Helen Fisher, popular academic on love, attraction and sexual behaviour

As a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, in 2006, Helen Fisher raised eyebrows in the academic world. Her research used MRI brain imaging to study the neural systems associated with the sex drive, romantic love and rejection. It appeared to confirm the theory that love is hard-wired in the brain, with her scans showing that neural activity, as measured by blood movement, could change quite dramatically when a subject was in the infatuation phase of new love. “People have resisted thinking that romantic love is actually a brain system,” she noted. “They’re scared that it will break the magic. They want romantic love to be part of the supernatural. Why? Because it feels so good.”
But a system is indeed what it appeared to be, one associated with drives such as hunger, thirst and cocaine addiction, as well as with the reward system that generates the “pleasure hormone” dopamine. Far from being merely an emotion, Fisher concluded that romantic love was a drive, a chemical kick we give ourselves to pass on our genes through procreation. “It enables us to focus our energies on one person,” she said, “thereby conserving courtship time.”
Just as intriguing, the study, which was published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, found that when subjects were experiencing feelings of rejection and were shown photographs of the person they were still in love with, similar neural activity patterns emerged on the scans.
Blonde, with a wide smile and a fruity vocabulary, Fisher became something of an academic star. Her TED talks on the brain’s love circuitry were watched by more than 20 million people around the world.
Helen Elizabeth Fisher was born in New York in 1945, the daughter of Roswell Fisher, an executive at Time magazine who urged his daughter to “be useful as well as ornamental”, and his wife Helen (née Greeff), a floral artist; she is survived by her identical twin, Lorna, who became a painter in France, and by another sister, Audrey.
She described growing up in a beautiful glass “party house” in Connecticut, before studying anthropology and psychology at New York University. She was then hired by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, to take part in a research project on matrilineal society that involved driving to Arizona in her battered old $300 Chevrolet to write about the Navajo Nation.
Although Fisher examined the complicated love lives of other people, her own romantic trajectory proved equally tangled. She married Joe Bergquist, a third-year medical student at the University of Colorado, in 1968, though they divorced after four months because “I was bored”, she said. Thereafter her personal life was a litany of romantic entanglements, deep attachments and steamy stories. “I fell in love too much. I fell in love every time I went around the corner,” she said.
For her PhD dissertation at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Fisher set herself some tough questions, including: What draws men and women together as mates? Why did human females lose their period of heat, becoming the only female animals to enjoy sex whenever they choose? And how did breasts develop?
Returning to Manhattan she wrote for Reader’s Digest before undertaking research in university anthropology departments, including Rutgers University, New Jersey, where she also taught. Her first academic paper was dismissed by one reviewer who said that love should not be studied because it was part of the supernatural.
In her first book, The Sex Contract: The Evolution of Human Behavior (1982), Fisher examined the development of human female sexuality and the origin of the nuclear family. A decade later came Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce (1992), which not only examined human sexuality in different cultures around the world but also suggested that the seven-year itch of the Marilyn Monroe film was unrealistic. “I found a four-year itch,” she told one newspaper, pointing out that four years coincides with the age at which babies lose total dependency on their parents.
In The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They are Changing the World (1999) Fisher argued that women would become the dominant sex in future decades. “As women move into the market, older women have more money, more education, more social networks and are in better health. They are out there with a lot of courtship tools that appeal to men,” she explained.
Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (2004) opened with lines by Walt Whitman before introducing her notion that the human brain has three core systems for mating and reproduction: lust (or sex drive); attraction (the intensity of early stage love); and attachment (deep feelings towards a long-term partner). This brought her to the attention of Match.com, the online dating company, and in turn inspired her book Why Him? Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type.
Fisher was invited to a meeting with Match.com. It turned out to be an audience with “everyone from the CEO on down”, she recalled.
The website’s executives were looking for insight into why someone falls in love with one person and not another. As Fisher reeled off the usual answers about people pairing up based on where they lived, their similar educational levels and their socioeconomic backgrounds, it occurred to her that there might be other factors. “Could we have evolved biological patterns so that we’re naturally drawn to some people rather than others?” she wondered.
By the time Fisher was hired as chief scientific adviser by Match.com in 2005 she had been studying love, attraction and sexual behaviour for more than two decades. One of her first innovations for the company was to develop the Fisher Temperament Inventory, a 62-part questionnaire to be completed by some six million volunteers. It categorised users into four personality types: explorers (spontaneous and daring), builders (logical and traditional), directors (decisive and competitive) and negotiators (empathetic and imaginative).
Fisher’s own personality type was “explorer” with traces of “negotiator”, the former explaining why she had visited more than 110 countries, including North Korea, and could cut across the crowded streets of Manhattan with barely a second glance at the yellow cabs swerving to avoid her.
These categories, and the ways in which members of one category were attracted to those in another, formed the basis for Chemistry.com, Match.com’s attempt to create a scientific approach to dating. It was later used by Match.com’s main site. “If Helen Fisher can give you right off the bat individuals that your brain is more likely to be attracted to, so much the better,” one executive noted.
While also still working as a researcher at the Kinsey Institute, Fisher remained with Match.com for more than a dozen years, providing insights into dating and relationship trends and helping to write the company’s annual survey of more than 5,000 people not drawn from the website. Among its regular findings was that the majority of respondents reported a one-night stand in the previous year. In typical fashion, Fisher turned around from the traditional notion that such flings are a bad idea by suggesting that casual sex helps single people to find better and more compatible partners.
Her own research went beyond examining the initial attraction between couples, to considering every aspect of love and mating as well as infidelity and divorce. She took issue with the idea that the urge for sexual variety, known to some as adultery, is stronger in men than in women, insisting that “every time a heterosexual man is philandering, he is philandering with a woman”.
In 2014 Fisher appeared in Christian Frei’s documentary Sleepless in New York about heartbreak and loneliness, in which she described some of her own middle-aged ventures into the dating scene. These included having her heart broken at Grand Central Terminal, New York. Despite “several opportunities to marry other men” she only did so in 2020, when she married John Tierney, a New York Times columnist who had written about her work in 1994 and who survives her. He told how the manuscript of her final book, provisionally titled Thinking Four Ways: How to Reach Anyone With Neuroscience, was submitted five days before her death.
They maintained separate homes: hers on the Upper East Side near Central Park; his in the Bronx, several miles from the Sex and the City-style hustle of Manhattan that was her natural milieu. Speaking at the time of their wedding, she explained that their relationship worked because it was one that she was “living, not dissecting”.
As for her research on romantic love, she concluded: “It is much more powerful than lust and is very difficult to control.”
Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist, was born on May 31, 1945. She died from endometrial cancer on August 17, 2024, aged 79