HELEN FISHER IS A LOVE SCIENTIST
SUBJECT
Helen Fisher
OCCUPATION
Biological anthropologist
INTERVIEWER
Sarah Darmody
PHOTOGRAPHER
Tawni Bannister
LOCATION
New York, US
DATE
June 2017
ANTIDOTE TO
Generalising
UNEXPECTED
Nothing like her identical twin
“Sex drive gets you out there looking for anybody. You can have sex with somebody you’re not in love with. Romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one person and start the process. And those feelings of attachment, that third brain system, enables you to stick with the person.”
The day before my interview with biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher, I had read Delia Ephron’s piece in The New York Times about falling in love, 54 years later, with the man Delia’s late sister Nora had set her up with at 18 years old. No spoilers for this deft, perfect essay on romantic love, but I cried throughout, on and off like automatic windscreen wipers in a light drizzle, my imagination spinning an entire film of the events described, my empathy so aroused that I felt as if I were experiencing them myself. I immediately forwarded the article to Helen, with no explanation or salutation other than, “Looking forward to talking to you tomorrow!”
After I calmed down I was embarrassed, but then I figured, . She’ll see this email as my neural introduction—it’s merely shorthand for Helen to know that she’s about to be interviewed by someone so ruled by their oestrogen system that they’re basically a few cells held together by strong emotions. I was confident of this because Helen, in her many books and articles on the neurochemical determiners of attraction, divides personality into four main groups whose traits are associated with powerful physiological systems. There’s serotonin (Builders), dopamine (Explorers), oestrogen (Negotiators) and testosterone (Directors). I took comfort in knowing that, like me, Helen is a Negotiator, so when she opens my breathless email, the scientist in her will see my chemically pre-destined empathy, but so will her own empathy—Negotiators have a lot of empathy—as well as
