The Pompatus Of Love

The primal necessity of it, too. For decades HELEN FISHER -- of the Knisey Institute and Match.com -- has studied why, how, with whom, and for how long (four years) we stay in love. Her finding will cheer, dismay, and fascinate you.

- Ben Dickinson

I grew up in a glass house designed by Eliot Noyes, right up the hill from Philip Johnson’s glass house,” says biological anthropologist Helen Fisher. “I used to swim in Johnson’s swimming pool.” This was in the 1950s and ’60s, and these renowned monuments to suburban modernism were situated, with abundant space between them and trees all around, along a dirt road in New Canaan, Connecticut. Opossums, deer, and red foxes, Fisher remembers, would press their noses right up to the windows. “You could make love in the front of that house on a Saturday night and nobody would ever see you,” she volunteers with a notably non-theoretical air. This is followed by a distinctive low, guttural laugh that seems character revealing—the sound of someone reveling in a healthy lust for life.

The picture conjured is of an idyllic, high-Wasp childhood for Helen and her identical twin sister, Lorna. Their father, Bud, was an executive at Time Inc.; their blond, blue-eyed former-debutante mother, also named Helen, was an amateur ceramist. But there are a couple of origin stories embedded here that begin to explain how and why Fisher became the preeminent authority 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,” as her website distills it. She’s an independent scholar affiliated with the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies in Rutgers University’s anthropology department and a senior research fellow at Indiana University’s famed Kinsey Institute. Her two TED talk videos have been viewed 12 million or so times; her five books on attraction, sex, bonding, and mating have all been best-sellers. Last spring, a thoroughly revised new edition of her best-known book, 1992’s