Why We Love : The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love

Rating:
Summary: Romance Coach to Love Writer
Review: I'm always interested in what's new on the romance and love front, and get my best leads from my eMAIL to eMATE readers and my romance coaching clients. Sure enough, "Why We Love" joins my "Recommended Reading for Romantics" list. Thanks for suggesting it, Darlene! This book is a goodie.

The author Helen Fisher does a terrific job of presenting the latest information on the biochemistry of emotions and love in a fascinating and readable style. Her own theorizing on falling in love, the facts that support and lead her ideas, and poetry, literature, and contemporary examples are woven seamlessly into a readable whole. Understandably, with my psychotherapy and now romance coaching clients, I've done a lot of thinking and talking about love and romance myself. And I'm pleased to see that Fisher thoughts and the research support and parallel my own theorizing.

Fisher thinks (and the research she quotes agrees) that romantic love has played a vital and important in human survival and development. "Normal" romantic passion lasts between one and two years, which, when you think about it, is just enough time for a new couple to get pregnant, set up housekeeping, and start raising a new infant - not necessarily in that order. Then a new kind of attachment develops, hopefully, that keeps the family together to raise the child. As we well know, that is not a foolproof arrangement.

Fisher's booked is crammed with riveting detail about the physiology and biochemistry of love and attraction. Fisher also extrapolates from her data and gives advice on how to use the findings in real life. She writes about how to make romance last, how to negotiate the end of a relationship quicker and easier, and even how to encourage someone to fall in love with you as well as make yourself more receptive to the in-love state.

Some of what she says sounds terribly familiar - men like to do things together, women like to talk about it, for instance - but Fisher goes ahead and explains why. She also adds some brand-new, contemporary details, like the role or serotonin in the falling-in-love process, and how elevated levels of serotonin inhibit your ability to fall in love. For those of us (and there are millions!) who take anti-depressants that are SSRI's (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, prozac is the best known), take heed. Your medications that are helping your feel better may be getting in the way romantically.

If you've wondered about romance and why men and women do what they do - and who hasn't? - Fisher has a lot of the answers. And if you want to be "in love," this book will explain the whole process. This is a "must read"!

Kathryn Lord, Romance Coach
www.Find-A-Sweetheart.com

Rating:
Summary: Romance Coach to Love Writer
Review: I'm always interested in what's new on the romance and love front, and get my best leads from my eMAIL to eMATE readers and my romance coaching clients. Sure enough, "Why We Love" joins my "Recommended Reading for Romantics" list. Thanks for suggesting it, Darlene! This book is a goodie.

The author Helen Fisher does a terrific job of presenting the latest information on the biochemistry of emotions and love in a fascinating and readable style. Her own theorizing on falling in love, the facts that support and lead her ideas, and poetry, literature, and contemporary examples are woven seamlessly into a readable whole. Understandably, with my psychotherapy and now romance coaching clients, I've done a lot of thinking and talking about love and romance myself. And I'm pleased to see that Fisher thoughts and the research support and parallel my own theorizing.

Fisher thinks (and the research she quotes agrees) that romantic love has played a vital and important in human survival and development. "Normal" romantic passion lasts between one and two years, which, when you think about it, is just enough time for a new couple to get pregnant, set up housekeeping, and start raising a new infant - not necessarily in that order. Then a new kind of attachment develops, hopefully, that keeps the family together to raise the child. As we well know, that is not a foolproof arrangement.

Fisher's booked is crammed with riveting detail about the physiology and biochemistry of love and attraction. Fisher also extrapolates from her data and gives advice on how to use the findings in real life. She writes about how to make romance last, how to negotiate the end of a relationship quicker and easier, and even how to encourage someone to fall in love with you as well as make yourself more receptive to the in-love state.

Some of what she says sounds terribly familiar - men like to do things together, women like to talk about it, for instance - but Fisher goes ahead and explains why. She also adds some brand-new, contemporary details, like the role or serotonin in the falling-in-love process, and how elevated levels of serotonin inhibit your ability to fall in love. For those of us (and there are millions!) who take anti-depressants that are SSRI's (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, prozac is the best known), take heed. Your medications that are helping your feel better may be getting in the way romantically.

If you've wondered about romance and why men and women do what they do - and who hasn't? - Fisher has a lot of the answers. And if you want to be "in love," this book will explain the whole process. This is a "must read"!

Kathryn Lord, Romance Coach
www.Find-A-Sweetheart.com

Rating:
Summary: Love conquers this book
Review: Is nothing sacred? Now science is trying to stick its cold clinical explanatory fingers into our most cherished of human emotions: romantic love. It's surprising that such a book was written, for like matters of morality, ethics, religion, and personal opinions, the topic of love is supposed to be outside of science's grasp, unable to be contained in a test tube.

Yet the author tries. Using evolution as the lens through which to analyze love, some pretty crazy ideas are put forth, not the least of which is that all animals are claimed to have romantic love. I don't know about you, but I have a hard time picturing a pair of seals or hyenas or newts having a candlelight dinner, commenting on how beautiful the full moon is, and looking forward to growing old together in holy matrimony.

Cold, often silly ideas are out forth on why we choose partners. Maybe his/her ears and nose are symmetrical! Her waist-to-hip ratio isn't bad either! I think I'll propose right now! I feel a dopamine and seratonine rush! Bah. All the chemical tests and brain scans in the world can't explain away True Love. Fisher is looking for love in all the wrong places. Love conquers all, including this book's attempts to explain it away.

Rating:
Summary: Why We Love : The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
Review: Love, the poets tell us, is as elusive as a butterfly. Such an ephemeral concept presented a nearly irresistible challenge to anthropologist Fisher, who set out to prove that love indeed could be quantified and analyzed as if it were a tangible commodity. Commanding sophisticated methodology, from MRIs to EEGs, and complex blood analyses to comprehensive psychological surveys, Fisher employed all the technological tools of the trade to determine the difference between love and lust, between the desire for romance and the demand to reproduce. Birds and bees do, in fact, do it, and men, it turns out, are not from Mars, nor women from Venus. Love, Fisher concludes, is the product of a chemical quagmire and the result of a sociological imperative as ancient as cavemen and as elemental as amoebas. Entertainingly balancing poetic plaudits with scientific sanctions, Fisher presents both the chemistry behind love's rashest behavior and the understanding necessary to weather the emotional upheavals associated with falling in love.

Rating:
Summary: How do I love thee...? With dopamine!
Review: One must first congratulate Dr. Fisher for attempting to try to explain the machinations of human love and why we choose who we fall in love with. Universal questions, of course, and ones that scientists, poets, composers and dramatists have pondered for centuries. And Dr. Fisher does rise to the occasion, offering numerous and fascinating examples of love in the animal kingdom and how it developed into human love, romantic love and attachment over thousands of years. But certain questions remain unanswered. Dr. Fisher never addresses as to why certain animals, especially swans, mate for life and will literally pine away for a lost partner. Death is also not an issue in Dr. Fisher's book - something that definitely needed addressing - as we are furnished with pages on stalking, depression, suicide and even murder, but nothing on how a loved one responds after the death of its mate. Also requiring additional exploration and examination are the subjects of love, courtships and attachments form by gay and lesbian couples. Since, as Dr. Fisher explains, love developed as a necessary resource for mating and rearing children, than how do you explain why one man is attracted to another or why one woman woos another female? If two men or two women fall in love, it is most certainly not for procreative purposes. Such questions and the theories behind them would make absorbing reading. Sadly, Dr. Fisher only glosses over them in a curt, dismissive manner. Also, the book needed the skills of a good editor since Dr. Fisher is frequently redundant. Sentences are repeated almost verbatum from chapter to chapter, endlessly extolling Dr. Fisher's chemical cocktail that she believes is the human brain's recipe for romantic love. At times it almost seems as if the author is convinced that her readers cannot remember such details from page to page. All in all, Dr. Fisher has written an intriguing book, one that is readable and understandable, but, in the end, she raises far more questions then she answers. Perhaps, this was her intent?

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book for good and sad endings!
Review: So far, I have read about 80 to 100 books on the topic of love everything from european poetry to sternberg's love theory with a few trashy cosmopolitan articles in between (I do admit, I have a clear obsession to understand what love is truly about).

Fisher's book has covered many aspects of evolutionary biology that have remained osbcured from many authors in the past. In many ways this book demystifies the concept of love and gives the reader a clear foundation of the biological processes that lie hidden from shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. H. Fisher picks some elegant human and non-human primate experiments to illustrate her ideas and goes beyond the lab to explain the every day phenomenon of love and attraction.

In summary, I recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic, including those who are deeply in love or to anyone out there who has lost a wonderful person and is looking for ways to understand a bit more.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book for good and sad endings!
Review: So far, I have read about 80 to 100 books on the topic of love everything from european poetry to sternberg's love theory with a few trashy cosmopolitan articles in between (I do admit, I have a clear obsession to understand what love is truly about).

Fisher's book has covered many aspects of evolutionary biology that have remained osbcured from many authors in the past. In many ways this book demystifies the concept of love and gives the reader a clear foundation of the biological processes that lie hidden from shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. H. Fisher picks some elegant human and non-human primate experiments to illustrate her ideas and goes beyond the lab to explain the every day phenomenon of love and attraction.

In summary, I recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic, including those who are deeply in love or to anyone out there who has lost a wonderful person and is looking for ways to understand a bit more.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable reading for its intended audience
Review: Some of the five people who reviewed this earlier here than I did judged the book as if it were intended as something more than it is. Fisher is a scientist, but her readership includes many who are just interested in romantic love as a human phenomenon. As a professional book reviewer as well as a physicist (Ph.D. though that matters little here), I always strive to evaluate how well the book serves its intended audience, not whether it meets the standards of a peer-reviewed journal.

I often recommend books to a subset of the people who are reading my reviews. In this case, I think Helen Fisher has done a remarkably good job of sharing her own research and that of others, drawing conclusions which she admits are sometimes speculative, and sharing them with people who appreciate romance as much as she does.

You can read my review, as published as the lead review in the Dallas Morning News on 2/8/04, at my personal review archive, The Science Shelf (www.scienceshelf.com/WhyWeLove.htm).

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating well written as a reference tome
Review: This intriguing look at why we love responds to that question and more such as when we fall out of love and implies why cheating on one's love occurs. Using survey techniques applied globally and scrutinizing available governmental records to gather information and evaluate research data on human behavior, behavioral anthropologist Helen Fisher insists that romantic behavior is caused by two crucial chemicals produced by the brain. When a person falls in love, the brain generates major increases of energy that leads to positive and negative reactions such as passion, elation, obsession, and jealousy. Most interesting is the thesis on love amongst prehistorical mankind that insists that "four-year birth intervals were the regular pattern of birth spacing during our long human prehistory". The author insists this has been wired into our modern brains to remain monogamous for four years. World wide data shows that a higher than normal divorce rate occurs during the fourth year of marriage especially when one child has been born.

This is more than just a scientific look at love. Instead Dr. Fisher provides an intriguing argument on WHY WE LOVE and why we fall out of love. Though the emphasis is chemical and data oriented, Dr. Fisher also provides tips to stay in love that includes focusing on the positive emotions. Fascinating well written as a reference tome that provides insight yet the easy to read WHY WE LOVE: THE NATURE AND FUTURE OF ROMANTIC LOVE is fun to follow.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Attempting to Touch the Sky without Leaving the Ground
Review: This sort of pseudo-science sold through the recitation of credentials does a disservice to the scientific community. The author attempts to explain a complex emotion through a simplistic analysis that can't even begin to confront the underlying intricacies involved in the human response known as love (notably the author pays little attention to many chemicals that are known to play a role in creating the feelings of love and infatuation- see oxytocin, phenylalinine, etc.). After reading this book I'm fascinated that the author has the nerve to draw actual conclusions from the limited data that is available, the real source of amusement in the book is watching Fisher attempt to explain love with only the most rudimentary forms of scientific data- it's like watching someone try to complete a jigsaw puzzle when they only have one piece. Some of Fisher's conclusions are the worst form of science - she clearly holds the world speed record in jumping from correlation to conclusion. At one point in the book Fisher concludes that we are conditioned for periods of serial monogamy, to bolster her conclusion she presents data indicating that divorce is most prevalent in the fourth year of marriage, when a couple has a single dependent child. I don't know about the other readers, but I'm sold- I'm sure there are no other plausible explanations for the statistical evidence presented by Fisher. I suppose in the end the worst thing that can be said about Fisher is that her she wanted to understand something that neither she or anyone else is capable of understanding at this point. There is nothing wrong with theorizing, scientific progress often comes in baby steps BUT science is based on a process whereby you attempt to disprove rather than to prove (Fisher's gear shifter seems to be locked in reverse). Unless Love turns out to be flat, Fisher's book is largely irrelevant.