What's going on guys?

Thanks for tuning in to today's show have a very interesting conversation for you today where I welcome Dr. Helen Fisher and Dr. Helen Fisher is a biological anthropologist senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and chief scientific advisor at match.com and she has conducted extensive research and written six books on the evolution and future of human sex love marriage gender differences in the brain and

how your personality style shapes who you are and who you love and today Dr. Fisher and I dive into just that how we become who we are and how that shows up in relationships and how our biology is important to understand in the context of relationships and I really enjoyed this conversation because most of our guests are coming from a psychology background.

We're really diving into the family dynamics and attachment styles and communication and those things are super important and it's not to discount them as Dr. Fisher will tell you and you'll hear her say but taking the biological approach of sex is good for you just on a biological level so sometimes rather than trying to hash out the argument about who should take out the trash for the

tenth time and there's ways and tools to do that better but maybe you guys just need to have a good date night and have sex and hack our biology because that's going to connect you on a on a deeper biological level through endorphins and brain chemicals so I really enjoyed this conversation in this different perspective with Helen thanks so much for tuning in and I hope you guys enjoy today's show.

Hi Helen thanks so much for joining me on the show today I'm delighted to be with you today we are going to talk about your role with match calm and the 11th annual singles in America study but I thought a great place to start would be having you tell our listeners a little bit about your work in the field of

human sex love marriage and gender differences and how you came to be with match calm and then we'll jump into the study.

Great well let's see I'm a biological anthropologist I got my PhD in human evolution and I wrote my PhD dissertation on why it is that men and women form partnerships why we are monogamous why we pair up to we were young 97% of mammals do not do that people do so

that's a real question so anyway I came up with a theory of you know the trees were disappearing we had to get out we began to stand up on two feet instead of four women said to carry their babies in their arms instead of on their backs they began to need a partner to help them at least while the child was an infancy and stuck away and so I then moved on to study the brain circuitry of romantic love I had my colleagues are the first in the world to put people in brain scanners

instead of the brain circuitry of romantic love and attachment and anyway I've written six books on it most reason one is anatomy of love second edition and one day two days before Christmas I got a telephone call I live in New York city and it was match calm and they asked me would I come in two days after Christmas and talk with them and I said well sure I mean nothing happens at Christmas in New York so anyway I did it and all these people filed for me.

All these people filed in the room and finally I didn't know they were like was the CEO on down and in the middle of the morning they said why do you fall in love with one person rather than another and I spent several years working on that I mean we do tend to fall in love with somebody from the same socioeconomic background same general level of intelligence and good looks and education

your childhood always plays a role your values your goals etc but you can walk into a room and everybody is from your background and level of intelligence and good looks and you don't fall in love with all of them so that steered me into studying the biology of personality and why we are naturally drawn biologically drawn to some people rather than others so that was first the thing that I did was match and then now this singles in America study what we do is I create with my

colleagues about 200 questions every year and we find them out to a very good service we collect the data on all Americans we do not pull the match members this is a national representative sample of singles based on the U.S. Census so this is your number 11 we did it right in the middle of the pandemic and there's some remarkable findings I definitely want to dive into those findings but before we get into that can we talk a little bit about why we fall in love with

one person over another and some of the research you did there and maybe you can share some of the more surprising or counter to what we might think the reasons would be for us falling in love the findings that you found sure you know I'm a biological I mean there's all kinds of cultural reasons that you fall for one person as I mentioned we do tend to fall in love with somebody from the same ethnic and socio economic background same general level of good looks

education and intelligence people who share our religious and social values and people who have the same economic goals and reproductive goals your child would always play the role but as I said you know you can run into an awful lot of people with all of those similarities and you don't fall in love with all of them so that began to think okay well you know people will say we have chemistry or we don't have chemistry what could be happening here so anyway I started to look through all of the

biological literature for any trait at all linked with any biological system so there's all kinds of systems in the brain most of them keep the heart beating or the eyes blinking did not

look with any personality traits but there are four brain systems that is each one of these brain systems is linked with a whole fleet a constellation a clump of personality traits the dopamine serotonin testosterone and estrogen system so I created a

create a questionnaire to see to what degree you express the traits in each of these four systems,

and I was able to find the following. People were very, now we all express all of these systems.

That's one of the problems with all of these personality questionnaires. They put you in one bucket

or another. That's not the way the brain is built, but we express some traits in all four of these

systems. Anyway, the bottom line is people were very primarily expressive of the traits in the

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