i'm Dr Helen Fischer I'm a biological anthropologist and I study love I've written six books that sell all over the world on romantic love where how it evolved what happens in the brain uh um and why you fall in love with one person rather than another [Music] Chapter 1 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 Cananan Connecticut And it was thrilling We had a lot of land We had big flood lights 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 uh uh my father gave me about um 20 books on sex There was nothing puran in our household I never even saw him hold my hand He was a an executive at Time magazine He was a good friend of Henry Aruse commuted to New York every day and and I just uh 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 uh Colorado in Boulder and got my PhD in in physical anthropology and human evolution And then I focused on the brain and romantic love and attachment Why we bother 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 dis 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 um we were playing on the beach way way up the beach and I was about 5 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 um sand um escarment and don't come back and don't look back until this uh 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 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 um on Saturday afternoon my twin sister were instructed to never walk around that side of the house cuz it was a glass house and you could see in And we were never allowed to knock on uh their bedroom door if um 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 and patter 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 uh 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 if you want to hear about it I am an identical twin and um I've always gotten along absolutely perfectly with my twin sister Her name is Lorna Uh she lives in France She's a very fine u painter and she shows in in Paris and actually also in China and Japan She's a fine painter Um we've never had an argument And um 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 At one time we were maybe around eight or nine and we were told to assemble in the foyer of our house uh when one of mother's friends came over and the mother 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 that the mind was an empty uh slate a tabular raza in 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 in a twin an identical twin And so when it came to uh 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 have 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 have 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 um you know people will often think uh 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 uh 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 uh 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 and 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 um about them and because we grew up in a glass house and because there were two other glass 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 had a um 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 and just the way the face moved the way his expressions were what he was wearing what 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 evolve 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 um I said in that paper uh to a very good journal and the peer reviews came back and uh 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 uh and in more advanced societies the the plays the operas the symphonies the ballets the movies the self-help books the Valentine's Day uh cards letters therapists We are delued with this basic human uh drive to love Chapter 2 Love is a drive not a feeling I really began by wondering why we bother to pair up at all Uh 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 um around the world today but historically uh traditional societies hunting and gathering societies every single culture in the world has some mechanism for for people to form some sort of partnership to re their babies as a team And so I really started by looking at the demographic yearbooks uh of the United Nations Um uh reading over 90 u ethnographic uh studies of hunter gatherers and agrarian peoples and hering peoples etc And I just kept seeing the same pattern No matter what their gods were uh what they did for a living uh what they wore the songs they sang everything varies except love And everybody loved 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 um in Greenwich Village It was about 3:00 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 have studied the sex drive I didn't need to study that We know some of the genes we know some of the hormones uh we know the pathways really I mean to some extent certainly but quite 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 um 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 uh very dramatically and some people can get it over it relatively quickly But we nobody gets out of love alive We all have disappointments is such a powerful brain system I mean everywhere in the world It's very interesting because uh you know I was talking to a man who an anthropologist who studies the people in China This was many years ago and he said oh the Chinese don't love well he didn't read any of their love poetry everywhere in the world um there's poetry and songs and dances and and dramas that express love 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 going to do." And that sent him on to studying romantic love uh in China And when you look around the world I mean the poetry you know a lot of anthropologists study potshards or post holes or or uh arrow heads or all kinds of more sophisticated things but um 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 China Chinese person and um it was something like this It was something like uh 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 U I've really looked at a lot of other animals and they do love They do form romantic I call it um animal magnetism or uh 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 5 days Uh in foxes uh 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 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 going to have to come down out of 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 millionyear-old female going to 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 years ago protect a whole group of females he could protect one And so we went over what I called 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 uh to protect at least one female with his DNA in her And of course uh you know females needed a a male who wanted to stick around Those that didn't stick around didn't have the babies and didn't pass their DNA on to 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 um 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 um 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 uh or negative emotions The problem with that is when you're madly in love with somebody uh your emotions are going to bleed from one picture to the other So I had to relax the brain uh between looking at the neutral uh the positive and the neutral So I used a very standard um psychological distraction task I would cast on the screen a large number like 4,821 And I would ask them uh for 30 seconds to look at that uh photograph uh that picture and 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 of the blood away from brain regions um 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 uh somebody from the dry cleaners uh uh some past uh 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 uh 12 times looking at these photographs That way we were able to capture through the uh 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 you h 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 vententral 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 uh linked with thinking processes and the emotions but no two people were alike which is obvious They'd be thinking about somebody else But um 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 um evolved in tandem Uh 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 mating 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 uh a lot of journalists etc after we discovered this uh 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 you can it's a dangerous situation And 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 um was putting people into the brain scanner who had just been rejected in love That was a lot harder because you know uh before you put I put people in this brain scanner you really talk to them for a long time You got to make sure that they are madly in love or that they are rejected in love because these machines are expensive and it's extremely timeconuming So and I also have to tell them what's going to 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 uh our participants before I put them in the machine And um when you've been rejected in love one girl um didn't show up for the scanning She had not been out of bed for almost 4 days Another person cried so hard in the machine that we couldn't use the data She moved too much Another person um after the uh scanning um came out of the machine and was so angry uh that he went home and uh 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 uh slip into clinical depression So I thought it was an extremely important study I still think it is Um and I was determined to see whether rejection in love was actually an addiction I had even thought that uh happy uh love was an addiction because you know when you're madly in love you'll do the craziest things And uh 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 Uh one brain region is that same basic vententral tegment metal area the VTA that pumps out the dopamine that gives them the feeling of intense romantic love Also found activity in a brain region linked with deep feelings of attachment You don't stop loving somebody when uh when they've dumped you I found activity in a brain region linked with pain with physical pain This is 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 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 encumbent is the basic brain region that becomes active when you are addicted to to um cocaine heroin booze uh uh alcohol cigarettes uh gambling um 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 encumbent 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 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 uh rid of them As a matter of fact I really believe in many of the uh uh principles of AA alcoholics synonyonymous and I do think that we need to treat this particular addiction uh as a very special addiction uh with very special therapies Chapter 3 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 uh the intense feelings of people when they have been rejected in love uh when they're happily in love and when they're in love long term My colleagues and I have put uh uh 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 uh I think it was 17 people into the brain scanner using fMRI again in love an average of 21 years Uh Americans don't believe that you can remain in love long term And sure enough we found activity in these same brain regions The vententral tegmental area pumps out the dopamine gives you feelings of intense romantic love A brain region in the vententral paladum linked with attachment A brain region in the hypothalamus uh 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 um you got to 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 um 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 uh uh drugs uh that either trigger the brain circuitry of romatic love or remain in love long term Uh I don't think that's possible personally We do know that when you do novel things together with somebody you can uh 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 to to people Uh if you want to maintain a long-term happy partnership you want to sustain all three of these brain system You want to 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 Uh if you want to 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 um stay in touch any kind of holding hands uh uh kissing uh walking arm in arm sitting next to each other to watch television instead of separate armchairs learning to at least start sleeping together uh 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 uh um 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 a partner uh 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 adviser to match.com and I'm going on to my 16th year of that And uh um I'm a consultant to them but I 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 um somebody said "Would you meet with the people that match 2 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 uh are there other academics here and as it turns out it was the CEO on down and in the middle of the the morning he turned to me I didn't know who which he was at the time but somebody had turned to me and ended up being the CEO and he looked at me 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 Uh we tend to fall in love with somebody uh who's from the same socioeconomic and ethnic background somebody with the same level of intelligence and good looks and education or somebody with the same reproductive and 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 uh uh 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 uh 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 uh we conduct we construct about 200 questions that we want to know about and then we do a national study We do not poll the match members This is not a a 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 uh rural suburban urban every part of the country in every age group age 18 to 71 plus So we create um about 200 questions generally in in uh July and August And then we get the data back um 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 um singles have I know Republicans and Democrats and independents I mean I I know what gays eat and what straits eat which by the way is exactly the same thing Um there's almost no difference between gays and straits 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 Um 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 it Understanding uh 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 um in my personality questionnaire uh 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 Chapter 4 love in the modern age It's very interesting um 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's 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 um uh at work um at school uh uh at church uh uh 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 coming 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 why would that be i mean what is what difference do you meet him in a bar you meet him in a restaurant you meet him in a in a museum you meet him 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 um 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 uh are more likely to have full-time employment more likely to be have higher education and um more likely to be looking for a long-term commitment And so we're seeing the rise of internet dating And along with that there's every reason to think we're going to 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 and met somebody that way 50,000 years ago uh uh you assembled at a water hole and you met somebody at the other side of the water 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 uh courtship process which I call slow love In the past people 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 Uh 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 uh and tell friends and family uh 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 uh through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations Everywhere in the world in 80 societies and I've got data from 1947 uh 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 uh together long term That is slow love There's a new stage emerging called video chatting And um 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 uh that is very recent within a 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 uh 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 of courtship And as a matter of fact what's interesting about this video dating is I did a study of almost a thousand people who are doing the video dating right this minute and it keeps increasing Um uh they uh uh 50% of them actually fell in love uh during their video chatting and 56% of them uh reported that they felt some romantic feelings for somebody So when you look at them even if it's through a video camera uh 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 it's doing it on video chatting So we're going to see more meaningful first dates but fewer first dates because they're now using video chatting as a vetting process just seeing whether they want to 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 want to spend some money on the date The first dates are going to be more and more meaningful because they've gotten rid of the the frogs We're going to be kissing fewer frogs and that's going to lead to longer courtship later marriage and more stability in partnerships I think for maybe decades to come Actually they are now calling the young I love millennials Uh they are 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 uh they're having less sex You know onethird of American millennials are living at home Before the pandemic they were living at home And they weren't living at home because they were lazy They were living at home because they want to put their career together They want to get financially 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 going to work they get rid of it You know they've invented this term DTR define the relationship And I asked uh 5,000 singles including an awful lot of millennials Uh 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 Uh they want transparency They want honesty They want meaningful conversations They're looking for somebody who's financially stable And they're not going to take second best They're going to wait They feel they've got time And they're using sex I think as an interview process I mean you know these days uh 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 going to 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 um the young in this singles in America study what's keeping you from getting serious about anybody and millennials say 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 Uh 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 uh 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 uh to surround to 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 rulebased systems Everything from engineering to math to computers to music Music is very spatial Uh it's not spatial to me I I don't I'm not high on the testosterone scale but uh you know I used to have a boyfriend He knew exactly where Beethoven was changing the key what was amusing in bet I didn't see what was amusing in Beethoven's structure but but he was able to see that whereas women uh really are much more linguistically skilled much better 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 tend to be more trusting um um more emotionally expressive uh they tend to see the long term men tend to see the short term Women have a more holistic uh uh 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 uh when 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 Uh women's anger dribbles out and whereas men explode So there's differences but they both feel uh 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 uh meets a woman who he met he falls in love with he wants to introduce her to friends and family sooner He wants to move in sooner We call it mateguarding Um 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 two and a half times more likely to kill themselves when a relationship is over So if I had to say who was the romantic 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 I was you know I have studied um romantic love and attachment for 50 years ever since graduate school And um but I was never really interested in marrying myself I did marry for about 3 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 because I was so scared of my mother that I didn't dare tell her I wasn't going to do it But she was perfectly happy with me divorcing him She was very sweet about it when the time came I've had uh three very long-term very good happy partnerships But um I got married a few months ago and I'm 75 And you ask 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 um it was the right time I found the right guy And uh I really learned something about attachment that teenagers already know It is different I had always maintained in these long-term romances with these other men that why why marry him you know uh I I'm gonna if I die I'm going to give him whatever I got Uh I'm dedicated to the partnership Uh uh it's socially visible to the people around me Uh why marry them and so I didn't do it And um 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 um last summer I was out to dinner with a friend of mine who I'd been going out with for 5 years and uh we were celebrating something and something important and he was drinking quite a bit of tequila and I was drinking some white red wine and he looked at me and he said "I'm going to marry you Helen Fischer." And I just laughed and and then we were laying in bed and I said to whispered to I said 'You know you said to me I'm going to marry you Helen Fischer 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 going to 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 going to marry you Helen Fischer and this time I'm not drunk." And um we got married in a field in Montana last summer and then took a a a two-eek uh honeymoon and instantly I saw how important this was You know you walk into a hotel and you say "Well we're on our honeymoon." Instantly people respond It's so meaningful to people And um I remember it was about a week ago I was going through my drawer and I saw a little note to myself I thought I was still wondering why did I actually get married i mean I was perfectly happy to get married but what 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 re 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 going to 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 Um he um worked for the New York Times for 22 years and now he writes books and so he had interviewed me over the years But um we were both invited um six years ago out to a 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 uh he invited me back to the uh airport It was a 2 and a half 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 another woman I'm never going to get involved with another woman Never." And I thought to myself I'm the only one in the car Uh he must be telling me something I said 'Well okay there's other boys around you know So we started for a year uh to go out just casually Every six weeks or so he invite me to go to the opera or we go to the movies with a group of people or to a museum etc And after a year he'd always give me a big hug and that was that And then after a year of this we were going to go down we were going to have dinner we were going to take a nice walk along the Highline in New York and then we were going to 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 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 I got the sex part but what do you have in mind for clarity?" And what he really wanted was uh 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 It was about 3:00 a.m And I said to him I said "You know I study I study romantic love." And um you know when you start having sex with somebody uh you can trigger the bro do 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 stimula any 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 uh to become popular in the United States yet But um millennials are square They have they're having much less sex than we were in in my day in uh the baby boomers In my day um you know herpes finally came in but uh um there was no um no really uh killing diseases uh at the time and uh it was in the 60s It was the you know the sex and love revolution and women were burning their bras and women were rising up etc etc And so there was a lot of uh sexual experimentation The millennials today are careful These people aren't reckless They're going out with somebody They they want transparency They want honesty Uh they want to know what's going on um before they tie the knot So they're doing this very long period of courtship before they fall in love We do study u at match um this data from around the United States and um I have a lot of data on that I can really only talk about New York City Um I study personality and the people that gravitate to New York City um express a lot of traits of the dopamine system in the brain I call them explorers They tend to be risk-taking novely 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 ser traits in the serotonin system I call these people builders They tend to be um conventional um uh traditional uh cautious They like rules and schedules and plans Um 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 in uh I did a uh I match and I uh 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 uh singles who lived in New Jersey And I finally realized why uh you know in the hitterlands in the suburbs and in the uh farmlands of America you find many more people who express the traits of the serotonin system what I call builders what Plato called guardians A perfect example uh would be Mitt Romney or or um 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 um more cautious conventional traditional people who respect authority and follow the rules gravitate uh uh to the hinderlands A lot of people think that these the 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 want to have sex with them You're feeling deeply attached to them They've got a wife you've got a boyfriend etc Then things change Uh they divorce the other person divorces you break up with your boyfriend and boom all of a sudden you fall in love with them Um 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 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 wayne Sex drive certainly can wax and wayne Romantic love can certainly wax and wayne Feelings of attachment are pretty stable It's very interesting You can fall in love with somebody instantly You can 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 uh I mean the main secret to uh 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 uh romantic love and feelings of intense uh sex drive can be triggered instantly Attachment takes time You got to get to know the person You got to learn to trust the person As a matter of fact you know I've asked um every year I ask all these singles I've got data on 50,000 of them now around the country uh every age group every background what are you looking for in a partner and they the top five things are always the same The and 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 a enough time for them and somebody who they feel physically attracted to That's different from in the past Going back a hundred 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 we're really 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 uh 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 Uh uh moving the trees uh moving the rocks uh plowing the land going off to local markets and coming home with the equivalent of money Women's roles became much less important Uh they couldn't go off and gather Their 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 of um um beliefs A woman's place is in the home Virginity at marriage A man's ahead of the household until death do us part Can't leave the farm What are you going to 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 uh love is changing Um we're we're no longer virgins at marriage Uh we're moving forward to the double income family Um uh 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 u 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 make choice than just your childhood just your experience There has to be some chemical um 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 uh 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 um 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 traits in the estrogen system and vice versa For example my boyfriend husband is very high on the dopamine system Uh as I am we both have traveled all over the world a great deal Uh we're both writers Uh you got to be creative to be a writer Um 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 Um but he's 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 going to you know were you ever thinking of marrying me?" And I said "Well no no not really but he's more traditional than I am." And here I am happily married So bottom line is no two people are alike I've studied the I created a questionnaire It's now been taken by um 15 million people in 40 count countries It shows where you are on all four of these scales I then created a uh a um a new business called Neuroor and we go into the business so that we can uh understand people um in business as well as in love and 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 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 spent thrifts Some people are naturally dedicated to details Some people are naturally cautious And when you understand who your partner is in business and 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 is who you are And once you understand that about somebody you can do workarounds to make a happy partnership Want to support the channel join the Big Think members community where you get access to videos early and free