THE SCIENCE OF LOVE

By Jake MacDonald

Its raining in New York, and in the cavernous gloom of penn station thousands of travellers pour down the hallways, the rustle of their feet and the echo of the train announcements combining into a kind of rapid-heartbeat rhythm.

When the blonde woman seated by herself in the departure lounge looks up and sees a man looking at her, she sends him a hard,wary glance that says 'step forward if you're who I think you are; otherwise, get lost'.

''Dr Fisher, I presume?''

Helen Fisher stands up and extends a small hand towards me. She's a trim 56-year-old dressed in the head-to-toe black ensemble of the seasoned New Yorker. Her manner is courteous and guarded as we head for a train to New Jersey, where she teaches at Rutgers University.

The human species is Fisher's specialty. she has just returned from a week spent living incommunicado with a clan of stone Age hunters in Africa. Among other things, she has determined that we all tend to behave in knee-jerk fashion when we're in the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex. Put an eligible man and a woman within three meters of each other and they'll often launch into some courtship behavior that evolved long ago and that's invariably comic to watch if you're schooled in recognizing it, which most of us aren't.

When Fisher graduated with a doctorate in physical anthropology, very few scientists were conducting research into human courtship. There was a broad consensus that patterns of flirting,sex and marriage were culturally determined, and therefore varied from one country to the next.

But Fisher didn't buy it and went on to assemble a remarkable body of evidence that human being select mates,marry, cheat on each other and even get divorced in predictable patterns that are as old as the species itself.

Fisher's central message starts with the now-familiar notion that men and women are very different not because they've been raised that way by patriarchal society but because four million years of evolution have saddled them with very different temperaments and brains. She says men, for example, are inherently much more aggressive than women, and this innate aggressiveness has motivated men to excel in the worlds of business and politics. She says that furthermore, despite their protestations, women prefer such high-status males as sex partners and long-term mates. These views have not endeared her to some traditional feminists.

'They think my ideas are harmful' says Fisher, who says she is a feminist herself and has had a successful carrier in the male-dominated world of anthropology.'They think I'm betraying the cause.But my cause is science, my job is to get at the facts.

When it comes to human behavior, the 'facts' continue to be in dispute. Back in 17th century England,the philosopher John Locke described the mind of a child as a 'tabula rasa', or blank tablet, upon which any life imaginable could be written. Then in the 19th century, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection put most of the emphasis on nature. His view prevailed until 20th century, when his ideas were hijacked by the eugenicists and the Nazis, who argued that natural selection proved the white race was inherently superior.

With the close of the second World War, 'social Darwinism' was discredited and thrown on the scrap heap. By the time Fisher was growing up in 1950's she says 'virtually every social scientist worth his salt had gone back to believing that the dominant force that shaped us was culture'.

During the late 1960's she studied at the University of Colorado. The Vietnam War was at its height and feminism, free love and black power were tearing up the streets. On Campus, the prevailing doctrine was that all human beings were virtually interchangeable. Boys and girls would grow up alike if you took away the Barbie dolls and toy trucks. 'I happen to be an identical twin, so I knew there was biology in behavior, but I did not argue the point,'says Fisher. 'I just quietly decided they were wrong.

She majored in psychology, but found her calling only after reading Jane Goodall's book In Shadow of Man. 'She was talking about chimpanzees, creatures that made friends, were jealous,had enemies, jockeyed for political position. As I read this book,I suddenly saw that here was a field of study that could explain both our physical origins and the origins of our behavior.'That field was anthropology.

A big insight came to Fisher in 1988 when she was travelling in a crowded New York subway carriage, reading divorce statistics. 'These were UN statistics from 62 countries,going back to 1947,' she says.'Incredibly,statistics seemed to show that people tend to divorce around four-year mark. To me,it clearly suggested that divorce might not be cultural malaise but an aspect of our inherited mating behavior. She looked at 'pair-bonds' in the animal world and discovered that many animals stay together only long enough to rear a single litter through infancy. 'In humans,the average time required to raise a child past infancy is four years.' Her investigation of divorce patterns led her into wide ranging research of mating traditions in both the human and animal worlds that grew into a book, Anatomy of Love. In the book,she examines the ancient drives that draw men and women together, weld them into a couple and,perhaps eventually, tear them apart. 'Some readers were alarmed by the book,' She says.'But I was not advocating infidelity,adultery, or divorce. I was explaining the basic aspects of human nature.'

Most couples, of course, survive the four-year crisis. What's the cement that holds them together? Is it friendship, dependency, sexual heat?

Most of us assume that these are all aspects of that complicated force called love.But Fisher's research indicates that lust,infatuation and long-term attachment are distinct drives.'Lust is not love. Lust is driven by brain chemistry, plain and simple.

But it's a dangerous game, sleeping with someone just for the sake of sex, because your levels of oxytocin and vasopressin will go way up and you'd better be ready for the consequences.

These powerful chemical produce feelings of attachment and you can become emotionally involved with someone who's quite inappropriate.'

Romantic love, or infatuation, is associated with a different barrage of chemicals. Romantic love, she hypothesises, produce dopamine, which generates obsessive feelings about the sexual partner.

From the evolutionary point of view, this natural addiction ensures that both parties will stick together and do the hard slogging if a pregnancy occurs. Infatuation is also characterised by persistent 'intrusive thinking' about the loved one. 'People who are infatuated testify that they are thinking about their lover at least 90 percent of the time,' It's no wonder that people in love feel so messed up.'

Fisher is now working on a new book about the brain chemistry of romantic love and says that while lovers are literally intoxicated by romance, the feeling fades. Why? Its possible that the brain nerve endings become used to high levels of natural stimulants, or the levels of chemical begin to drop. Either way, it takes two or three years for the feelings to subside, she says. For some relationships, that's the beginning of the end. 'But speaking as a woman, not as a scientist, I see feeling of love falling into three basic categories: sexual, romantic and attachment love. Long-term love can have some of each, but preserving sexual passion and romance and even attachment does require some work.

'You have to start by picking the right person,' says Fisher. 'Then establish some mutual goals and stick to them. Infatuation is a free ride, an overwhelming physiological and psychological experience that can swamp the rational mind. It is blissful when it is returned, excruciatingly painful when rejected.'

She says couples who survives the death of infatuation can then make the transition into what she calls attachment. Fisher theorizes that as infatuation subsides and attachment grows, so do the attachment chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin. Unlike dopamine, which make all revved up, these calm us down, says Fisher.

'When two people are happily attached, they feel a sense of peace and security. The challenge, of course,is in finding someone to share your life with.'

Fisher was married herself once, when she was 23. The marriage lasted six months. Throughout her life, she has had a series of 'wonderful' long-term relationship, but still she lives alone.

At a traffic light near The Plaza Hotel, she pauses to gaze a happy-looking couple walking hand in hand towards their waiting limousine.'The mystery never goes away,' she finally says. 'It just deepens. Look at me. I have studied love and come to know a great deal about it- but I still haven't learn how to do it-to fall in love and make it last.''

For more information on the work o Helen Fisher, visit her website at www.helenfisher.com

Source: Reprinted from Reader's Digest; February 2004