Salon.com chats with Ian Kerner and Helen Fisher
By Rebecca Traister
Aug. 20, 2007 | You've probably seen Chemistry.com's magazine and television ads, the ones about people who have been rejected by online matchmaking sites like eHarmony for being gay, depressed, or generally unmarriageable for murkier reasons. In one ad, a young man stares hopefully at heterosexual porn, only to conclude, "Nope, still gay." At Chemistry, spokespeople like to crow, you can "come as you are" (as long as you come as someone who is over 18).
But the aggressive ad campaign isn't the only thing that sets Chemistry apart in the flourishing business of finding love online. The company is an offshoot of Internet meet-market Match.com, which has been around since 1994. In 2004, Match approached Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher, whose work on sex, love and the brain had made her a preeminent authority on human mating, about designing a site where, like at the successful but restricted eHarmony, members would not shop blindly for dates, but would be matched with each other based on personality profiles and compatibility.
Fisher developed a theory that human beings fall into four categories: negotiators, directors, explorers and builders, and that your type helps determine who you fall for. According to Fisher's formulation, negotiators are powered by estrogen, intuitive, socially skilled, imaginative and sympathetic; testosterone-fueled directors are focused, ambitious, daring and independent; explorers are dopamine-driven risk-takers who are spontaneous, curious and adaptable; and solid builders have a lot of serotonin that makes them calm, sociable, conscientious and domestically oriented.
Fisher designed, and continues to tweak, the site's lengthy personality questionnaire, on which customers discover what their driving chemical and personality type is by answering wacky questions about the length of their fingers, how they react to public displays of affection, and what kind of doodles they do in work meetings. (While reporting this story, I took Chemistry's personality test, and received a stream of matching profiles. My matches did not seem to differ significantly from those with whom I was set up several years ago while reporting a story on eHarmony, except that my Chemistry matches tended to be geographically closer to New York City. But overall, the profiles I browsed were of guys I was not moved to meet in person. Then again, I am not the world's most enthusiastic dater.)
Fisher, a lifelong academic, seems the unlikeliest online dating entrepreneur, and in the 18 months since Chemistry's launch, has lent the enterprise a kind of punk-wonky sensibility. On Chemistry's Great Mate Debate blog, she trades messages with Match spokesman and sex therapist Ian Kerner, columnist Dan Savage and modesty enthusiast Wendy Shalit. Her entries are sprinkled with references to everything from Chaucer to an East African chimp named Flo, who gets a lot of play despite her bulbous nose and bald pate because she's so confident and happy.
Fisher and Kerner recently stopped by the Salon offices to chat about estrogen, testosterone, the impact of antidepressants on our love lives, the mating habits of elephants, trading sex for food, and what on earth the length of our fingers tells us about our personalities.
Helen, how did you come to be involved with a dating site?
Helen Fisher: When Match invited me in December 2004 to create a new dating site for them, I said, "Are you sure you've got the right person? Because I'm an anthropologist. I've spent my life studying why we're all alike, not why we're different." But I came up with a theory, supplementing what we already knew, for why you fall in love with one person and not another. I wanted to add the Darwinian, biological, evolutionary, chemical component. So I came up with a theory [that there are four personality types] and I designed the core questions on the site. I've studied the first 28,128 people and who they chose to go out with. Did you do the questionnaire?
I did.
HF: What did you end up being?
Oh, I already knew what I'd be. I'm a Negotiator/Explorer.
HF: Oh! I'm the Explorer/Negotiator. But frankly I think I cheat, so I could be a Negotiator/Explorer. Those two could be very interchangeable. Plato came up with these four types, and then Aristotle, and Galen in the second century A.D., and then Carl Jung. We've known about these types for hundreds of years. What I've done is add that biological component.
Did Plato divide them into four categories as well?
HF: Yes. What I call the Explorer he calls the Artisan, what I call the Builder he calls the Guardian, what I call the Negotiator he calls the Idealist, and what I call the Director he calls the Rational. Frankly, I would not have made up new names if I had known the originals. You can't beat Plato.
Ian Kerner: I have a question for Helen, because I was recently at the AASECT [American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists] conference and people were saying that women's sexual response has a lot more to do with emotional attunement at the outset, as opposed to desire, and that initial desire is going to have a broader emotional context for a woman than for men.
HF: Generally women take a broader view of everything, for good Darwinian reasons: Women were the ones that were going to spend nine months having the baby, and most of the time for the first four years raising the baby! So women think of the contingency: "Well, he doesn't have a job. What about 10 years from now?" Women do more long-term thinking.
Does that play into initial attraction, not just a later decision about whether to stay in a relationship?
HF: I don't think we understand much about female sexuality yet. We way underplay men's desire for love and women's desire for just plain sex. Women can have quite a high sex drive. But there's a lot of data that they're a lot less interested in the one-night stand, for good Darwinian reasons.
IK: I was looking at studies of male and female college students who were having a lot of casual sex; the women ended up being much more ambivalent, much more regretful, much more depressed.
HF: I just don't think that casual sex is very casual. Any kind of sexual activity drives up dopamine in the brain, and that can bring you closer to a threshold of romantic love. I also think both sexes often use casual sex trying to trigger these other brain systems. They may tell you it's casual sex, but they're hoping that he likes me or she likes me.
