Welcome to my Blog!

Hello fellow bloggers.  This is my first post.  So I thought I would tell you why I titled my blog “The Nature of Love.” 

I am an identical twin.  And one day when I was about six, my mother commanded me and my twin sister, Lorna, to assemble in the foyer of our home in Connecticut to greet one of her friends.  The woman soon asked us all the standard questions.  “Do you two have extra-sensory perception about one another?”  “Do you like the same foods?” etc.  But then she leaned in to me and almost whispered, “Do you two think alike.”  I felt instant disdain for her.  How was I supposed to know how Lorna thought? 

But that question remained with me.  And as I studied for my PhD in anthropology, I became more and more fixated on this issue: our common human nature—how and why and in what ways do you and I and everyone else on this gorgeous blue/green planet think and act alike.  My teenage and womanhood adventures with sex and romance had their impact on my curiosity as well. 

So since graduate school I have focused on our human mating habits, why and how we fall in love, who we choose, why we marry, why some of us are adulterous, why we divorce and remarry, how men and women are different (and similar), future sex and how we can sustain love in a long relationship.  I have approached these topics from many angles, from studying divorce in 62 societies, to examining the sex lives of chimpanzees and other relatives, to scanning the brains of people who are crazily in love, and most recently, to exploring attraction among the members of the new Internet dating/relationship service, Chemistry.com.

Darwin regarded humanity as one of many “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.”   And as I have eavesdropped on nature’s plans, I have come to know more about our ancient human spirit. 

This blog is my next step in this lifelong investigation of brain sex.  But this time I hope you will help.  Write to me.  Together let’s “push off,” as Tennyson wrote, and “follow knowledge like a sinking star.”  Perhaps as we share our experiences and ideas we will take another step toward understanding human nature, then use this knowledge to improve our sexual, romantic and family lives.

Semper ad astra (always to the stars)  Helen Fisher.