Helen Fisher Quotes

A Rolex watch or an expensive car are the things guys often use to show status, wealth, and basic desirability.

Keep an open heart. We are wired to find love.

Why do we feel jealousy? Therapists often regard the demon as a scar of childhood trauma or a symptom of a psychological problem. And it's true that people who feel inadequate, insecure, or overly dependent tend to be more jealous than others.

People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.

Romantic love is an obsession. It possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You can’t stop thinking about another human being.

Any kind of novelty or excitement drives up dopamine in the brain, and dopamine is associated with romantic love.

You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your 'love map,' an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up. And I also think that you gravitate to certain people, actually, with somewhat complementary brain systems.

The main characteristics of romantic love are craving: an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally.

A world without love is a deadly place.

There's all kinds of reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another: Timing is important. Proximity is important. Mystery is important. You fall in love with somebody who's somewhat mysterious, in part because mystery elevates dopamine in the brain, probably pushes you over that threshold to fall in love.

Sometimes we fall in love with somebody who will probably never love us, for reasons having nothing to do with us but with their own mindset, their chemistry.

That "ol' black magic" is a fickle force. The chemistry of romantic love can trigger the chemistry of sexual desire and the fuel of sexual desire can trigger the fuel of romance. This is why it is dangerous to copulate with someone with whom you don't wish to become involved. Although you intend to have casual sex, you might just fall in love.

We're not very dangerous animals; we don't have a horn like a rhino or quills like a porcupine.

There's magic to love... Millions of years ago we evolved three basic drives: the sex love, romantic love, and attachment to a long-term partner. These circuits are deeply embedded in the human brian. They're going to survive as long as our species survive on what Shakespeare called, this "mortal coil."

Your sweetheart calls you by another's name. His eyes linger too long on your best friend. He talks with excitement about a girl at work. And the fire catches. Jealousy - that sickening combination of possessiveness, suspicion, rage, and humiliation - can overtake your mind and threaten your very core as you contemplate your rival.

Barriers tend to intensify romance. It's called the 'Romeo and Juliet effect.' I call it 'frustration attraction.'

Experiences shape the brain, but the brain shapes the way we view experiences, too.

Games are the way we keep romance alive. They're based in human hardwiring. Playing hard-to-get or leaving a little to the imagination allows the woman to be wooed and appreciated and the man to be challenged and intrigued.

I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy.

Men and women are like two feet; they can help each other get ahead.

From my studies of genetics and neuroscience I have come to believe that people fall into four broad personality types - each influenced by a different brain chemical: I call them the Explorer, Builder, Director, and Negotiator.

Nobody gets out of love alive. You turn into a menace or a pest when you've been rejected.

Women have never been as interesting as they are now. Not at any time on this planet have women been so educated, so interesting, so capable.

As a group, anthropologists are not too fond of people who work in the business world.

Saliva has testosterone and estrogen. When you kiss, you're having a chemical experience.

Today, most women are surrounded by ingenious gadgets. They don't grow the peas or raise the chicken that they serve for dinner; instead they hunt and gather in the grocery store. They go through catalogs or department stores to buy clothes instead of shearing sheep, carding wool, and weaving cloth for skirts and coats and blankets.

Romantic love is not an emotion. ... It's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind.

Romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it's going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it's going poorly.

The reason you take antidepressants is to feel calm. And romantic love is not calm -it's elation, it's mood swings, and you're killing all that when you take the drug.

Research shows that couples who have a lot of similarities, including intellectual compatibility, end up staying together.

Women are better at reading body language everywhere in the world. As a matter of fact, it's associated with the female hormone estrogen. Women are better at figuring out of tone of voice, reading your face and posture and gesture.

Psychologists maintain that the dizzy feeling of intense romantic love lasts only about 18 months to-at best-three years

What our grandmothers told us about playing hard to get is true. The whole point of the game is to impress and capture. It's not about honesty. Many men and women, when they're playing the courtship game, deceive so they can win. Novelty, excitement and danger drive up dopamine in the brain. And both sexes brag.

Mothers really were not built to raise babies not only by themselves, but with only a partner. For millions of years, a woman had much more than just her husband to help rear her young... This whole idea of 'it takes a village to raise a child' is exactly how we're supposed to live.

Young women today do not marry the men they met in high school, or even the one they go out with at college, because they do not need to.

We're apt to fall in love with those who are mysterious and challenging to us.

When you massage someone, the levels of oxytocin go up in the brain, and oxytocin is one of the chemicals that drives attachment.

There were real reasons that you were attracted to somebody originally. The brain doesn't pick willy-nilly. Unless you part ways hating each other for some reason, that mechanism could get triggered again. You can literally fall in love again.

Women have a better sense of smell than men do, and it's even sharper in the middle of their menstrual cycle, when estrogen levels peak and women are more likely to be deciding whether a man's attractive.

Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it.

There's biology in everything, even when you're feeling spiritual.

I've always maintained that men were more romantic than women.

Romantic love allows you to focus mating energy. Attachment sustains that relationship as long as necessary to raise your baby.

Throughout evolution, ostracism was death indeed.

Despite the myth that men are less committed, they are predisposed to desire marriage.

You can get into a very fancy car and know everything about the engine, but when you drive in that car, you feel that rush. In the same way, I think the more you know about love, the more you can enjoy it. And knowing about your personality type, who you are and what kind of person you're dealing with gives you a great leg up.

A woman of 40 or 50 or 60 can take estrogen replacements, get facelifts, spend her money in bars.

love is like Someone is camping in your head

You've got to remember that men are men and women are women. And although a lot of similarities, there are some real differences.

Whether you're married or not, relationships - and the satisfaction tied to them - are extremely important for increasing men's and women's quality of life.