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    Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
    Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
    Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
    Audiobook9 hours

    Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love

    Written by Helen Fisher

    Narrated by Marie Hoffman

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    A groundbreaking exploration of our most complex and mysterious emotion.

    Elation, mood swings, sleeplessness, and obsession-these are the tell-tale signs of someone in the throes of romantic passion. In this revealing new book, renowned anthropologist Helen Fisher explains why this experience-which cuts across time, geography, and gender-is a force as powerful as the need for food or sleep.

    Why We Love begins by presenting the results of a scientific study in which Fisher scanned the brains of people who had just fallen madly in love. She proves, at last, what researchers had only suspected: when you fall in love, primordial areas of the brain "light up" with increased blood flow, creating romantic passion. Fisher uses this new research to show exactly what you experience when you fall in love, why you choose one person rather than another, and how romantic love affects your sex drive and your feelings of attachment to a partner. She argues that all animals feel romantic attraction, that love at first sight comes out of nature, and that human romance evolved for crucial reasons of survival. Lastly, she offers concrete suggestions on how to control this ancient passion, and she optimistically explores the future of romantic love in our chaotic modern world.

    Provocative, enlightening, and persuasive, Why We Love offers radical new answers to the age-old question of what love is and thus provides invaluable new insights into keeping love alive.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 4, 2018
    ISBN9781977336279
    Author

    Helen Fisher

    Helen Fisher spent her early life in America but grew up mainly in Suffolk, England, where she now lives with her two children. She studied psychology at the University of Westminster and ergonomics at University College London and worked as a senior evaluator in research at the Royal National Institute of Blind People. She is the author of Faye, Faraway.

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    Reviews for Why We Love

    4/5

    58 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Beautifully written and easy to listen to book on the chemistry of love with plenty of poetic references. The narrator was pleasant and relaxing to listen to.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant analysis and poetic narrative of the most essential and mind altering emotion, love.
    • 4/5
      Intriguing book with a breakdown of multiple surveys, brain chemistry, and anatomy. Loses one star based on the promotion of ignoring others.The book states you should ignore another to remove them from your thoughts. Yet also states that memories of a lover may never leave you but is reduced in time. As explained in the book, one of the main questions one may ask after a relationship has ended is what they did wrong. By endorsing others to ignore, the rejected may never receive that answer and can not move on.The reason anger develops is from being ignored. Do not promote this. By talking things through you can identify differences, and reasons for relationship failure to easily move on.I've had no interest in reigniting past relationships but human nature, the selfishness of others, and the common practice of ignoring instead of treating those with respect as people has driven me to reconsider life.I appreciate the honesty in this book and the poor outlook of long term relationships due to human evolution has further decreased my view on mankind.
    • 3/5
      This book got off on the wrong foot with me right from the beginning. I found the first two chapters -- on the "symptoms" of romantic love as exemplified by literature and poetry and on behaviors that look like love in animals -- to be shallow, overgeneralized, and far too willing to present anecdotes as if they were evidence. Things got a bit better in chapter three, where Fisher started talking about hormones, brain chemistry, and her own fMRI experiments on people in love. But most of the rest of the book was oversimplified and overly speculative. Particularly problematic were the discussions of gender differences; this is an interesting and valid topic, but more often than not it's impossible to tell whether Fisher's assertions on the subject are based on science or stereotype. And to top it all off, she throws in a chapter full of insipid self-help advice at the end.All in all, a fairly disappointing take on what ought to be a fascinating subject.