HELEN FISHER: I'm Dr. Helen Fisher. I'm a biological anthropologist, and I study love. I've written six books that sell all over the world on romantic love, how it evolved, what happens in the brain, and why you fall in love with one person rather than another.

- [Narrator] Chapter one: A life shaped by love and curiosity.

- I really had a wonderful childhood. I grew up in a modern house, a glass house right next to Philip Johnson's glass house in New Canaan, Connecticut. And it was thrilling. We had a lot of land. We had big floodlights. You could see the deer and the foxes and the woodchucks and the possums all around the house all the time. I have an identical twin sister, so I always had somebody to play with. And my father and mother really believed that sex was an important part of a partnership. As a matter of fact, when I was 18, my father gave me about 20 books on sex. There was nothing prurient in our household. I never even saw him hold my hand. He was an executive at "Time" magazine. He was a good friend of Henry R. Luce. He commuted to New York every day, and I just played with my twin sister and went to school, was sent off to boarding school. Certainly went to college, actually several of them. And then got into graduate school at the University of Colorado in Boulder and got my PhD in physical anthropology and human evolution. And then I focused on the brain and romantic love and attachment. Why are we bothered to pair up with somebody at all? 97% of mammals don't do that. It's very unusual that we love the way we do and we stick with one partner for periods of time. I remember my first sexual experience. You'll probably be disappointed, but my father loved to fish, and my mother collected a lot of driftwood for her flower arrangements. And we went up to Cape Cod, and it was in the autumn. And we were playing on the beach, way, way up the beach when I was about five years old. And my father, who was a very good tennis player, gave me a tennis ball, and he put his big watch on my wrist. And he said, "You girls go up around that huge sand escarpment, and don't come back and don't look back until this hand is here and that hand is there." So off we shuffled up the beach. We followed the instructions, and we came back when we were told to. And my mother was entirely different. She's generally a bit of a battle ax, and she was right next to my father. They were both sitting on this tiny little towel, and she was so charming. And I looked down to her, and I said, "Something's going on here. I don't know what it is, but I know it's good for me." And that was the beginning. Sex was always a part of my family's life. I remember that on Saturday afternoon, my twin sister were instructed to never walk around that side of the house 'cause it was a glass house and you could see in. And we were never allowed to knock on their bedroom door if, in fact, it was shut. So for some reason sex was all around. I remember one time, very young child, and I walked out of a restaurant, and Dad and Mother were standing out there waiting for the car. And I saw him reach in pat her on the fanny. It was somehow always around. And I was also told that this was an important part of a partnership. I knew, from a small child, that when I grew up, there were certain things in a partnership that really should work properly. And one was, you should find your partner sexually attractive. And so, I mean, a lot of people have thought, "Oh, this is disgusting." It was just the way I grew up. And I've always thought that sex was an important part of romance. It is. They're very closely connected now. I've shown that in the brain. I'm happy to tell you why sex is good for you if you want to hear about it. I am an identical twin, and I've always gotten along absolutely perfectly with my twin sister. Her name is Lorna. She lives in France. She's a very fine painter. And she shows in Paris and actually also in China and Japan. She's a fine painter. We've never had an argument. And one thing about being an identical twin is everybody asks you about yourself. Everybody does. Do you have the same cavities in your teeth? Do you like the same food? Do you have the same friends? Everybody does. And one time, we were maybe around eight or nine, and we were told to assemble in the foyer of our house when one of mother's friends came over. And Mother's friend came over and she leaned down to me and she said, asked the standard questions, and then she said, "Do you think alike?" And at the time, I thought to myself as I looked up at her, "Well, how would I know how she thinks? I mean, that's ridiculous." But I came to realize that there are patterns to personality that are genetically related. And so when I got to graduate school in Boulder, it was a long time ago, and in those days, they thought that the mind was an empty slate, a tabula rasa, and environment just filled up the brain with who you are. And as I stood there and listened to these various academics, I thought, "That's not true. There's got to be some part of our mind that came out of our nature. I know that because I'm a twin, an identical twin." And so when it came to writing my PhD dissertation, I thought to myself, if there's any part of human behavior that has a biological origin, it must be our patterns of love and marriage, because as Darwin would've said, if you have four children, and I have no children, you live on and I die out. The game of love matters. And so you would think there would've been selection for all kinds of behaviors that would enable you to fall in love with somebody, form a partnership, and raise your babies as a team. And so that's why I started to study love. And you know, people will often think, "Well, she studied love because she had a bad relationship in high school." Well, nobody gets out of love alive. We all have problems with love, but that did not stimulate me to study romantic love. It was simply because I was an identical twin, and I was absolutely positive that if there was any part of human behavior that must have evolved, that must have a genetic and physiological component, it's who we love, who we choose, how we partner, and how we raise our babies as a team. I was a very curious child. I remember we lived in a small town in Connecticut, but my family comes from New York City, and I remember taking the train home at night and just glued out the window into everybody's home, looking for anything about them. And because we grew up in a glass house and because there were three other glass houses on this lane, we were at the top of the lane, I used to, as a small child, sneak into the woods and sit on an old stone wall and just watch my neighbors eat dinner. And then when I got to graduate school, I remember being invited to a party and they had a telescope, and they had the telescope focused on somebody in another apartment building. It happened to be a man watching television and smoking a pipe. And while everybody was carousing, I just sat there, and I watched for, I don't know, 45 minutes. I just watched this man smoke his pipe. Just the way the face moved, the way his expressions were, what he was wearing. I've always been interested in human beings, and particularly in human nature. When I first began to study romantic love, I wrote my very first academic paper, and it was on these three different brain systems that I think evolved for mating and reproduction, sex drive being one, feelings of intense romantic love being the second, and feelings of deep attachment being the third. And I was maintaining in that article that these all evolved for various reasons. And I sent in that paper to a very good journal. And the peer reviews came back, and maybe two, but at least one of the peer reviewers wrote back and said, "You can't study this. It's part of the supernatural." And I looked at that, and I thought to myself, "Does this person think that anger is part of the supernatural, that fear is part of the supernatural, that disgust or joy is part of the supernatural? Why would they think that romantic love, a basic brain system, would be part of the supernatural? I mean, all over the world, you know, we've got data on over 200 societies, people everywhere fall in love. They pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love. It's a powerful brain system. And then you take a look at all the myths, the legends, and in more advanced societies, the plays, the operas, the symphonies, the ballets, the movies, the self-help books, the Valentine's Day, cards, letters, therapists, we are deluged with this basic human drive to love.

- [Narrator] Chapter two: Love is a drive, not a feeling.

- I really began by wondering why we bothered to pair up at all. 97% of mammals do not pair up. People do. So I thought that might be quite easy. And I looked at the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations and in every culture in the world, and not only around the world today, but historically, traditional societies, hunting and gathering societies. Every single culture in the world has some mechanism for people to form some sort of partnership to rear their babies as a team. And so I really started by looking at the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations, reading over 90 ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherers and agrarian peoples and herding peoples, et cetera. And I just kept seeing the same pattern no matter what their gods were, what they did for a living, what they wore, the songs they sang, everything varies except love, and everybody loves. So I became convinced that this was a real thing, that we were built somehow to form partnerships. And then the day came when I thought to myself, "Well, then it must be something in the brain." And I remember I was walking along in Greenwich Village, it was about three o'clock on a weekday afternoon. And I suddenly thought to myself, these three brain systems must have evolved: sex drive, feelings of intense romantic love, and feelings of attachment. I remember even where I was standing, and I thought maybe if I could put people into a brain scanner, I could find the basic brain pathways, the basic brain circuitry of these three basic brain systems. A lot of people who have studied the sex drive, I didn't need to study that. We know some of the genes, we know some of the hormones, we know the pathways, really. I mean, to some extent certainly, but quite a bit about the sex drive. So I felt that it was more important for me to study romantic love and feelings of attachment. And I focused on romantic love because people really do think it's part of the supernatural. Most people don't kill themselves over an attachment. They kill themselves over romantic love. I mean, it is such a powerful brain system that I thought to myself, if I can figure out what's happening in the brain, maybe I can help people understand this and, in fact, maybe not even kill themselves when they are rejected. Nobody gets out of love alive. We all suffer. Some people suffer more than others. Some people respond very dramatically, and some people can get it over it relatively quickly, but nobody gets out of love alive. We all have disappointments. It's such a powerful brain system. I mean, everywhere in the world. It's very interesting because, you know, I was talking to a man, an anthropologist, who studies the people in China, this was many years ago. And he said, "Oh, well the Chinese don't love." Well, he didn't read any of their love poetry. Everywhere in the world, there's poetry and songs and dances and dramas that express love. So he went back to China, and he said to his assistant, who was Chinese, he said, "Well, I mean in China they don't love." And the assistant broke down, started crying and said, "I have a woman who doesn't love me. I don't know what I'm gonna do." And that sent him on to studying romantic love in China. And when you look around the world, I mean, the poetry, you know, a lot of anthropologists studied potsherd or postholes or arrowheads or all kinds of more sophisticated things, but I really like to read poetry because I think it's a basic artifact of this basic brain system. And it always says the same thing. I remember one poet by a Chinese person, and it was something like this. It was something like, you know, I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat. The night I brought you home, I watched you roll it out. Even the things that a lover touches in your house acquire meaning. The brain acquires meaning to anything that has to do with romance and attachment. It's so profoundly basic to who we are because if you don't love and you don't attach, you don't have babies and you don't send your DNA into tomorrow. And from a Darwinian perspective, you lose. It's very interesting. People don't think that other animals love. I've really looked at a lot of other animals, and they do love. They do form romantic, I call it animal magnetism or animal romance. And you can see a rat suddenly feel a very intense interest in another rat. Only lasts for about 30 seconds. In elephants, it lasts for about five days. In foxes, it can last a long time, but most other animals don't form a partnership. They feel that intense attraction, animal attraction, animal magnetism. And we now know that that attraction is basically the same brain system as our brain system of feelings of romantic love. So other animals love. Darwin said that other animals love. He even thought that butterflies felt that attraction and that this was sort of a, oh, a primordial beginning of this attraction system that became incredibly elaborate in the human animal. But why is it that we bother to pair up? All kinds of other animals feel romance, but it doesn't last very long. In humans, it can last months or years, actually. We've been able to prove that romantic love can last many years. I think that the brain circuitry for human romantic love and feelings of deep attachment evolved probably 4.4 million years ago. Our ancestors were being forced out of the trees. They were gonna have to come down onto the ground because the trees were disappearing and move through very dangerous open grasslands to another group of trees and collect what they could on the ground before they went to eat in a place, unmolested by predators. And with the beginning of carrying sticks and stones to protect themselves and food to eat, they began to have to walk on two legs instead of four. Chimpanzees walk on four legs, and they've got their baby on their back. We began to have to walk up on two legs instead of four, which meant that females began to have to carry their babies in their arms instead of on their backs. Now, how is a 4-million-year-old female gonna have to carry the equivalent of a 20-pound bowling ball in one arm and sticks and stones in the other and protect and feed herself? She began to need a partner to help protect her while she moved along. And how could a male four millions year years ago protect a whole group of females? He could protect one. And so we went over what I call the monogamy threshold, a threshold, so in which the female needed a partner to help her raise her baby, at least through infancy. And males needed to protect at least one female with his DNA in her. And of course, you know, females needed a male who wanted to stick around. Those that didn't stick around, didn't have the babies, and didn't pass their DNA onto you and me, leaving in the human creature today, both men and women, with a tremendous capacity to fall in love, form a partnership, and raise their children as a team. So the bottom line is, along with that, we began to evolve our human brain pathways for human romantic love and feelings of deep attachment. So I began to believe that if I looked into the brain, I could find the brain circuitry of romantic love. So I assembled a team and began to put people in the scanner, and the issue was how to scan the brain. And what I ended up with is the following protocol or research design. They would look at a picture of their sweetheart that called forth the wonderful feelings of romantic love, and they would also look at a photograph of somebody who called forth no emotions, no positive or negative emotions. The problem with that is when you're madly in love with somebody, your emotions are gonna bleed from one picture to the other. So I had relax the brain between looking at the positive and the neutral. So I used a very standard psychological distraction task. I would cast on the screen a large number like 4,821, and I would ask them for 30 seconds to look at that photograph, that picture, that number, and count backwards in increments of seven. Now, even mathematicians take some time to count backwards in increments of seven. It takes all the blood away from brain regions linked with romantic love to brain regions linked with just simply counting backwards. So this way, they would bring a photograph of their sweetheart into the lab, they would bring a neutral photograph, somebody from the office who they barely knew, somebody from the dry cleaners, some past friend of somebody who called forth no positive or negative feelings. So they would look at those two photographs, they would look at their sweetheart, then they would count backwards. Then they would look at the neutral, then they would count backwards. So it was positive, count back, neutral, count back, a cycle of six times, 12 times looking at these photographs. That way, we were able to capture, through the FMRI machine, how you felt when you have experienced that intense feeling of romantic love, what you were doing in the brain when you were counting backwards, and how you felt when you were simply looking at the neutral photograph. And when you put the neutral and the romantic love on top of each other and cancel out what they have in common, you're left what's going on in the brain when you're madly in love. I'll never forget the first moment that I looked at our data. I felt as if I was looking back to over 4 million years ago when this brain system evolved. And what we saw was activity in a tiny little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. It's a brain region that actually makes dopamine a natural stimulant and gives you that focus, that motivation, the craving, the elation of intense romantic love. And in fact, I was really surprised, I thought we would find all kinds of data, oh, linked with the emotions and linked with cognitive thinking process. We did find data linked with thinking processes and the emotions, but no two people were alike, which is obvious. They'd be thinking about somebody else. But they all showed activity in this little factory near the base of the brain. And I had thought that romantic love was an emotion or a series of emotions, but what it really is is a drive, a basic mating drive that evolved millions of years ago to enable you to focus your mating energy on a single individual and start the mating process. As a matter of fact, we now call it a survival mechanism. The basic brain region that generates the dopamine and gives you that feeling of romantic love lies right next to the factory that orchestrates thirst and hunger. Thirst and hunger keep you alive today. Romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy and drive your DNA into tomorrow. So it's a basic survival mechanism that evolved millions of years ago, came out of nature, came out of other animals that feel it, but nowhere near to that degree. As a matter of fact, I think all three of these brain systems evolved in tandem. The sex drive evolved to get you out there looking for a whole range of partners. I mean, you can have sex with somebody when you're not in love with them. Romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your meeting energy on just one at a time. And attachment, that third brain system evolved to enable you to stick with this person, at least long enough to raise a single child through infancy. I was absolutely positive it was not a supernatural event. And so no, I did not think about that person at that moment. But I have been determined to show the world that this is real. So many people suffer from it. And as a matter of fact, you know, a lot of people came and wanted to talk to me, a lot of journalists, et cetera, after we discovered this data. And I thought to myself at the time, you know, Helen, this really isn't very important. You know, when you're madly in love with the right person, there's no problem. The real problem is when you've been rejected in love. That's when you turn into a pest, not only for all your friends and family, but it's a dangerous situation. So I thought to myself, now what I've got to do is put people into the machine who have been rejected in love. That's where I can make a contribution to humanity. Well, then my next study was putting people into the brain scanner who had just been rejected in love. That was a lot harder because, you know, before I put people in this brain scanner, you really talk to them for a long time. You gotta make sure that they are madly in love or that they are rejected in love because these machines are expensive, and it's extremely time-consuming. And I also have to tell them what's gonna go on in the machine. I've got to get them to bring me the correct pictures so it triggers the right response in the brain. So I have long discussions with all of our subjects, our participants before I put them in the machine. And when you've been rejected in love, one girl didn't show up for the scanning. She had not been out of bed for almost four days. Another person cried so hard in the machine that we couldn't use the data. She moved too much. Another person, after the scanning, came out of the machine and was so angry that he went home and, you know, drank too much. And so I began to realize very early, now I'm playing with something that is so powerful that I began to make sure that I walk with them for a while after the scan was over, that I called them that evening and the following morning to make sure that everything was all right. This is when people kill themselves. This is when people kill somebody else. This is when they stalk. This is when they cry all night. This is when they slip into clinical depression. So I thought it was an extremely important study, I still think it is. And I was determined to see whether rejection and love was actually an addiction. I had even thought that happy love was an addiction because, you know, when you're madly in love, you'll do the craziest things. And sure enough, I was able to put 15 men and women into the scanner who had just been dumped. I was able to find activity in a lot of brain regions. One brain region is that same basic ventral tegmental area, the VTA, that pumps out the dopamine that gives them the feeling of intense dramatic love. Also found activity in a brain region linked with deep feelings of attachment. You don't stop loving somebody when they've dumped you. I found activity in a brain region linked with pain, with physical pain, is there's a brain region that also becomes active when you have a toothache. The difference between a toothache and intense rejection is the toothache goes away after you get to the dentist. And with rejection and love, you can feel that pain for months, maybe sometimes years. But most important, I found activity in three brain regions linked with craving and addiction specifically. And what I was looking for is activity in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens. It's the basic brain region that becomes active when you are addicted to cocaine, heroin, booze, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, all of the addictions. And so I was able to prove that romantic love, when you are rejected, is an addiction. It is a love addiction. Then we went back, and we were able to find that people who were madly and happily in love were also addicted. We also found activity in this basic brain region, the nucleus accumbens. So I'm trying to get the world to understand how important this brain system is. You know, it's so interesting. Some psychologists, you know, you'll go in, and they'll say, "Well, just get rid of him. You know, he beats you up, just get rid of him." And they don't really realize that this person might not be able to get rid of them. As a matter of fact, I really believe in many of the principles of AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, and I do think that we need to treat this particular addiction as a very special addiction with very special therapies.

- [Narrator] Chapter three: How to make love last.

- I hope the world understands that this intense feeling of romantic love came out of nature. Everybody feels it. And we have to respect the intense feelings of people when they have been rejected in love, when they're happily in love, and when they're in love long term. My colleagues and I have put 17 people into the scanner who were in love long term. These were people all in their 50s and 60s. They kept coming into the lab saying, "I'm still in love with her." Not just loving her. In love with her or in love with him. So we put, I think it was 17 people into the brain scanner using FMRI again. In love an average of 21 years. Americas don't believe that you can remain in love long term. And sure enough, we found activity in these same brain regions. The ventral tegmental area pumps out the dopamine, gives you feelings of intense romantic love, a brain region in the ventral pallidum linked with attachment, a brain region in the hypothalamus linked with the sex drive, and brain regions linked with calm and security. So in long-term love, you can remain in love long term, but you gotta pick the right person. And that's what sent me into wondering, why him? Why her? Why are we so naturally drawn to one person rather than another? I don't think it's just culture. I think there's biology involved. I know that some other scientists are trying to find what's basically love magic. I mean, you know, great many cultures in the world have some form of love magic, and they are trying to see if we can concoct various drugs that either trigger the brain circuitry of romantic love or remain in love long term. I don't think that's possible, personally. We do know that when you do novel things together with somebody, you can trigger or sustain feelings of romantic love, the reason being that any kind of novelty drives up the dopamine system in the brain. And that's one of the things that I say to people. If you want to maintain a long-term happy partnership, you wanna sustain all three of these brain system. You wanna have sex regularly, that drives up the testosterone system, so you want more sex. Sex is very good for you if you like the person you're having sex with. If you wanna sustain feelings of intense romantic love, novelty, novelty, novelty. And you don't have to swing from chandeliers. Just ride your bicycles going out to dinner, walk in a different part of town, go on a summer vacation to someplace else, do something novel. And if you want to sustain feelings of deep attachment, stay in touch. Any kind of holding hands, kissing, walking arm in arm, sitting next to each other to watch television instead of separate armchair, learning to at least start sleeping together in one another's arms. Any kind of continued pleasant touch drives up the oxytocin system. So I think what I'm working towards here is understanding these brain circuits enough, sex drive, romantic love, and feelings of attachment, so that we can use the data to find the right person, that's number one, understand who they are, that's number two, and sustain a long-term happy partnerships. The reason being that happy partnerships are important. In a happy partnership, you live longer, you have fewer diseases, any kinds of hugs drives up the oxytocin system. Any kind of laughter with the partner drives up the dopamine system. And any kind of play with the partner contributes to brain growth. So it's important to be able to find the right person and then sustain these feelings of the sex drive, romantic love, and attachment. And I hope I'm certainly working that way in my science. I am chief science advisor to match.com, and I'm going on to my 16th year of that. And I'm a consultant to them, but I'll talk to them again tomorrow. I do it all the time. The first thing I did with them, I'll never forget the moment that they first called me. It was two days before Christmas in New York City. Nothing happens in New York City two days before Christmas. And I picked up the phone, and somebody said, "Would you meet with the people that matched two days after Christmas?" I said sure. And they offered me some money too, so why not? And I went into this big glass building down on Canal Street and was sitting there in this room, and all of a sudden, 11 people poured in. And I didn't know who they were. I thought, "Is this a think tank? Are there other academics here?" And as it turns out, it was the CEO on down. And in the middle of the morning, he turned to me, I didn't know which he was at the time, but somebody had turned to me and ended up being the CEO. And he looked at me, he said, "Helen, why do you fall in love with one person rather than another?" And at the time I said, well, you know, nobody really knows. We tend to fall in love with somebody who's from the same socioeconomic and ethnic background, somebody with the same level of intelligence and good looks and education, somebody with the same reproductive and economic goals, and somebody who shares your social and religious values. But you can walk into a room and everybody is from your background and level of education and good looks and ethnic background, and you don't fall in love with all of them. And it was at that moment that I thought to myself, there must be some biology to it. There must be something that we've evolved to draw us naturally to some people rather than others. So that was the beginning of looking into the biology of why him, why her, why you fall in love with one person rather than another. I accomplished that within, oh, I don't know, 5, 10 years of working with them. And more recently, for the last 10 years, what I do is something else. I work with, annually, doing a study called Singles in America. And annually, with Match, we construct about 200 questions that we wanna know about. And then we do a national study. We do not poll the Match members. This is not a study of Match members. It's a national representative sample of singles based on the US census. So we got the right number of Blacks, whites, Asians, Latino, gay, straight, rural, suburban, urban, every part of the country, and every age group, age 18 to 71+. So we create about 200 questions, generally in July and August. And then we get the data back in early December. That destroys Christmas for me. And we assemble all the data, and I begin to find the patterns of who we love, how we love, where we love, when we love, what we eat. I know how many orgasms singles have. I know Republicans and Democrats and Independents. I mean, I know what gays eat and what straights eat, which, by the way, is exactly the same thing. There's almost no difference between gays and straights except who you're attracted to. I've been trying to tell the press that for, I don't know, 15 years. They can't understand that. These people love. It's a universal feeling, romantic love. And so we collect the data, I look for patterns, and then finally, we write a press release, and then we write academic papers on it. We've already written 13 academic papers on understanding this huge data set. And it's so interesting, a lot of people have said, "Oh, well, why do you work with Match? You know, I mean, academics are supposed to stay in academia." Well, I've got data on 50,000 people. That's a real blessing. And indeed, in my personality questionnaire, I made this questionnaire based on brain circuitry. I validated with brain scanning, and it's now been taken by over 15 million people in 40 countries. And this is where business and academia can really work together.

- [Narrator] Chapter four: Love in the modern age.

- It's very interesting how online dating is affecting love, particularly recently. You know, I've done this study for 10 years now, and as it turns out, more people met their last first date on the internet than off of the internet. So it varies year by year. But let's say 2017, 40% of singles met their last first date on the internet, not just Match, but somewhere on the internet, on a dating site or a dating app. And only 25% met through a friend, and less than 10% met at work, at school, at church, in some sort of social setting. So the bottom line is more people meet today on the internet than off the internet. And a very recent article came out of the University of Chicago showing that if you met somebody on the internet rather than off the internet, you were less likely to divorce. And I thought to myself, well, why would that be? I mean, where does what difference, you meet them in a bar, you meet them in a restaurant, you meet them in a museum, you meet them at work or school. Why would where you meet somebody make a difference in the stability of a partnership? So I did a study with Match, not of Match members, and I looked at people who met somebody on the internet as opposed to off of the internet. And as it turns out, people who met on the internet are more likely to have full-time employment, more likely to be of higher education, and more likely to be looking for a long-term commitment. And so we are seeing the rise of internet dating. And along with that, there's every reason to think we're gonna see more stability in partnerships. The other thing that we're seeing is more interracial marriages, which I think is always great. So these are the long-term trends. You can't kill love. It's a basic brain system, like the fear system or the anger system or the choice, you can't kill it. What it's changing is courtship. You know, in my day, which was a long time ago, somebody picked you up and you went parking. You know, 150 years ago, you went to church and then went off to to lunch and swang on the swing on the porch and met somebody that way. 50,000 years ago, you assembled at a waterhole and you met somebody at the other side of the waterhole. So courtship changes from one society and one culture and one time to the next. Courtship will keep changing. Romantic love will be with us forever. It's primordial, it's adaptable, and it's eternal. It will survive as long as we survive as a species. Long before the pandemic, I had already seen a very interesting new courtship process, which I call slow love. In the past, both men and women married in their early 20s. Now they're marrying in their late 20s, this very long period of pre-commitment, slow love. They're getting to know each other very slowly. They're starting these days, oh, just friends, we're just friends. Then they move into friends with benefits. You learn a lot between the sheets, not just the way somebody makes love, but whether they are patient, whether they're kind, whether they've got a sense of humor. Then if that all works out, then they go out on the official first date and tell friends and family about the relationship and then they slowly move in together, and then they marry. The bottom line is with this slow love, by the time they walk down the aisle, they know who they've got, they know they want who they've got, and they think they can keep who they've got. As a matter of fact, 89% of singles today do believe that when you find the right person, you can remain married for life. What's interesting about this slow love is that the later you marry, the longer you court, the later you marry, the more likely you are to remain together long-term. I know that because I've studied it through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations. Everywhere in the world, in 80 societies, and I've got data from 1947 to 2011, it hasn't changed. The later you marry, the more likely you are to remain married. And we now have data on over 3,000 Americans showing that the longer you court and the later you wed, the more likely you are to remain together long-term. That is slow love. There's a new stage emerging called video chatting, and they're meeting on the internet, then they're doing the video chatting, and then they're going out and meeting in person. And I have data that is very recent within about four months. And as it turns out, these people who are doing the video chatting are having more meaningful conversations. They're having longer conversations before they meet in person. They're being more honest, more transparent. They're focusing less on their looks and the other person's looks, and they're focusing much more on whether this person is fully employed and is stable economically and financially. So we're seeing the slowing down even more of courtship. And as a matter of fact, what's interesting about this video dating is I did a study of almost 1,000 people who are doing the video dating right this minute, and it keeps increasing. 50% of them actually fell in love during their video chatting, and 56% of them reported that they felt some romantic feelings for somebody. So when you look at them, even if it's through a video camera, you can trigger this brain circuitry and fall in love. You know, romantic love I think is like a sleeping cat. It can be awakened instantly and indeed is doing it on video chatting. So we're gonna see more meaningful first dates, but fewer first dates because they're now using video chatting as a vetting process, just seeing whether they wanna go out on the first date. And that's great because on the first date, they now know they do want to kiss and hug. They've already begun to like the person. They know they wanna spend some money on the date. The first dates are gonna be more and more meaningful because they've gotten rid of the frogs. We're gonna be kissing fewer frogs, and that's gonna lead to longer courtship, later marriage, and more stability in partnerships. I think for maybe decades to come. Actually, they're now calling the young, I love millennials. They're leading this whole process. Millennials are careful. Everybody thinks that they're reckless. I think they are a very cautious group. As a matter of fact, they're having less sex. You know, 1/3 of American millennials are living at home. Before the pandemic, they were living at home, and they weren't living at home 'cause they were lazy. They were living at home because they wanna put their career together. They wanna get stable before they tie the knot. And they're very serious about love. They'll go out and hop into bed with somebody, but if it's not gonna work, they get rid of it. You know, they've invented this term, DTR, define the relationship. And I asked 5,000 singles, including an awful lot of millennials, you know, when do you have this conversation, DTR, define the relationship? And they said, within four months. That was the average. Four months. After four months of going out with somebody, you ask, "Where are we headed?" In my day, you'd wait years. You would wait years. These people are dedicated to knowing what's going on. They want transparency, they want honesty, they want meaningful conversations. They're looking for somebody who's financially stable, and they're not gonna take second best. They're gonna wait. They feel they've got time. And they're using sex, I think, as an interview process. I mean, you know, these days, they know how to avoid getting pregnant. They know how to avoid disease, and they don't have to walk the walk of shame. So sex has almost become, I think, a bit of a sex interview before the first date. And a lot of older people think that's crazy. Well, you mean you're gonna have sex before the first date? Well, a lot of them forget that a first date, at least in New York City, can cost you $200. And these people want to go out and have a meaningful conversation and know that this could work. I asked the young, in this Singleton America study, what's keeping you from getting serious about anybody? And 40% of millennials said, I first want self-acceptance. Now, when do you get self-acceptance? It's very noble, but it's a noble crowd. Millennials are serious about love. There are still an awful lot of academics that hold out that there are no differences between men and women. They are fighting the last war. That war should be so over. The bottom line is that there are some real gender differences in the brain. And I'm not the only one that knows that. There's a huge amount of data that people, you know, even doing brain scanning studies on something entirely different, they're not even looking for gender differences, and they see these gender differences. And the data is just overwhelming that there are some real gender differences that evolved millions of years ago. In fact, I wrote a whole book about it called "The First Sex: the Natural Talents of Women and How they're Changing the World." And indeed, as women pile into the job market in cultures around the world, they really come with some incredible assets. And of course, for millions of years, men and women did different things. Men went out hunting all the time. For that, you needed the ability to track, to surround, to throw, to hit, to drag it home. There's a lot of data from around the world in over 22 societies that men tend to be analytical, logical, direct, decisive, tough-minded, and good at what we call rule-based systems, everything from engineering to math to computers to music. Music is very spatial. It's not spatial to me. I'm not high on the testosterone scale, but you know, I used to have a boyfriend. He knew exactly where Beethoven was changing the key, what was amusing in Beethoven, I didn't see what was amusing in Beethoven's structure, but he was able to see that, whereas women really are much more linguistically skilled, much better at reading posture, gesture, and tone of voice, probably comes from millions of years of holding that baby in front of your face, controlling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. Women tend to be more trusting, more emotionally expressive. They tend to see the long-term. Men tend to see the short term. Women have a more holistic, synthetic, contextual, long-term view. They tend to be extremely imaginative. So the sexes have evolved, through millions of years of doing different jobs, a host of different skills. The point is men and women are like two feet. We need each other to get ahead, but we are not alike. You know, when I talk about, there not a lot of gender differences when it comes to romantic love. This is a basic brain system like the fear system or the anger system. Men and women can both get angry. Women's anger dribbles out, and whereas men explode. So there's differences, but they both feel anger in the same way both men and women feel the love. When we put people into the brain scanner, we found no difference in that pathway for romantic love, but they express it somewhat differently. Men fall in love faster than women do. They fall in love more often than women do. When a man meets a woman who he falls in love with, he wants to introduce her to friends and family sooner. He wants to move in sooner. We call it mate guarding. Men have more intimate conversations with their wives than women do with their husbands because women have their intimate conversations with their girlfriends. And men are 2 1/2 times more likely to kill themselves when a relationship is over. So if I had to say who was the more romantic sex, I would say men rather than women. We've got a lot of data on that. Try telling that to a women's magazine. It's hopeless. I've been trying for 40 years. Yeah, it was, you know, I have studied romantic love and attachment for 50 years ever since graduate school, but I was never really interested in marrying myself. I did marry for about three months when I was 23. I thought that's what you were supposed to do. I knew as I was walking down the aisle I did not want to marry him. I only did marry him 'cause I was so scared of my mother that I didn't dare tell her I wasn't gonna do it, but she was perfectly happy with me divorcing him. She was very sweet about it when the time came. I've had three very long-term, very good, happy partnerships. But I got married a few months ago, and I'm 75. And you asked me why. It's not because I was scared of old age. I'm not scared of it. I've got that somewhat under control as much as you can. But it was the right time. I found the right guy, and I really learned something about attachment that teenagers already know. It is different. I had always been maintained, in these long-term romances with these other men, that, why marry him? You know, if I die, I'm gonna give him whatever I got. I'm dedicated to the partnership. It's socially visible to the people around me. Why marry them? And so I didn't do it. And they were all perfectly happy to marry me. I've been invited many times, actually. But I just thought, this doesn't make sense to me. Why would I do that? And then last summer, I was out to dinner with a friend of mine who I'd been going out with for five years. And we were celebrating something, and something important. And he was drinking quite a bit of tequila, and I was drinking some red wine. And he looked at me and he said, "I'm gonna marry you, Helen Fisher." And I just laughed. And then we were lying in bed, and I whispered to him, I said, "You know, you said to me, 'I'm gonna marry you, Helen Fisher.'" And he turned to me, he said, "Oh, I must have been drunk." Well, he was joking, but I took him seriously. I said, I'm not gonna discuss that again. And the following day, we were walking through the streets in New York, and he looked at me, he said, "I'm gonna marry you, Helen Fisher, and this time I'm not drunk." And we got married in a field in Montana last summer and then took a two-week honeymoon. And instantly, I saw how important this was. You know, you walk into a hotel and you say, "Well, we are on our honeymoon," instantly, people respond. It's so meaningful to people. And I remember it was about a week ago, I was going through my drawer, and I saw a little note to myself. I was still wondering, why did I actually get married? I mean, I was perfectly happy to get married, but how is this different? And I saw a little note that I had written to myself right after we got married and stuffed into that drawer. And I found it about a week ago. On the note, it said, "I married for adventure, he married for union," and I looked at that note, and I realized I found union, and he found adventure. And I've asked him many times, how is it different? And he says to me, it's richer, it's deeper. And I think that's as good as I can get on it. It is richer, it is deeper. I never was gonna leave him even if I didn't marry him, but it's richer and deeper, something that everybody else has known, and it took me 50 years to get there, but I'm there now. And you know what? I look at everybody's wedding ring. I notice every man's wedding ring, and I'm so touched. I'm more touched by a man wearing the wedding ring than a woman wearing the wedding ring. And I know something about those people. I respect them in a way that I probably didn't understand prior to this. It was very interesting, the beginning of our courtship. He worked for "The New York Times" for 22 years, and now he writes books. And so he had interviewed me over the years, but we were both invited six years ago out to a private ranch in the west. And during that course of the week, I really liked him, but I didn't push it at all. And he invited me back to the airport. It was a 2 1/2-hour drive. And during the course of the drive, he suddenly said, "I'm going through an absolutely terrible divorce. I'm never going out with another woman. I'm never gonna get in involved with another woman. Never." And I thought to myself, "I'm the only one in the car. He must be telling me something." I said, "Oh, okay. There's other boys around, you know." So we started for a year to go out just casually. Every six weeks or so, he invite me to go to the opera. We go to the movies with a group of people or to a museum, et cetera. He'd always give me a big hug, and that was that. And then after a year of this, we were gonna go down, we were gonna have dinner, we were gonna take a nice walk along The High Line in New York, and then we were gonna go play pool. I don't know what got into me. And as we were having our cocktail, I pulled the cocktail napkin out from my drink, and I said, "Why don't we secretly write down on these two napkins what we would like to win if we win at pool?" So I wrote down a real kiss, and I put that in my pocket. I didn't know what he had written down. So we have our dinner, we take our walk, and we play pool. He creams me at pool. I had played pool, I don't know, 10 times in my life. He'd grown up with a pool table in his basement. So I open his little cocktail napkin, and it says, "Sex and clarity." So I said, "Well, okay, I got the sex part, but what do you have in mind for clarity?" And what he really wanted was friends with benefits. So I said, well, okay. And it was way too late now to do anything that night. So we were walking home in the dark, was about 3:00 AM, and I said to him, I said, you know, "I study romantic love. And you know, when you start having sex with somebody, you can trigger the dopamine system in the brain and fall in love with that person. Are you willing to take that chance?" And he said yes. And that's what started it. I had known and I pointed out to him, sex is not casual. Things happen in the brain. When you start having sex with somebody, any nice stimulation of the genitals drives up the dopamine system in the brain and can push you over the threshold into falling in love. And then with orgasm, there's a real flood of oxytocin and some vasopressin linked with feelings of attachment. So these three basic brain systems can often operate together. You start having sex, boom, you trigger the romantic love, you trigger the feelings of attachment, and you're off to the races. Casual sex is not casual unless you're so drunk, you can't remember it. Casual sex is not casual. You can fall in love when you climb in bed together. I study millennials, and I've really come to believe that millennials are square. As a matter of fact, I was recently talking to a journalist in Russia, and they are calling their millennials the new Victorians. And that same day I spoke to a journalist in Brazil, and she also regards millennials as the new Victorians. That term has not come to become popular in the United States yet, but millennials are square. They're having much less sex than we were in my day, the baby boomers. In my day, you know, herpes finally came in, but there was no really killing diseases at the time. And it was in the '60s. It was the, you know, the sex and love revolution, and women were burning their brass, women were rising up, et cetera, et cetera. And so there was a lot of sexual experimentation. The millennials today are careful. These people aren't reckless. They're going out with somebody. They want transparency. They want honesty. They wanna know what's going on before they tie the knot. So they're doing this very long period of courtship before they fall in love. We do study, at Match, this data from around the United States, and I have a lot of data on that. I can really only talk about New York City. I study personality, and the people that gravitate to New York City express a lot of traits of the dopamine system in the brain. I call them explorers. They tend to be risk-taking, novelty-seeking, curious, creative, spontaneous, energetic, and mentally flexible. And they come to the big cities, whereas people in the suburbs tend to be more expressive of the traits in the serotonin system. I call these people builders. They tend to be conventional, traditional, cautious. They like rules and schedules and plans. They respect authority. They're more concrete and literal thinkers, and they're more likely to have a gene in the serotonin system linked with religiosity. There was one point, Match and I held a party in New York City for singles, and as it turned out, the singles who live in New York did not want to meet singles who lived in New Jersey. And I finally realized why. You know, in the hinterlands, in the suburbs, and in the farmlands of America, you find many more people who expressed the trace of the serotonin system, what I call builders, what Plato called guardians. A perfect example would be Mitt Romney or Mike Pence. Now, they live in larger metropolitan areas. But the bottom line is I study personality, and we've evolved four very broad styles of thinking and behaving linked with the dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen systems in the brain. And I have a great deal of data about where these people congregate. And the high-dopamine, risk-taking, novelty-seeking, curious, creative, spontaneous, energetic people gravitate to the cities. And the more cautious, conventional, traditional people who respect authority and follow the rules gravitate to the hinterlands. A lot of people think that these three different brain systems, sex drive, romantic love, and feelings of attachment, are phases. They're not phases, they're brain systems. So you can start out in college or at work or wherever feeling deep attachment for somebody. You're not romantically interested in them, and you don't wanna have sex with them. You're feeling deeply attached to them. They've got a wife, you've got a boyfriend, et cetera. Then things change. They divorce, the other person divorces, you break up with your boyfriend, and boom, all of a sudden you fall in love with them. So you can start out with attachment and then fall in love with somebody and then have sex with them. Or you can fall madly in love with somebody and then have sex with them, and then feel feelings of attachment. Or you can start out just having casual sex with them, boom, feelings of deep romantic love, and then move into feelings of attachment. Or you can start having sex with them and feel deep feelings of attachment and then, years later, fall madly in love with them. So they're different brain systems, they're not stages. And of course, what we all really want is to sustain a long-term partnership with all three of these brain systems intact. And you can even do it in the course of a day. You wake up in the morning, you feel sexy, you make love, then you go to breakfast. And suddenly, he or she says something absolutely charming, you feel the rush of romantic love. And then in the middle of the day, you get a text from the person that gives you a sense of deep attachment. So all three of these brain systems can wax and wane. Sex drive certainly can wax and wane. Romantic love can certainly wax and wane. Feelings of attachment are pretty stable. It's very interesting. You can fall in love with somebody instantly. You could feel the sex drive instantly. But romantic love takes time. And in fact, we've even proven that it's hard to get rid of that feelings of attachment. You know, I mean, the main secret to getting rid of attachment is time. We've looked in the brain and found that attachment recedes often very slowly. It takes time, whereas romantic love, that can take time too. But the bottom line is romantic love and feelings of intense sex drive can be triggered instantly. Attachment takes time. You gotta get to know the person. You gotta learn to trust the person. As a matter of fact, you know, I've asked, every year, I ask all these singles, I've got data on 50,000 of them now around the country, every age group, every background, what are you looking for in a partner? And the top five things are always the same. Over 95% of singles say they're looking for these five things: somebody who respects them, somebody who they can trust and confide in, somebody who makes them laugh, somebody who makes enough time for them, and somebody who they feel physically attracted to. That's different from in the past. Going back 100 years ago, a young girl living on a farm had to find a man who was from the same background, same political perspective, same social connections, and hopefully from the farm next door. We finally at a time in human humanity when we can choose what we want for companionship. As a matter of fact, what we're doing now is we're moving forward to the kinds of partnerships that we had a million years ago. You know, for millions of years, our ancestors lived in these little hunting and gathering groups. And you know, women commuted to gather their fruits and vegetables. They came home with over 50% of the evening meal. The double-income family was the rule. Women were just as powerful as men, sexually, socially, and economically, and they could leave bad partnerships to make a better one. We settled down on the farm. Men's roles became much more important, moving the trees, moving the rocks, plowing the land, going off to local markets, and coming home with the equivalent of money. Women's roles became much less important. They couldn't go off and gather. Their main job was to have babies to help them pick on the farm. And with that, we see the rise of all kinds of beliefs. A woman's place is in the home, virginity at marriage, a man's the head of the household, and till death do us part. Can't leave the farm. What are you gonna do? You can't cut the cow in half and take it out of town or move half of the wheat field. You're stuck, and before our eyes right now, love is changing. We're no longer virgins of marriage. We're moving forward to the double-income family. Man is no longer the head of the household. It's both the man and the woman. We are shedding the last 10,000 years of our agrarian tradition and moving forward to the kinds of partnerships that we had for millions of years, partnerships that are actually highly compatible with our ancient human spirit. After that, CEO of Match turned to me 15 years ago and asked me, why do you fall in love with one person rather than another? At that moment, I realized there has to be more to mate choice than just your childhood, just your experience. There has to be some chemical composition that drives you naturally towards him or her. And with that, that set me on the study of the biology of personality. And I was able to establish that we've evolved four very broad styles of thinking and behaving linked with the dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen system. And I call these people the explorer, the builder, the director, and the negotiator. Now, we're all a combination of all of these traits, but we all have certain personalities. And I've never met two people who are alike. Even my identical twin sister and I are not exactly alike, but what I was able to find is that explorers, people who are very expressive of the traits in the dopamine system, they tend to be novelty-seeking, risk-taking, curious, creative, spontaneous, energetic, and mentally flexible, they're drawn to people like themselves. People who are very expressive of the traits in the serotonin system, I call them builders, they tend to be cautious; traditional; conventional; they follow the rules; they respect authority; like rules, plans and schedules; they're concrete thinkers; they tend to be religious. They're also drawn to people like themselves. In those two cases, similarity attracts. In the other two cases, opposites attract. People who are very expressive of the traits in the testosterone system are drawn to those expressive of the traits in the estrogen system and vice versa. For example, my boyfriend-husband is very high on the dopamine system as I am. We both have traveled all over the world a great deal. We're both writers. You gotta be creative to be a writer. And we constantly do novel things together. That works. We're both high dopamine, we're built to be drawn to each other. He's very high testosterone, and I'm very high estrogen, another natural match. But he is higher on the serotonin system than I am. He's more traditional. And it was he that invited me to marry him. He even asked me the other day, "Helen, were you gonna, you know, were you ever thinking of marrying me?" And I said, "Well, no. No, not really." But he is more traditional than I am, and here I am happily married. So bottom line is no two people are like. I created questionnaires, now been taken by 15 million people in 40 countries. It shows where you are on all four of these scales. I then created a new business called NeuroColor, and we go into the business so that we can understand people in business as well as in love. And so, yes, when that CEO asked me, "Why do you fall in love with one person rather than another?" it launched me on a profoundly new understanding of personality and why you fall in love with one person rather than another. And the reason that this is important is because modern psychology is, we're saturated in modern psychology. Every one of your problems is your mother's fault or your father's fault or some issue in your childhood. It's all your childhood. It's not all your childhood. Some people are naturally stubborn. Some people are naturally risk-taking. Some people are naturally spendthrifts. Some people are naturally dedicated to details. Some people are naturally cautious. And when you understand who your partner is in business, in colleagues, clients, friends, relatives, and lovers, you can do workarounds. You don't have to spend 20 years on a couch understanding why you're a cautious person. It's who you are. Once you understand that about somebody, you can do workarounds to make a happy partnership.