Helen Fisher: Technology hasn't changed love
0:11I was recently traveling in the Highlands of New Guinea, and I was talking with a man who had three wives. I asked him, "How many wives would you like to have?" And there was this long pause, and I thought to myself, "Is he going to say five? Is he going to say 10? Is he going to say 25?" And he leaned towards me and he whispered, "None. " 0:31(Laughter) 0:34Eighty-six percent of human societies permit a man to have several wives: polygyny. But in the vast majority of these cultures, only about five or ten percent of men actually do have several wives. Having several partners can be a toothache. In fact, co-wives can fight with each other, sometimes they can even poison each other's children. And you've got to have a lot of cows, a lot of goats, a lot of money, a lot of land, in order to build a harem. 1:02We are a pair-bonding species. Ninety-seven percent of mammals do not pair up to rear their young;human beings do. I'm not suggesting that we're not -- that we're necessarily sexually faithful to our partners. I've looked at adultery in 42 cultures, I understand, actually, some of the genetics of it, and some of the brain circuitry of it. It's very common around the world, but we are built to love. 1:26How is technology changing love? I'm going to say almost not at all. I study the brain. I and my colleagues have put over 100 people into a brain scanner -- people who had just fallen happily in love,people who had just been rejected in love and people who are in love long-term. And it is possible to remain "in love" long-term. And I've long ago maintained that we've evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and reproduction: sex drive, feelings of intense romantic love and feelings of deep cosmic attachment to a long-term partner. And together, these three brain systems -- with many other parts of the brain -- orchestrate our sexual, our romantic and our family lives.
2:13But they lie way below the cortex, way below the limbic system where we feel our emotions, generate our emotions. They lie in the most primitive parts of the brain, linked with energy, focus, craving, motivation, wanting and drive. In this case, the drive to win life's greatest prize: a mating partner. They evolved over 4.4 million years ago among our first ancestors, and they're not going to change if you swipe left or right on Tinder. 2:45(Laughter)
2:47(Applause)
2:49There's no question that technology is changing the way we court: emailing, texting, emojis to express your emotions, sexting, "liking" a photograph, selfies ... We're seeing new rules and taboos for how to court. But, you know -- is this actually dramatically changing love? What about the late 1940s, when the automobile became very popular and we suddenly had rolling bedrooms?
3:20(Laughter)
3:21How about the introduction of the birth control pill? Unchained from the great threat of pregnancy and social ruin, women could finally express their primitive and primal sexuality.
3:36Even dating sites are not changing love. I'm Chief Scientific Advisor to Match.com, I've been it for 11 years. I keep telling them and they agree with me, that these are not dating sites, they are introducing sites. When you sit down in a bar, in a coffee house, on a park bench, your ancient brain snaps into action like a sleeping cat awakened, and you smile and laugh and listen and parade the way our ancestors did 100,000 years ago. We can give you various people -- all the dating sites can -- but the only real algorithm is your own human brain. Technology is not going to change that.
4:20Technology is also not going to change who you choose to love. I study the biology of personality, and I've come to believe that we've evolved four very broad styles of thinking and behaving, linked with the dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and estrogen systems. So I created a questionnaire directly from brain science to measure the degree to which you express the traits -- the constellation of traits -- linked with each of these four brain systems. I then put that questionnaire on various dating sites in 40 countries.Fourteen million or more people have now taken the questionnaire, and I've been able to watch who's naturally drawn to whom. 5:05And as it turns out, those who were very expressive of the dopamine system tend to be curious, creative, spontaneous, energetic -- I would imagine there's an awful lot of people like that in this room -- they're drawn to people like themselves. Curious, creative people need people like themselves. People who are very expressive of the serotonin system tend to be traditional, conventional, they follow the rules, they respect authority, they tend to be religious -- religiosity is in the serotonin system -- and traditional people go for traditional people. In that way, similarity attracts. In the other two cases, opposites attract.People very expressive of the testosterone system tend to be analytical, logical, direct, decisive, and they go for their opposite: they go for somebody who's high estrogen, somebody who's got very good verbal skills and people skills, who's very intuitive and who's very nurturing and emotionally expressive. We have natural patterns of mate choice. Modern technology is not going to change who we choose to love.
6:08But technology is producing one modern trend that I find particularly important. It's associated with the concept of paradox of choice. For millions of years, we lived in little hunting and gathering groups. You didn't have the opportunity to choose between 1,000 people on a dating site. In fact, I've been studying this recently, and I actually think there's some sort of sweet spot in the brain; I don't know what it is, but apparently, from reading a lot of the data, we can embrace about five to nine alternatives, and after that,you get into what academics call "cognitive overload," and you don't choose any. 6:47So I've come to think that due to this cognitive overload, we're ushering in a new form of courtship that I call "slow love." I arrived at this during my work with Match.com. Every year for the last six years, we've done a study called "Singles in America." We don't poll the Match population, we poll the American population. We use 5,000-plus people, a representative sample of Americans based on the US census.
7:15We've got data now on over 30,000 people, and every single year, I see some of the same patterns.Every single year when I ask the question, over 50 percent of people have had a one-night stand -- not necessarily last year, but in their lives -- 50 percent have had a friends with benefits during the course of their lives, and over 50 percent have lived with a person long-term before marrying. Americans think that this is reckless. I have doubted that for a long time; the patterns are too strong. There's got to be some Darwinian explanation -- Not that many people are crazy. 7:52And I stumbled, then, on a statistic that really came home to me. It was a very interesting academic article in which I found that 67 percent of singles in America today who are living long-term with somebody, have not yet married because they are terrified of divorce. They're terrified of the social, legal, emotional, economic consequences of divorce. So I came to realize that I don't think this is recklessness;I think it's caution. Today's singles want to know every single thing about a partner before they wed. You learn a lot between the sheets, not only about how somebody makes love, but whether they're kind,whether they can listen and at my age, whether they've got a sense of humor. 8:40(Laughter)
8:42And in an age where we have too many choices, we have very little fear of pregnancy and disease and we've got no feeling of shame for sex before marriage, I think people are taking their time to love. 8:57And actually, what's happening is, what we're seeing is a real expansion of the precommitment stagebefore you tie the knot. Where marriage used to be the beginning of a relationship, now it's the finale. But the human brain --
9:12(Laughter)
9:14The human brain always triumphs, and indeed, in the United States today, 86 percent of Americans will marry by age 49. And even in cultures around the world where they're not marrying as often, they are settling down eventually with a long-term partner. 9:28So it began to occur to me: during this long extension of the precommitment stage, if you can get rid of bad relationships before you marry, maybe we're going to see more happy marriages. So I did a study of 1,100 married people in America -- not on Match.com, of course -- and I asked them a lot of questions.But one of the questions was, "Would you re-marry the person you're currently married to?" And 81 percent said, "Yes. " 9:59In fact, the greatest change in modern romance and family life is not technology. It's not even slow love.It's actually women piling into the job market in cultures around the world. For millions of years, our ancestors lived in little hunting and gathering groups. Women commuted to work to gather their fruits and vegetables. They came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal. The double-income family was the rule. And women were regarded as just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men.
10:35Then the environment changed some 10,000 years ago, we began to settle down on the farm and both men and women became obliged, really, to marry the right person, from the right background, from the right religion and from the right kin and social and political connections. Men's jobs became more important: they had to move the rocks, fell the trees, plow the land. They brought the produce to local markets, and came home with the equivalent of money.
11:00Along with this, we see a rise of a host of beliefs: the belief of virginity at marriage, arranged marriages -- strictly arranged marriages -- the belief that the man is the head of the household, that the wife's place is in the home and most important, honor thy husband, and 'til death do us part. These are gone. They are going, and in many places, they are gone.
11:25We are right now in a marriage revolution. We are shedding 10,000 years of our farming tradition and moving forward towards egalitarian relationships between the sexes -- something I regard as highly compatible with the ancient human spirit.
11:44I'm not a Pollyanna; there's a great deal to cry about. I've studied divorce in 80 cultures, I've studied, as I say, adultery in many -- there's a whole pile of problems. As William Butler Yeats, the poet, once said,"Love is the crooked thing." I would add, "Nobody gets out alive. " 12:02(Laughter) 12:04We all have problems. But in fact, I think the poet Randall Jarrell really sums it up best. He said, "The dark, uneasy world of family life -- where the greatest can fail, and the humblest succeed. " 12:19But I will leave you with this: love and attachment will prevail, technology cannot change it. And I will conclude by saying any understanding of human relationships must take into account one the most powerful determinants of human behavior: the unquenchable, adaptable and primordial human drive to love.
12:44Thank you.
