Helen Fisher Quotes & Sayings

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. — Helen Fisher

There exists no culture in which adultery is unknown, no cultural device or code that extinguishes philandering. — Helen Fisher

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

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

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. — Helen Fisher

Hair that looks like it's been naturally sun-bleached makes you seem youthful, like you spend a lot of time outdoors. And that appeals to most people. — Helen Fisher

When you look at the brain regions associated with picking up data from the body, a huge amount of the brain is devoted to picking up information from the lips and tongue. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

Personality is composed of two fundamentally different types of traits: those of 'character;' and those of 'temperament.' Your character traits stem from your experiences. Your childhood games; your family's interests and values; how people in your community express love and hate; what relatives and friends regard as courteous or perilous; how those around you worship; what they sing; when they laugh; how they make a living and relax: innumerable cultural forces build your unique set of character traits. The balance of your personality is your temperament, all the biologically based tendencies that contribute to your consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving. As Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, put it, 'I am, plus my circumstances.' Temperament is the 'I am,' the foundation of who you are. — Helen Fisher

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

More and more of us live segmented, compartmentalized lives. This isn't natural. For millions of years, our forebears knew everyone around them and everyone knew them. — Helen Fisher

The women's movement is just a symptom of basic changes in the economy that are favoring women. — Helen Fisher

We still have community, but we don't seem to have local community. Even in a small town where you know your neighbors and your mother's down the street, they're not in arm's length. — Helen Fisher

Keep an open heart. We are wired to find love. — Helen Fisher

Women spend their lives trying to look good for men. So a woman who feels she's sending the right visual signals is pleased with herself. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

Any time you choose not to hide your tattoo, you're limiting your social sphere, because they're not popular in big business. — Helen Fisher

If patterns of human love subtly change, all sorts of social and political atrocities can escalate. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

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

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

Men with high baseline levels of testosterone marry less frequently, have more adulterous affairs, commit more spousal abuse, and divorce more often. — Helen Fisher

Women are naturally prone to compete over their mates. — Helen Fisher

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

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. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

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

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. — Helen Fisher

Kissing is not just kissing. It is a major escalation or de-escalation point in a powerful process of mate choice. — Helen Fisher

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

People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms - for love. — Helen Fisher

It's almost as if men who get tribal tattoos are trying to signal that they are dangerous, they're to be respected, and they're powerful. — Helen Fisher

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

You size up someone physically in less than one second - too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too old, too young, too stuffy, too scruffy. — Helen Fisher

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

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

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

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. — Helen Fisher

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

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

I was married and divorced at 23. — Helen Fisher

Real competition can drive up testosterone, which boosts libido. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

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

A world without love is a deadly place. — Helen Fisher

A hundred years ago, if you had a child out of marriage, you'd be a social disgrace. Today women feel comfortable enough economically and culturally to bring up a child without a recognized commitment from a man. — Helen Fisher

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

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. — Helen Fisher

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

Every time you cuddle with your children, you're likely to be driving down your testosterone. — Helen Fisher

I think that property is very important in this day and age. It defines you; you worked hard to get it. It's meaningful to you, and when you divorce, a lot of people have a lot of battles over their property for good reasons. — Helen Fisher

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

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. — Helen Fisher

Women's worst invention was the plow. With the beginning of plow agriculture, men's roles became extremely powerful. Women lost their ancient jobs as collectors. — Helen Fisher

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." — Helen Fisher

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

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

If two very different people pool their DNA, they'll create more genetic variety, and their young will come to the job of parenting with a wider array of skills. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

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

I suspect privacy is a very new concept to humanity. — Helen Fisher

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

You know, when you've been dumped, the one thing you love to do is just forget about this human being, and then go on with your life - but no, you just love them harder. — Helen Fisher

Love is not an emotion; it is a drive. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

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

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. — Helen Fisher

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

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. — Helen Fisher

A woman will toss her head and a man will say, 'Oh she's trying to pick me up,' when in fact she's not doing that at all. So, women actually have to be a little careful with what they do, because men will pick up things that they didn't mean. — Helen Fisher

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

We are wired to find love. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

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

Today, American women bear an average of 2.2 children that live to adulthood. Across most of Europe, women bear even fewer young. — Helen Fisher

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

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

It certainly would have been adaptive for ancestral man to have a chubby wife during stressful times of famine. Not only would she have had more calories to burn, and thus more energy and endurance, but since fat stores estrogen, she would have remained fertile for longer. — Helen Fisher

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

We all have restlessness in long-term relationships. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

Love is like Someone is camping in your head — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

We are lied to by our love songs. — Helen Fisher

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. — Helen Fisher

Women have a better sense of color and a better color memory. They're more likely to notice when something doesn't match; more likely to notice what you're wearing. — Helen Fisher

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

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

In general, men are wired to notice obvious signs that convey interest in mating - a warm smile, for example - and ignore other subtleties, like if your lipstick is faded. — Helen Fisher

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

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. — Helen Fisher

Men want to think women don't cheat, and women want men to think they don't cheat, and therefore the sexes have been playing a little psychological game with each other. — Helen Fisher

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

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. — Helen Fisher

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

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

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

We spend our lives trying to get along with people so we can keep our jobs, keep our marriages together, so that we can raise our kids properly. — Helen Fisher