Helen Fisher Quotes

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.

Men couldn't care less if your strands are perfectly styled and neat. In fact, he might like you more with some wildness or bedhead, since it shows you're carefree and relaxed.

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

There's more than one person on the planet. When you're madly in love, that's not what you think.

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

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.

We evolved in a tropical climate where the smells of plants and flowers were all around us. We spent a lot of time in the trees with a lot of sunlight and no clothes.

Most of us make up our minds in the first three minutes of meeting someone whether there's a potential for a relationship.

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

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere; some say the poorest in the world.

When you can't have someone but you're not willing to accept that, you try harder and become more extreme about it. Either you win the person back or you drive him away.

Men have a psychological need to show off their courage and strength. When he sees you talking to another guy, that instinct kicks in and he jumps to protect you and prove he's worthy of your love.

Along with our many human propensities, we evolved a huge cerebral cortex with which we make decisions.

In that early-love stage, you're in that state of exhilaration. You talk till dawn. You become obsessed with 'What does he think?' 'Does he like me?' 'Does he think I'm fat?'

There are cognitive processes and limbic reactions associated with basic emotions. And you can change brain chemistry, but you're still not going to change memories and experiences in a human being.

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.

A lot of people head into courtship looking for fireworks. Don't pass up a chance by dumping someone after a first date because you don't feel the fireworks. The fireworks can happen at any time and be maintained.

Blushing is thought to be linked to increased levels of norepinephrine in the brain, which may be associated with romantic feelings. It signals that we are interested and excited, which is attractive to men.

When chimps threaten, they open their mouth and show their teeth. It's a little like waving a knife in front of you. It's very primitive, and therefore bizarre.

The Internet lets women use words, which is their natural tool. Little girls speak in more complex, grammatical sentences than little boys do, and women never lose that superiority in verbal ability.

In America, we are demanding everything from our marriage.

For so many generations, a woman's only career path was to marry well and to marry up. Those days have changed.

Love is not an emotion; it is a drive.

If we remained perpetually infatuated, we couldn't eat, sleep or work.

The human brain is built to compare; it's Darwinian to consider an alternative when one presents itself.

It's in our genes, we were built to wander.

Since when is anyone truly honest with anyone?

You can really get poked in the back and not feel it very much, but just a feather around your lips and you really do feel it.

Throughout evolution, ostracism was death indeed.

Women are very attracted to a low voice because it's linked to testosterone, which for millions of years was a sign that men had very good spacial skills and would have been very good at hunting and finding their way back home.

There is more and more data indicating that there is a biological basis to your political views.

Both sexes like the exercise and challenge of sports, but for men it's also a basic display behavior for impressing and winning a mate.

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

High heels can literally raise your
status because you're taller when you wear them.

Liberals and conservatives are looking for entirely different things. Their attitudes toward romance and how they court are really dramatically different. There's almost no overlap.

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

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

Like most animals, we're wired to associate height with power.

Romantic love is an addiction.

For men, being too put-together implies femininity.

People have been looking for love potions since hunter-gatherer societies.

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

In courtship, who wins and who loses will determine who passes on their DNA to tomorrow.

After a man falls madly in love, he no longer cares how old she is.

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.

People kill for love. They die for love.

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.

Overdone lipstick is a deterrent to men. It rubs off easily onto their skin and the edges of their shirts, so it discourages them from kissing, touching, and coming closer to you, which is what they really want to do!

There's a lot of talk about the positive aspects of love. We as a society downplay the danger, the anxiety, and the disappointment. We romanticize romance.

Men fall in love faster than, and just as often as, women.

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.

As societies continue to loosen their standards regarding what is appropriate female and male behavior, I think we are going to realize we have not only underestimated women, but also men.

Real competition can drive up testosterone, which boosts libido.

My hypothesis is that conservative Republicans have very clear values, and when you have that, you're simply more relaxed.

Women like signs of money and education - things that indicate that not only is this guy going to have some resources, but he's also willing to share them.

Jealousy can even be good for love. One partner may feel secretly flattered when the other is mildly jealous. And catching someone flirting with your beloved can spark the kind of lust and romance that reignites a relationship.

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.

As social animals, we need to exchange juicy tales about someone - to connect with one another. For millions of years our forebears must have sat around the campfire, whispering about everyone they knew.

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.

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.

Women apparently are quite drawn to men who have differences rather than similarities in their histocompatibility system. They pick it up by smell, and they can pick it up from kissing.

Once you fall for someone, their smell can be a powerful thing. Women will wear their boyfriends' T-shirts, and throughout tales in history men have held on to their lover's handkerchief.

Almost always, when I'm on TV, the producers who call me, who negotiate what we're going to say, is a woman.

Office romances are few, short, and not usually destructive.

Natural beauty really entices men. They will tell you this time and time again, and studies consistently prove it.

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

Men don't need linguistic talent; they just need courage and words.

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

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

When people tell you to walk a certain way, it's like not thinking of a purple tomato. You can't not do it.

People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms - for love.

There's every reason to think SSRIs blunt your ability to fall and stay in love.

The only people you and I are likely to know in common are people in the news - politicians, journalists and celebrities.

When you fight, anger drives up testosterone in both men and women.

Scientists know that women gravitate to men who have a different immune system from theirs.

We are lied to by our love songs.

People have often asked me whether what I know about love has spoiled it for me. And I just simply say, 'Hardly.' You can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and then when you sit down and eat that cake, you can still feel that joy.

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.

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.

As women in industrial societies join the paid workforce, they gain the economic means to depart unhappy marriages more easily.

Hair that gleams can send a clear sign that you're young and in your prime, whatever your actual age.

A lot of people have been romantically in love with somebody who they feel wasn't appropriate to marry.

The Great Depression of the 1930s saw more American unmarried women working from nine to five, mostly in repetitive, boring, subordinate, dead-end jobs. But the number of working women doubled between 1870 and 1940. During World War II it doubled once again.

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

Until recently, we regarded love as supernatural. We were willing to study the brain chemistry of fear and depression and anger but not love.

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.

You can be instantly scared. You can be instantly happy. So why can't you be instantly romantically in love? I think when it happens, it's because you are ready to fall in love.

Neither gender is routinely more jealous - although women are more willing to work to win back a lover, while men tend to flaunt their money and status and are more likely to walk out to protect their self-esteem or save face.

I don't think we're an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce.

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.

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

I suspect privacy is a very new concept to humanity.

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

We are wired to find love.

I think the happiness we find, we make.

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

Globalization requires taking a broad contextual and long-term view.

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.

I was married and divorced at 23.

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