Helen Fisher and the science of attraction
Helen Fisher was an anthropologist who spent decades studying romantic love and argued that it is a drive. In 2005 she was part of a team that put people who were intensely in love into a brain scanner. She died on August 17, 2024, at 79.
She wasn't a dating coach. What she left is a set of ideas about why you feel what you feel when you like someone, and a few of them are useful on a Friday night.
Who she was
Helen Fisher was born in New York in 1945. She studied anthropology and psychology at New York University and earned her PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1975. She later worked as a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, became a member of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies in Rutgers University's anthropology department, and was a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University.
Her books include The Sex Contract (1982), Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Mating, Marriage and Why We Stray, Why We Love (2004) and Why Him? Why Her? (2009). She was a main speaker at TED in 2006 and 2008. The Boston Globe ran an obituary.
Lust, attraction, attachment
Her best-known idea is that romantic life runs on three separate brain systems. She described them in a 1998 article and developed them in Why We Love.
| System | What it is |
|---|---|
| Lust | The sex drive, the general wanting |
| Attraction | The focused, early-stage romantic love for one person |
| Attachment | The calm sense of union with a long-term partner |
She argued the three can run somewhat independently, so you can feel lust without attraction or attachment. A practical reading, and it's ours rather than hers: how strongly you feel something in week two doesn't tell you much about week fifty.
The brain scan
In 2005 she and colleagues, including Arthur Aron and Lucy Brown, published a study in the Journal of Neurophysiology. They used functional MRI on 17 people, 10 women and 7 men, who had been intensely "in love" for between 1 and 17 months. Each person alternately viewed a photo of their beloved and a photo of a familiar person.
Activation specific to the beloved's photo appeared in dopamine-rich areas tied to reward and motivation, including the right ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus. The authors concluded that romantic love uses subcortical reward and motivation systems to focus on a specific individual.
Keep the size in mind. It was 17 people, and the finding is about which regions were active while they viewed a photo, not about how any one relationship turns out. Fisher's three-system model is her framework for findings like these. Wikipedia notes that a 2023 paper by Bode critiqued the theory as not accurately representing the evolution or mechanisms of romantic love, so treat it as one model, not a settled consensus.
A follow-up study, described in the Globe's obituary, looked at 15 students who had recently been rejected by partners. The Globe reports that brain regions lit up even more than in people in early romantic love. Fisher cited this in her argument that romantic love is a drive.
Match.com and Singles in America
Match.com, a commercial dating company, hired her in 2005 as its chief science adviser. She created a questionnaire, the Fisher Temperament Inventory, which the Globe says millions of people took on Chemistry.com, a site Match.com built for her. The annual Singles in America survey, run with the Kinsey Institute, started in 2010. According to the Globe, its sample of about 5,200 singles was meant to be demographically representative and none were drawn from Match.com.
The four types
In Why Him? Why Her? she sorted personality into four styles, each linked to a brain chemical system. The Globe lists them this way:
- Explorer: dopamine
- Builder: serotonin
- Director: testosterone
- Negotiator: estrogen
Publisher descriptions of the book say each type is governed by different chemical systems and that people tend to seek partners who both mirror and complement their own type. Treat the four types as her model and her questionnaire's output, not a lookup table for who you'll match with. Most people don't fit one type perfectly, and the framework is mainly useful for noticing how you and a date differ.
What to take from Helen Fisher
You can't test brain chemistry on a date, but her ideas turn into habits.
- Name the stage you're in. After a good conversation, write one line: is this lust (I want her), attraction (I keep thinking about her), or neither? Check again a week later.
- Expect the pull to be strong early. If you can't stop checking your phone after one coffee, that's the reward system she described. It's a reason to slow your decisions, not to skip them. The first month of dating someone covers what to expect.
- Let attachment take its time. Plan three meetings over about a month before judging whether it's going anywhere. Attachment, in her model, is the slow one.
- Learn your own style. Write down whether you tend to explore, plan, push or smooth things over, then notice the differences in a date. A good first date question is "what do you do on a free Saturday?" Her types are about differences like that.
- Expect rejection to sting. Her follow-up study looked at 15 recently rejected students, and the Globe reports strong activity in reward-related regions. It's a small study, so hold it loosely, and how to get over a girl who didn't like you back has a plan.
- Handle the nerves separately. If a crush makes you freeze, the nervous around a girl you like article is a better starting point than any theory. In Run Game you can log each conversation and add a note on how you felt.