Love With The Proper Type

Studying personality for the dating site Chemistry.com, noted Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher found keys to compatibility.

When it came to love, Helen Fisher figured she had done it all.

She had explored the evolution of human pair-bonding; discovered a universal four-year itch that often led to divorce; and theorized that lust, romantic love, and attachment are each separate drives.She had even used brain scans to show that the chemistry of romantic love and the chemistry of addiction are similar.

By 2004, Fisher, a research professor of biological anthropology at Rutgers University whom the media had dubbed the Love Doctor, had reached a professional turning point: “I was truly thinking of getting out of studying love—I figured that there was more to be said, but maybe not by me.”

Then, two days before Christmas, she received a phone call from Match.com. The executives there had a project in mind, and they wanted advice from the best love expert around. Four days later, Fisher found herself in a New York conference room with about a dozen strangers.

“In the middle of the morning,” she recalls, “they literally looked at me and said, ‘Why do you fall in love with one person rather than another?’ ”

“I said, ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows.’ ”

Far from being put off, the Match.com executives shared with Fisher their plan to launch a new dating site—Chemistry.com—that would use science to find people their ideal romantic partners.

“I said, ‘Are you sure you have the right person? I study why we’re all alike, and you’re asking me why we’re all different.’ ”

And yet the challenge tempted Fisher. Sure, she says, scientists know that people are attracted to others who share their values, backgrounds, and intelligence. Fisher also was familiar with John Money’s concept of “love maps,” mental pictures of the ideal mate derived from our childhood experiences.

But what about matching people by personality? That was the new frontier—and Fisher is an explorer by nature. The meeting ended with Match.com—founded in 1995 and now the world’s largest online dating site—asking Fisher to help them design Chemistry.com.

Her work on the project forms the basis for her new book, Why Him? Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type (Henry Holt). In it, she proposes four basic personality categories: Builders, Directors, Negotiators, and yes, Fisher’s own type, Explorers.

In a way, the 63-year-old Fisher had been preparing for this new gig all her life.

But before she signed on as chief scientific advisor to Chemistry.com, she needed to be certain that she could make a contribution. “I pulled out this blank sheet of paper and asked myself, What do you know about personality? I said, Well, you know about dopamine.” She had explored the association between elevated levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine and romantic attraction in Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (2004).

“I wrote down the characteristics associated with the dopamine system: risk-taking, novelty-seeking, curiosity, creativity, spontaneity,” Fisher says. In her paradigm, that constellation of traits would denote an Explorer.

Then there was serotonin, another neurotransmitter, one associated, she says, with traits such as being “calm, cautious but not fearful, social, popular, managerial, traditional, conventional, literal, fact-oriented, conscientious, loyal.” She named that type the Builder.

She knew the effects of testosterone and estrogen, too, from her work on gender differences, the foundation of her book, The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and Why They Are Changing the World (1999). She describes the testosterone-fueled Director as “direct, tough-minded and decisive,” as well as competitive, logical, and mathematically and mechanically adept. By contrast, the estrogen-influenced Negotiator is imaginative, intuitive, agreeable, verbal, and skilled at intimacy.

“So I looked at those four things,” Fisher recalls. “Now I know there’s a lot of chemicals in the brain, but they don’t all code for personality traits. I know that those four do.

“I sat there with these four sheets of paper and said to myself, Nobody’s ever been able to solve how two personalities get along. I thought to myself, Maybe I could create a questionnaire to see to what degree you express these four constellations of personality traits—and then watch who’s drawn to whom.”

And that is how she and Chemistry.com made their match.

Studying personality for the dating site Chemistry.com, noted Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher found keys to compatibility. When it came to love, Helen Fisher figured she had done it all.

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