It's raining in New York, and in the
cavernous gloom of Penn Station, thousands of travellers pour down the
hallways, the rustle of their feet and the echo of the train announcements
combining into a kind of rapid-heartbeat rhythm that might be more exciting if
weren't such a cold and drizzly winter morning. The fluorescent ceiling exudes
an olive glow that makes everyone look like they died two hours ago, and when
the blonde woman seated by herself in the departure lounge looks up and sees a
man looking at her, she sends him a hard, wary glance that says, step forward
if you're who I think you are; otherwise, get lost.
"Dr. Fisher, I presume?"
Helen Fisher stands up and extends a small
hand toward me. She's a trim 56-year-old with shoulder-length blonde hair,
dressed in the head-to-toe black ensemble of the seasoned New Yorker. Her
manner is courteous but guarded, and she walks quickly as she hefts her bag
and heads for the train. She's a hard one to track down, this Helen Fisher.
She has a policy of not answering her phone when she's writing a book, which
is most of the time, and when she's not writing, she travels. She's just
returned, for example, from Africa, where she spent a week living
incommunicado with a clan of Stone Age hunters. Catching up with her feels
like apprehending a fugitive.
During the hour-long train ride to New
Jersey, where she teaches anthropology at Rutgers University, Fisher sits by
herself, intently making notes and prepping for her first lecture of the new
term. I sit a few rows back and look out the window. This part of New Jersey
is all tank farms and swamp, and in the grey light of dawn it looks like some
gigantic hillbilly's junk-strewn hayfield; a futuristic and extraordinarily
brutal landscape that can't help but inspire unoptimistic thoughts about the
human species. It's an appropriate backdrop for this journey however, because
the human species is Dr. Fisher's specialty.
When Fisher graduated with a Ph.D in
physical anthropology, very few scientists were conducting research into
modern human behaviour, or trying to separate innate behaviour from what is
learned. Even less research material was available on human courtship. There
was broad consensus that patterns of flirting, dating, sex and marriage were
culturally determined, and therefore varied wildly from one country to the
next.
For reasons of her own, Fisher didn't buy
it. She launched her own investigation and, over the course of her career,
assembled a remarkable body of evidence that human beings seek romance, select
mates, marry, cheat on each other, and even get divorced in predictable
patterns that are as old as the human species itself. More interestingly, she
has determined that we all tend to behave in knee-jerk fashion when we're in
the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex. Put an eligible man
and woman within 10 feet of each other, and they'll immediately launch into
rote display behaviour that's invariably comic to watch, if you're schooled in
recognizing it, which most of us aren't.
Fisher's work has earned her a reputation
that is both formidable and controversial, and she now teaches at Rutgers
University, which has the most prestigious anthropology department in the
world. The office across from hers belongs to Lionel Tiger, and the guy down
the hall is the top fossil hunter alive. After she checks into her office and
deals with a few minor emergencies, we make our way to her first class, where
the room is already filling up with hundreds of students. By the time she
clears her throat and starts the lecture, it's jammed to the rafters.
"I think I'm just beginning to get a
reputation," she told me earlier. "I suspect some of these students
might be here because they've heard about me."
Helen Fisher has dedicated her life to
exploring and defining the innate qualities of the human species. Being a
woman, and one who has lived through the final days of an old millennium and
the dawn of a new one, she's particularly drawn to the inborn aspects of
romance and sexuality. As she paces the stage, she begins to loosen up. With
her hand propped on her hip, she throws a few one-liners at the crowd, and
asks them if they have any idea why human males have such large penises.
Nobody wants to touch that one. But when she tells them that a mature
silverback gorilla has only two inches, a couple of big football players in
the back row glance at each other, appalled.
Fisher's central message starts with the
now-familiar notion that men and women are very different; not different
because they've been raised that way by a callous and patriarchal society, but
because four million years of evolution have saddled them with very different
nervous systems, temperaments and brains. She says men, for example, are
inherently much more aggressive than women, and this innate aggressiveness is
one of the reasons men tend to dominate the worlds of business and politics.
She says that furthermore, despite their protestations, women prefer such
dominant males as sex partners and long-term mates. These views haven't
endeared her to traditional feminists.
"The traditional feminists hate
me," says Fisher, walking back to her office. "Even though I'm a
feminist myself. I've made a successful career in the male-dominated world of
anthropology, and I've written books like The First Sex, in which I argue that
women possess unique talents that will soon change the world. But traditional
feminists don't read my books. They're too angry to step outside their
paradigm. They think my ideas are harmful. They think I'm betraying the cause.
But my cause is science. My job is to get at the facts."
When it comes to human behaviour, the
"facts" continue to be in dispute. Back in 17th-century England, the
philosopher John Locke famously described the mind of a child as a "tabula
rasa," or blank tablet, upon which any imaginable life could be written.
Then Charles Darwin came along in the 19th century, published the brilliant
The Origin of Species, and turned Locke on his head. Darwin's theory of
natural selection put most of the emphasis on nature, and that view prevailed
until the 20th century, when his ideas were hijacked by the eugenicists and
the Nazis, who argued that natural selection proved the white race was
inherently superior. With the close of the Second World War, "social
Darwinism" was discredited and thrown on the scrap heap, and by the time
Helen Fisher was growing up in the Connecticut of the 1950s, she says,
"virtually every social scientist worth his salt had gone back to
believing that the dominant force that shaped us was culture."
She lived in New Canaan, in a neighbourhood
of glass houses, and in the evening, her neighbours' homes glowed like
tropical aquariums in the darkness. She remembers sneaking through the wooded
backyards. "One of our neighbours lived in a Philip Johnson house,"
she says. "And I remember being a little girl, perhaps six years old,
sitting on this rock in the woods, and studying the people, watching how they
talked and laughed and argued and prepared their meals." Later, as a
college student, riding the train into New York City, she found herself doing
the same thing, staring into the windows of the homes at trackside. "It's
still one of my habits," she says. "My friends are always saying,
'Earth to Helen, Earth to Helen ...' I've always been fascinated by
people."
During the late '60s, she studied at the
University of Colorado. The Vietnam War was at its height and American society
was in turmoil. Feminism, gay rights, free love and black power were tearing
up the streets. On campus, the prevailing doctrine was that all human beings
were virtually interchangeable. Social equality could be achieved through
proper training and re-education. Boys and girls would grow up alike if you
took away the Barbie dolls and the G.I. Joes.
"I've never been a confrontational
person," she says. "So I never debated these ideas in class. But I
happen to be an identical twin. My sister, Lorna, and I laugh alike. Our
gestures are similar. We like the same kinds of foods. Our older brother and
sister grew up in the same household as us, but they don't share our uncanny
similarities. So I knew there was biology in behaviour, but I didn't argue the
point. I just quietly decided they were wrong."
She majored in psychology, but wasn't keen
on the material. "In those days," she says, "everyone was very
interested in psychosis and abnormal behaviour. But I was interested in what
made people the same, not what made them different. A big discovery for me was
reading Jane Goodall's book In the Shadow of Man. She was talking about
chimpanzees, and you could clearly see that these creatures kissed and hugged,
made friends, were jealous, had enemies, made war, made peace, jockeyed for
political position. And as I read this book, I suddenly saw that here was a
field of study that could explain both our physical origins and the origins of
our behaviour."
At the time, it was generally believed that
dating, flirtation, romance and courtship among humans were cultural
constructs, and that marriage patterns varied wildly from one society to
another. A big insight came in 1988, when Fisher was riding in a crowded New
York subway car, reading divorce statistics. "These were UN statistics
from 62 countries, going back to 1947," she says. "Incredibly, the
statistics seemed to show that divorce peaks around the four-year mark."
She kept rechecking the tables to see if she'd made a mistake. But whether the
statistics were from Third World countries or highly developed Western
nations, the pattern was the same.
"I was staggered," she says.
"I couldn't believe there was a pattern, let alone a consistent one.
Nobody had ever bothered to analyze this. To me, it clearly suggested that
divorce might not be a cultural malaise, but an aspect of our inherited mating
behaviour."
She looked at "pair bonds" in the
animal world, and discovered that in many cases animals only stay together
until the young are raised. "In humans, the period of infancy is about
four years. Of course, it takes a while for the relationship to heat up, and
it takes a while for things to cool down. But the average time required to
raise a child past infancy is four years." Her investigation of divorce
patterns led her into wide-ranging research of mating traditions in both the
human and animal worlds, and over the next four years, the research grew into
a book, Anatomy of Love. In that book, she examined the ancient drives that
draw men and women together, weld them into a couple and, perhaps eventually,
tear them apart. "Some readers were alarmed by that book," she says.
"But I was not advocating infidelity, adultery or divorce, or trying to
trivialize them. I was just explaining why they're facts of life."
Some couples, of course, survive the
four-year crisis. What's the cement that holds them together? Is it
friendship, dependency, sexual heat? Most of us assume these are all aspects
of that complicated force called "love." But Fisher's research
indicates that lust, infatuation and long-term attachment are distinct drives.
Sometimes they're even incompatible drives. Lust, for example, is often
celebrated in pop music as just a rougher, friskier version of romantic love.
But Fisher says that's a mistake. "Lust is not love. Lust is driven by
brain chemistry, plain and simple. Lust is the desire for sexual
gratification, no more. But it's a dangerous game, sleeping with someone just
for the sake of sex, because your levels of oxytocin and vasopressin will go
way up, and you'd better be ready for the consequences. These powerful
chemicals produce feelings of attachment, and you can become emotionally
involved with someone who's quite inappropriate."
Romantic love, or infatuation, is
associated with a different barrage of chemicals. Romantic love produces
dopamine, which generates obsessive feelings about the sexual partner. From an
evolutionary point of view, this natural addiction ensures that both parties
will stick together and do the hard slogging if a pregnancy occurs.
Infatuation is also characterized by persistent "intrusive thinking"
about the loved one. "People who are infatuated testify that they're
thinking about their lover at least 90% of the time," she says.
"Dopamine produces feelings of elation and excitement, along with
decreased serotonin, which causes anxious, obsessive thinking. One minute
you're up, the next you're down. It's no wonder that people in love feel so
messed up."
As we ride the train back to New York,
Fisher seems more relaxed than she was this morning. She's relieved that her
first day of class has gone well. "I don't have a combative
temperament," she admits. "And I don't do well when people attack me
in large-group situations. But I've taught myself to be calm, and stick to the
facts, and not take it personally. When I was less experienced, I'd
immediately feel like doing the girl thing, which is to run off and cry."
She explains that it's "the girl
thing" because the male and female brain have dramatically different
physiological responses to emotional stress. When you put a man in an MRI
machine and ask him to think of something sad, a small part of his brain will
light up. Ask a woman the same question and the response will be about eight
times greater. The well-known tendency of men to "stonewall" is
therefore not macho stubbornness, but brain physiology.
"Let's not forget that the human brain
has been evolving for four million years," Fisher says. "For most of
that time, it's been important for men to compartmentalize their feelings. If
a hunter has to cut a gazelle's throat, empathizing with the gazelle is
actually counter-productive."
She says evolution favoured the man who
could ignore discomfort, fear, danger, weariness, pity, etc., and focus on the
task at hand. Hunting was a linear undertaking, with a pass-fail outcome.
Women, on the other hand, evolved as "web thinkers." Everything was
relative to everything else. The successful primordial woman was the one who
could fetch the wood, feed the fire, separate the squabbling children, cook
the meal and nurse the baby all at the same time.
She says we may not still be
hunter-gatherers, but numerous lab experiments have shown women are still much
better at multi-tasking than men. "Because women do not think in linear,
step-by-step fashion as men do, men often regard them as less rational and
less precise. This can cause real problems in the workplace, where women will
discuss all kinds of variables and permutations of an issue. Men tend to
regard this as dithering. Men 'hunt' for the goal, and they don't want to
dwell on the process. But for a woman, sometimes just discussing a problem is
the solution."
Fisher is working on a new book about the
brain chemistry of romantic love, and says the laboratory results are so
remarkable that she can't talk about them.
"I'm sworn to secrecy," she
confides. All she can say is, she's been conducting experiments with
colleagues from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, using volunteers who
claim to be romantically infatuated. The subjects lie inside an MRI machine,
and she monitors changes in their brain activity as they think about their
lovers.
"We know a lot about the brain
chemistry of lust, but we don't know much about infatuation. We know that
lovers are literally intoxicated by romance, but the feeling fades. Why does
it fade? I think it's possible the brain's nerve endings become habituated to
high levels of natural stimulants, or the levels of chemical begin to drop.
"Either way, it takes from 18 months
to three years for the feelings to subside. For some relationships, that's the
beginning of the end. That's where all the sad songs and the poems leave off
-- at the end of love. But speaking as a woman, not a scientist, I don't
regard infatuation as real love. I think that real love requires commitment
and long-term effort. Infatuation is a free ride."
She says couples who survive the death of
infatuation are those who can make the transition into what she calls
attachment. "This is the warm, secure feeling associated with a
comfortable relationship," she says. "As infatuation subsides and
attachment grows, a new group of chemicals takes over. Unlike dopamine, which
makes us all revved up and anxious, these calm us down. When two people are
happily attached, they feel a sense of peace and security. This is the kind of
relationship, I think, that most people are hoping for. I've had both, and
I've found that even the most mundane long-term relationship is more
satisfying than the wildest short-term affair. Long-term relationships allow
for personal autonomy, trust and a real feeling of partnership. The challenge,
of course, is in finding someone to share your life with."
Manhattan has a population of more than
65,000 people per square mile, the highest density in North America. As the
city's mythmakers persistently contend, it's the world's premiere gathering
place for the rich and beautiful, the best and brightest. You'd think it
wouldn't be much trouble finding a mate in such a target-rich environment, but
New York also has a remarkably low population of live-in couples. The average
household has 1.6 occupants -- and that includes many neighbourhoods with
large immigrant families. Most New Yorkers live alone.
In the search for a partner, they go to
such places as Scopa, a fashionable singles bar on East 28th. It's as good a
place as any to try to meet someone, and tonight, Helen Fisher and I are going
on a safari to study the humans. I pick her up at her home, a classy old Upper
East Side condo building just across from Central Park, and we ride downtown
to the singles bar, which on this Thursday night is as crowded as a waterhole
on the Serengeti. The semi-gloom is filled with chatter and loud music.
"Singles bars are designed to
facilitate sexual encounters," Fisher says. "I'm not sure the
designers are conscious of this, but a good singles bar has a direct influence
on the human brain. The brain has three basic parts: the cortex, which is the
higher brain; the limbic brain, which is the seat of emotion; and the
'reptilian core', where a lot of our basic drives come from. A good singles
bar has loud, rhythmic music, which allows you to lean in close, and smell
someone's hair and skin. The loud, hypnotic beat of the music also depresses
rational thinking and gets you down into your lower brain."
It's like a house party, with lots of
milling around. The currency of exchange at a singles bar is personal space.
"The idea is to meet people," she says. "But there are strict
rules about approaching someone. Most people aren't conscious of the rules,
but they instinctively know them anyway." She says women tend to do most
of the roaming around. "That way, they can select who they want to
interact with. A man will talk to any good-looking woman, but women are
fussier. They're looking for a man of confidence, achievement, trustworthiness
-- qualities that may not be immediately obvious."
Fisher says two scientists named Tim Perper
and David Givens spent several hundred hours in cocktail lounges, watching men
and women flirt. Their research confirmed that, most of the time, women make
the initial contact. This is true with other species, such as prairie
chickens. Fisher says that in the springtime, male prairie chickens gather at
a dancing ground, or "lek," where they bust a few moves and wait for
the females to arrive. The females are in charge of selecting partners. The
males dance on their spots, hooting and displaying their feathers, while the
hens circulate, looking them over.
"Humans observe similar rules,"
Fisher says. "The male human has to look both impressive and
non-threatening. If he inflicts his presence on a woman, he'll probably be
regarded as a nuisance. So, often, it's better for him to just stand there.
It's difficult to stand in one place and attract attention, so he'll use
exaggerated gestures. He'll puff out his chest, roll his shoulders, and
generally embellish his movements. Watch that young man over there, for
example. Do you see his exaggerated body language?"
She nods toward a tall, young businessman
who's standing by the bar. He's talking with a couple of buddies and holding a
martini in his hand, which he's mixing with a lot of forearm action, as if
stirring a can of paint. By studying his face, you can see he's keeping an eye
on the buxom blonde who's standing about 10 steps away. Mister Big, as we,
inevitably, name him, is nodding slightly in synch with the music, and
laughing a little louder than necessary. When he lights a cigarette, he does
it with real flourish, using a vehement gesture to shake out the match.
"He's claiming a large physical space
for himself, advertising his self-confidence and status," she says.
"If the blonde woman finds him attractive, she'll signal her interest
with a glance. We have to watch for the glance. The glance is important. It's
the first stage of the pickup."
In the 1960s, a German ethnologist named
Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt travelled the world taking photographs of men and
women flirting with each other. He used a camera lens that shot sideways,
making it seem as though he was taking photographs of heritage buildings or
waterfalls. He examined the many hundreds of photographs back at the Max
Planck Institute of Behavioral Psychology in Munich, and discovered that,
whether the subjects lived in France, Japan, or the Brazilian rain forest,
they adhered to universal facial expressions and gestures -- the woman first
smiling at her admirer, lifting her eyelids in a swift jerky motion like an
expression of surprise, then lowering her eyelids and looking away.
"There are numerous studies demonstrating that these gestures are part of
our innate behaviour," Fisher says. "They evolved over millions of
years as a means of communicating sexual interest."
Five or six years ago, when cellular
telephones were still a prestigious fashion accoutrement, Mister Big might
have tried catching the blonde's eye by off-handedly checking the messages on
a walnut-paneled Nokia. In the early 1990s, a British researcher conducted a
study of "lekking behavior" in singles bars, and determined that
when an attractive woman walked into the bar, the men would grab their
cellphones, make a call or two, or just fondle the phones and hope she
noticed. The amount of cellphone display behaviour was proportional to the
perceived attractiveness of the female. The women carried cellphones, too, but
tended to keep theirs in their purses.
Our view of Mister Big's campaign to catch
the blonde's attention is momentarily obscured by another group, this one
composed of three young people -- a calm, intellectual-looking brunette with a
boyish haircut, pretty blouse and a red leather skirt, and on either side of
her, two young men in plaid shirts and khakis who look like they work on the
creative side. The two men are bobbing to the music and chattering away, but
she is gazing straight ahead. "She's an interesting one," Fisher
remarks. "She appears to be buttoned-down and demure, but the red leather
skirt adds a sexy touch. Watch her toes when the men are talking to her."
When the fellow on her right leans close
and says something, raising his voice to be heard over the music, her toes
twitch together. When the other fellow leans in and speaks to her, her toes
twitch apart. "That's a perfect example of body talk," Fisher says.
"She's unaware that she's doing it, but her toes are saying that she's
interested in the man on the right. When he speaks, she goes slightly
pigeon-toed, in a gesture of awkwardness. You can observe that sort of
behaviour all through the animal world. The female will feign defenselessness
in order to show she's available." As the two men take turns speaking,
her toes go back and forth like dowsing wands. Meanwhile, her face is pensive
and she's staring straight, taking an occasional sip from her beer. A few
minutes ago, an onlooker might have guessed she was bored. But her feet
suggest another explanation. Perhaps she's thinking, I wish this guy would
give us some privacy.
A moment later, we catch a glimpse of
Mister Big, and miraculously, the Blonde has moved over to join him. They're
conversing face to face, laughing and preening. "They're involved in
grooming talk," Fisher says. "Right now, it's not so much a matter
of what they're saying, as how they're saying it. As soon as people open their
mouths, they reveal all kinds of things about themselves -- background,
education, even aspects of character. These two are measuring each other for
compatibility. If they like what they hear, they might move on to the next
stage."
The next stage is initiated when a woman,
with a seemingly casual gesture, touches a man on the arm or shoulder. This is
an indication that she likes what she sees, and if he reciprocates, with a
similar touch, they graduate to what Fisher calls "body synchrony"
-- nodding their heads in time, lifting their drinks in synch, and generally
mirroring each other's behaviour. Fisher says couples that get to the stage of
synchronous movement are usually quite taken with each other, and may move on
to the next stage, the kiss.
In real life, however, it's rarely that
easy. After 15 minutes of conversation, the Blonde courteously withdraws and
returns to her friends. Mister Big looks deflated. During the interview,
something must have gone wrong. Did he tell the wrong joke? Did he mention his
three rambunctious kids? It's hard to know, but the mating dance can go wrong
in many ways, and usually does. It's a long, hazard-strewn path from the
initial glance of interest to the long-term relationship. After joining his
buddies for a while, Mister Big finally puts on his trenchcoat and goes home
alone.
Helen Fisher was married once, when she was
23. The marriage lasted six months. Throughout her life, she has had a series
of "wonderful" long-term relationships, but she still lives alone.
As we ride home in the taxi, she confides that she's seeing an older man right
now. They go to off-Broadway plays, take long walks in the park. He reads
poetry to her, and he's a wonderful lover. But he goes away a lot, on business
trips to Europe, and she worries he's not being faithful. It's frankly a bit
of a mess. "I'm OK with being a girlfriend rather than a wife," she
says, choosing her words carefully. "But I would like to be the only
girlfriend."
In the canyon walls overhead, thousands of
tiny lights glitter in the darkness. Each one hints of lives we'll never lead,
people we'll never know. It feels like a long life, sometimes, but less so
when most of it is behind us. And one person's life is a mere eye-blink when
compared to the long span of human evolution.
"There's a common perception that
human beings are very different now than we were 10 or 20 thousand years ago.
But we're not," she says. "The human brain is no different. The
wiring hasn't changed. It's like a piano. We're playing different music on it,
but it's still the same instrument. Sometimes, people ask me if I'm trying to
demystify romance. I ask them, if you learn more about, say, musical theory,
does that prevent you from being carried away by the beauty of a Chopin
concerto?"
At a traffic light near The Plaza, she
pauses in conversation for a moment and gazes at a happy-looking, well-dressed
couple walking hand-in-hand toward their waiting limousine. Earth to Helen.
She's still the six-year-old, trying to figure out the neighbours.
"The mystery never goes away,"
she finally says. "It just deepens. Look at me. I've devoted my whole
life to this. I'm supposed to be the world expert on love, and I still haven't
learned how to do that -- to fall in love and make it last."
- 2002 SATURDAY
POST
