Interview Transcript with Helen Fisher

And I am not at all surprised. Between 85-90% of Americans will marry by middle age. And those who don’t actually marry generally fall in love and form an attachment to someone anyway. The drive to love and form a pairbond is ancient. I think this drive evolved at least 4 million years ago or earlier–whenever our forebears began to descend from the fast disappearing trees of Africa to start a new life on the ground.

As a result we have primordial brain systems for the sex drive (which gets us out looking for a range of partners), romantic love (which enables us to focus on one individual), and attachment (which enables us to form a pairbond with this individual and remain attached at least long enough to rear a single child through infancy as a team).

Pairbonding is human. And inspite of our many contemporary variations on this theme, the vast majority of people in almost every society in the world eventually settle with one partner (or a series of consecutive partners) during their life.

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