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Helen Fisher was an “Explorer,” according to a personality questionnaire she created for those seeking love. She had designed the test to measure the degree to which we express four broad styles of thinking and behaving. Fisher prominently exhibited the traits of the Explorer: novelty-seeking, risk-taking, creative, spontaneous, enthusiastic, and independent.
Of course, anyone who knew the biological anthropologist and expert on love did not need a questionnaire to tell them this. Five minutes walking with Fisher on the streets of New York City was usually enough to convey that same information. Whether rushing to catch a new play or dashing to meet up with friends, she would find a way to cut a straight path to her destination, regardless of what road signs or local traffic codes had to say about it.
Fisher died on August 17, at the age of 79, at the home of her husband John Tierney in New York. The cause of death was cancer, Tierney told Nautilus.
That the home belonged to Tierney, and not Fisher and Tierney, was one of the many ways in which Fisher applied the results of her scientific work to the manner in which she lived. When she finally agreed to get married at age 75, she did so on the condition that she would not officially move in with her husband-to-be, who lives in a quiet corner of the Bronx several miles from the main bustle of Manhattan.
A life devoted to studying how our patterns of pair-bonding correlate with the odds and ends of our individual personalities had taught Fisher most everything she needed to know about what might make her happy. Autonomous weeknights out on the town with her friends would be something an Explorer like her would have trouble giving up, even in exchange for what she termed “life’s greatest prize”: a long-term romantic partner.
One peer reviewer tried to knock Fisher off of researching love. “You can’t study this, it’s part of the supernatural.”
Fisher wrote several popular-science books which packaged the wisdom gleaned from her research into guidance for the wider romantic world. She was one of those lucky academics whose work intersected directly with topics that everyday individuals find immensely interesting and applicable to their daily lives. This was perhaps what she found most fulfilling about her job. What was the point of such research if it wasn’t helping the common love-sick man or woman?
Books such as Anatomy of Love (1992), Why We Love (2004), and Why Him? Why Her? (2009) proved to be hits with a public eager to understand the rhyme and reason for their most intense feelings. Never the kind of stuffy academic who was liable to take the romance out of romance, Fisher’s writings were filled with as much poetry and storytelling as they were hard data. Why We Love opens with a set of lines from Walt Whitman in which he declares that a strange overwhelming passion has possessed him. Fisher knew how to interpret the language of love.
In 2015, Fisher wrote a provocative article for Nautilus, “Casual Sex May Be Improving America’s Marriages.” In subsequent interviews with Nautilus, her informative answers were always candid and punctuated with wit. Didn’t casual sex come with risks? “Yes,” she responded, “you are always taking a chance when you have casual sex—not just getting pregnant or getting infectious diseases, or losing your self-respect, or having your reputation in some way jeopardized, but you can fall madly in love with the wrong person.”
I first met Fisher two years ago at a coffee shop near her home in the heart of Manhattan. I was interested in representing some of her ideas on film. She was as well. Within 10 minutes of arriving, she had diagnosed me as an Explorer, just like her.
An Explorer is one of the four personality types she identified in her research. Each is associated with one of four major neurochemicals or hormones. She theorized that the extent to which we express these four personality styles can tell us something not only about who we are, but perhaps also who we are meant to love. Explorers (dopamine) and Builders (serotonin) tend to get along best with each other, while Directors (testosterone) and Negotiators (estrogen) are more attracted to their opposites. This might explain why she and I hit it off and quickly became friends. Then again, it’s difficult to imagine Fisher not getting along with anyone.
“I fell in love too much,” she told me. “I fell in love every time I went around the corner.” Fisher’s personal life was chock-full of romantic entanglements, deep attachments, and steamy stories of her own. But despite decades spent learning about the biological foundations of long-term partnership, for her, the ritual of marriage never felt like the right move. “Intellectually, I understood all of this,” she told me. “But emotionally, I didn’t profoundly understand it. I had no intention of marrying, ever. Until I met my husband.”
When Fisher entered academia in the late 1960s, behaviorism was the dominant school of thought in psychology and related disciplines. Having grown up alongside a twin sister with whom she shared most traits, Fisher believed that nature was not getting its fair due in the perennial nature vs. nurture debate. She recalled having to write answers to questions on her exams which she knew in her heart to be untrue, answers about how the mind is a blank slate that the world fills with information over time.
In one of her first academic papers as a young researcher, Fisher proposed that there are three separate brain systems involved in human reproduction: sex drive, romantic love, and long-term attachment. In Fisher’s own telling, there was one peer reviewer who tried to knock her off this course: “You can’t study this, it’s part of the supernatural.”
Over the course of her academic career, Fisher was given the opportunity to bear out her initial theories on love, doing so through a series of studies which allowed her and her colleagues to place everyday humans going through the trials and tribulations of love inside an fMRI brain scanner.
The first of these was conducted with a group of individuals who were newly and madly in love. Her second study was performed with a group of those who had recently experienced some kind of romantic rejection. Their brains looked like those who struggled with addictions from cocaine or gambling. “Love is an addiction—a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly,” she said in Nautilus.
Fisher’s third set of test subjects were those who had been in stable romantic partnerships for multiple decades and claimed that they were still in love with their spouses. This group showed much of the same intense brain activity as the first crop Fisher had studied; but they also showed tranquility in brain regions associated with stress and anxiety.
This third fMRI study proved particularly meaningful to Fisher—she had not only identified a problem, but also a solution to that problem. When asked about the secret to their stability, the participants in this study mentioned strategies they used to avoid fixating on their partners’ negative qualities and embrace novelty in their relationships. Long-term happiness is possible, but it must be cultivated and practiced.
In 2005, executives at the dating platform Match.com approached Fisher. They were eager to know if there were any biological reasons as to why someone may fall in love with one person rather than another. Fisher admitted that she had no clue. The question had yet to be seriously studied, but she was determined to change that. Fisher’s investigation led to the Fisher Temperament Inventory, the name for the four personality types she had identified. Over 40 million people have taken the test, which for years Match.com displayed prominently on a spinoff dating site it created in conjunction with Fisher, Chemistry.com.
Fisher told me that falling in love with Tierney, a former New York Times writer, was like tasting a cake that you’ve spent your whole life baking for others. With him, “I finally understood what most teenage girls already know,” she said. I asked her if she could articulate what was different about him. She discussed how they were both high on the dopamine-Explorer scale, but also contrastingly exhibited traits associated with the estrogen and testosterone systems. But then she paused, thought a bit more, and laughed: “I don’t know. I just love him.” She died by his side. 
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