Helen Fisher - Why Him? Why Her?: Finding Real Love By Understanding Your Personality Type

Also by Helen Fisher

Why We Love

The First Sex

Anatomy of Love

The Sex Contract

Why

Him?

Why

Her?

Finding Real Love by

Understanding Your Personality Type

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Henry Holt and Company, LLC
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Henry Holt and are registered trademarks of
Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright 2009 by Helen Fisher
All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fisher, Helen E.

Why him? why her?: finding real love by understanding your personality
type/Helen Fisher.1st ed.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.).

ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8292-0

ISBN-10: 0-8050-8292-1

1. PersonalityPhysiological aspects. 2. Interpersonal relations
Psychological aspects. 3. Mate selectionPsychological aspects. I. Title.

BF698.9.B5F57 2009

155.264dc22

2008033877

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First Edition 2009

Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

eISBN 9781429982672

For Ray, Lorna, Audrey and the rest of my family

Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours
For one lone soul, another lonely soul
Each chasing each through all the weary hours,
And meeting strangely at one sudden goal;
Then blend theylike green leaves with golden flowers,
Into one beautiful and perfect whole
And lifes long night is ended, and the way
Lies open onward to eternal day.

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD

Why

Him?

Why

Her?

CHAPTER 1

I am large, I contain multitudes.

WALT WHITMAN

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter to the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there is no more loneliness for you. But there is one life before you. Go now to your dwelling place, to eat to your days together. And may your days be very long upon this earth.

The Apache Indians of the American Southwest probably recited this wedding poem for centuries before I heard it in La Jolla, California, in 2006. It was an early June evening, the sky still pink and blue, the sea smells wafting through the windows as I sat in a folding chair on the second story of a fancy Italian restaurant. An older gentleman was conducting a short wedding ceremony, one mixed with rituals from the Christian, Jewish and Apache traditions. And before me glowed the two celebrants, Patrick and Suzanneone of the first couples to marry after meeting on the Internet dating site I had helped to design, Chemistry.com.

Patrick had been a journalist in New Orleans until he lost his job, his home and all of his belongings to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. West he went, taking up residence with relatives in Los Angeles in February 2006. Days after settling in, he joined Chemistry.com and received his first recommended match: Suzanne, a lawyer living in La Jolla. That first night they talked for three hours on the phone. They met the following weekend and fell passionately in love.

So on a balmy evening during an April vacation together in Paris, Patrick took her to the top of the Eiffel Tower and proposed. The dazzled young woman grinned her yes. So here I sat at a fancy Italian restaurant in La Jolla, surrounded by some fifty of their friends and relatives on this festive wedding eve.

I like being around people who are in love. They have a contagious energy. This force was palpable in the groom, the first to arrive for the nuptials. He burst into the room, filling it with his vivacious charm. Although we had never met, he greeted me warmly. We instantly struck up a conversation about the evolution of the English language, his experience as a journalist in some dangerous parts of Asia and some of my past work on the brain chemistry of romantic love.

Others soon arrived, and we took our places on the folding chairs facing a small bar strewn with lilies. Last came the bride. I was stunned when saw hera tiny, perfectly formed, porcelain-like doll, with huge blue eyes and long auburn hair in soft ringlets wreathed in forget-me-nots. Like the mythological Helen, Suzanne had a face that could launch a thousand ships. And her vigor matched his. She was enraptured by her prince, gazing at him and grinning with uncontainable effervescence as she said I do.

Someone played a flute. The Apache poem was read. And as the bride and groom walked down the makeshift aisle between our seats, we blew bubbles at them from the little bottles left on our chairs. Then came the feast: platters of Cavatelli Marinara, Antipasto Rustico, mussels, sausages, Chicken Fra Diavoloa host of Italian favorites appeared at every table amid the balloons, confetti and champagne as the disc jockey blasted out old tunes and we wildly danced. Patrick and Suzanne swirled among us, radiating joy.

Love hopes all things, the Bible says. I hoped for Patrick and Suzanne. But I also had a reason to be optimistic about their marriage. I knew some things about their personalities because both had taken my personality test, a series of questions I had devised to establish some basic things about a persons biological temperament. Both had told me their test results. And from these data, I was confident that Patricks particular chemical profile would complement Suzannes, creating a biological and psychological cocktail that would keep them captivated with each other for years.

We have many inborn tendencies. Indeed, scientists now believe some 50 percent of the variations in human personality are associated with genetic factors. We inherit much of the fabric of our mind.

But what is personality?

Psychologists define it as that distinct cluster of thoughts and feelings that color all of a persons actions.

Your personality is more than just your biology, of course. Personality is composed of two fundamentally different types of traits: those of character and those of temperament.

Your character traits stem from your experiences. Your childhood games; your parents interests and values; how people in your community express love and hate; what relatives and friends regard as polite, dangerous or exciting; how they worship; what they sing; when they laugh; what they do to make a living and relaxthese and innumerable other cultural forces combine to build your unique set of character traits.

The balance of your personality is your temperament, all of the biologically based tendencies you have inherited, traits that emerge in early childhood to produce your consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving. As the Spanish philosopher Jos Ortega y Gasset put it, I am, plus my circumstances. Temperament is the I am, the foundation of who you are. Curiosity; creativity; novelty seeking; compassion; cautiousness; competitiveness: to some degree, you inherit these and many other aspects of your disposition.