Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers university and an adviser to Chemistry.com, knows that when it comes to love, the Internet is a tool that's too valuable to waste. Her new book, the most recent of 5 publications, called "Why Him? Why Her?: How to Find and Keep Lasting Love" explores the results of 35 years of research on the biological origins of lust, romantic attraction, and deep attachment.
Online dating, Fisher believes, is a viable choice for all love-seekers. It's "a cheap, easy, safe way to meet people," she recently told The Baltimore Sun, that doesn't deserve the stigma it's acquired. "They shouldn't call them dating sites. They should call them introducing sites," she offers, as a way to help online dating become less looked down upon and even more mainstream. "They provide the newest way to do the same old thing, which is places to meet people," she adds, so why not take a chance on finding your match online?
Fisher believes online dating might even tap into deeply-rooted biological mating instincts. "In many respects, [with online dating] we're going back to the way we used to be introduced. They're the kind of introductions we had millions of years ago. We traveled in small packs. You knew about people before you went out with them. The brain was not built to walk into a bar, where you know nobody, and start a conversation. That's not the way humanity has courted." The style of courtship provided by online dating, then, is very compatible with the complex ways in which the human brain is constructed and has evolved over thousands of years.
The brain, according to Fisher, has "evolved three core brain systems for mating and reproduction: lust, romantic attraction and attachment." Each of these systems is evolutionarily advantageous in different ways. A "soul mate," for instance, is a special person because he or she combines attraction and attachment, whereas many other people spark attraction, and maybe even love, but not the deep attachment required for a long-term partnership.
Through her research, Fisher also discovered that romantic love is a drive, not an emotion. Fisher experimented by putting 49 people in a brain scanner - 17 who had recently fallen in love, 15 who had recently been rejected, and 17 who were still in love after an average of 21 years of marriage. She and her research team found that activity in the area of the brain that makes dopamine and sends natural stimulants to the brain is responsible for creating the basic traits of romantic love, like the urge to spend time with someone and obsessive thinking about them. Romance comes from "ancient primitive centers linked with drive and linked with wanting," meaning that it has less in common with emotions and more in common with serious addiction!
It might sound like so much focus on biology and evolution will take away from the spontaneity of falling love, but Fisher isn't concerned about a conflict: "You can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, but when you sit down to eat the cake, you can still enjoy it. The brain swamps it all and just goes with the powerful emotion of it." Her ultimate goal, she says, is just to " to enable people to kiss fewer frogs."
For more on the dating site Helen Fisher advices, you can check out our Chemistry.com review.
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