Why We Love

Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who writes about humans and love, was giving a talk at the Maryland Science Center, so after picking up Maya and having a yoga class together, I dropped her off at home with Eric while I made a mad dash across town to the Inner Harbour, was relieved to have enough quarters for the parking meter, and rushed into the Imax theater where the event was just starting. After reading several of her books, it felt good to see her in person. She spoke well, and was interesting. Eric would have hated her lecture because to him nothing she says is scientific enough or provable and he laughs at her conclusions.

I guess I was intrigued by her comments because I do wonder why Eric and I are together and why we love each other. We are so different in so many ways and have entirely opposing views on almost everything. How is it that we stay a couple, almost twelve years now!!!!

She proposed that sex is testosterone based, that romantic love was dopamine/norepinephein/serotonin based and that attachment/sustained love was modulated by vasopressin/oxytocin. She is using MRI's to look at brains in love and finds that the 'ventral tegmental area' lights up in love addled brains. She went on to talk about four types of people and went through all their characteristics and suggested that certain types did better with their like types or their opposites. She works with Match.com and does her surveys and gets her subjects form that population. I am not sure I learned more about why Eric and I love each other or why we are still together after all these years, but I enjoyed the lecture. Eric laughed when I tried to explain what I learned. I had taken notes on my iphone, and laboriously went through all the details I had recorded, but he was not impressed. Perhaps it was because he spent the evening moving boxes from the sunroom to the downstairs, so that we could expand the usable space in the house. I was happy with his progress, but he was sore and tired.