention of farming tools that required physical strength, women were relegated to seemingly secondary chores of keeping house and having children. Arranged marriages dominated, and mating became more of an economic and sometimes political agreement between families.”
Helen expects this shift in male-female roles to continue to gain strength. As more women graduate from college — in several recent years more women have been earning PhDs than men — their economic and political power will only continue to grow, and Helen expects women to return to the place of power they held before the plow was invented.
“Men are now being pressured to please a woman — or she won’t have them back,” Helen insists. “Going forward, men are definitely going to have to work a little harder to get and keep a mate.”
Helen also believes that the pursuit of romantic love later in life will increase.
As more baby boomers hit 50 — and realize they could live another 40-50 years — many will be looking around for someone new to “light their fire,” she forecasts. “Romantic love is deeply threaded into our human spirit. If we don’t have that in our lives, we feel like we are missing something. And we are.”