Why Him? Why Her?

Why Him? Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type sets out Helen Fisher's account of why people are drawn to some partners and not to others. Her proposal is that each of us expresses one of four broad temperament types, which she names the Explorer, the Builder, the Director and the Negotiator, and that each is governed by a different chemical system in the brain, associated in turn with dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and oestrogen. From those systems she derives clusters of traits, the Explorer restless and drawn to novelty, the Builder orderly and loyal, the Director analytical and direct, the Negotiator imaginative and attuned to others. Fisher reports the questionnaire she built to identify the types and the very large numbers of people across many countries who completed it, and argues from the resulting patterns that we are attracted to partners who in some respects mirror our own type and in others complement it. She then works through which pairings tend to go smoothly and which are more demanding, and offers the framework as a practical aid to finding and keeping a partner.

Written from the publisher description, Henry Holt.

What this vault takes from it

Reliability

Not audited here. 1 note in this vault draws on it.

People

• Helen Fisher