Why We Love

The Drive Beneath Everything

Helen Fisher started looking for the brain circuitry of love in 1996. She was an anthropologist who had spent her career studying mating, marriage, and divorce across cultures, and she had grown convinced that romantic love was not what most of her colleagues thought it was. It was not a Western invention. It was not a luxury emotion that bloomed only after food and shelter were sorted. It was something older, hungrier, and more deeply lodged in human biology than that.

By the time she finished her fMRI scanning study eight years later, she had imaging data from more than forty men and women freshly and recklessly in love, and she had her answer. Romantic love is a drive. Not an emotion in the usual sense, not a cultural script, but a goal-directed motivation system as old as the reptilian brain, running on the same dopamine machinery that pushes a hungry animal toward food. It evolved for a reason, it follows rules, and you can watch it light up on a brain scan.

That is the spine of the book. Everything else — the survey of 839 Americans and Japanese, the courtship of elephants and prairie voles, the chemistry of jealousy, the four-year itch — hangs off it.

What Wild Ecstasy: The Anatomy of Being in Love

To find out whether being in love feels the same everywhere, Fisher and her collaborators handed a 54-item questionnaire to 437 Americans and 402 Japanese students. The results were startling for their flatness. Heterosexuals and homosexuals answered the same way on 86 percent of items. Men and women, on 87 percent. Catholics and Protestants, on 89 percent. People over forty-five reported the same intensity of passion as people under twenty-five. The one cluster of meaningful differences was cultural rather than emotional — Japanese respondents were more afraid of saying the wrong thing, for instance, because cross-sex relations in Japan are more formal.