Dr. Helen Fisher: Well, first of all, I think the most interesting thing is how interested we all are in them. We're interested in them for many reasons, but the obvious thing is they're real people, they're people like us. We can identify with them and say "I would have done it that way" or "I wouldn't have done it that way." I mean, for millions of years we've learned by watching others, not by reading books. These reality shows have tremendous impact on the human brain simply because we can identify with these people; you know, they're sort of like us.

These days we don't have local communities very much… in New York we really don't know our neighbors. As a result you and I can't talk about my neighbor next door because you don't live here and you don't know my neighbor. We both can talk a bout someone on a reality show because we both know those people. SO I think television has been sort of like the global campfire - we sit around it and get to know these personalities… I'm not surprised these reality shows are popular and people are drawn to them.

A: Well, what aspects of these shows, especially dating shows like The Bachelor, are real? Do you think these connections that they make are long lasting?

HF: What I've read in some material is that most of these relationships where man meets woman - they only stay together for a couple of months.

A: Why do you think that is?

HF: It's interesting… I study the brain's circuitry of romantic love. I and my colleagues have put 32 people who are madly in love into a functional MRI brain scanner and found some of the brain's circuitry of romantic love and it can be triggered instantly, or it can be triggered years down the road. What my belief is that if you pick the right person, you can not only trigger that brain chemistry really very rapidly, but keep it percolating for many, many years.

It's my guess that people who are picking these women on the television show and picking the man are not asking them the right kind of questions before they put them on the show to know enough about them to help in the matching process. Because an awful lot of people, and I'm guessing a lot of television producers, don't know why you fall in love with one person over another. And the more you study that, which is what I've done for Chemistry.com, you understand the subtleties of why you fall in love with somebody rather than another. If you don't understand any of that… you're not likely to get yourself a lot of winners on a TV show that's shot for two weeks.

A: Moving on to Chemistry.com, can you explain the services and online in general?

HF: Let me just start out by talking a little about online dating. You know, I think online dating now has become totally mainstream… It's very common now, and for very obvious reasons. You know one of the great 20th and 21st century trends is that we're marrying later, and women are moving are moving into the job market and getting into careers before they marry. And so they are not marrying in high school when there are lots of boys around, and they're not marrying in college. In fact, the median age of marriage for women in America today is age 26… So by the time they are really looking for a spouse they have sort of met already everybody that their girlfriends and male friends know and they don't want to jeopardize their relationships at work.

They are tired of going to bars. And this is becoming a very natural and economical and easy way to enlarge the circle of friends and find from that pool of people someone to marry. I'm not at all surprised that internet dating has sort of come of age and it will continue to be stable, I think for a long time, as people marry later, as middle aged people remarry, as people who are older marry and remarry… I think that online dating in general offers you an entire community that you wouldn't have found otherwise. And also, as an anthropologist we tend to think the natural way to meet people is at a party or in a bar, but in fact, when you walk into a bar you don't know anything about this person. For millions of years in the grasslands of Africa, you may not know that cute boy at the watering hole, but his mother knows your grandfather or father or brother or sister or somebody. People were connected in some sort of way. And so in many respects as you get to know these people through the online dating service, it's oddly enough a more natural way to meet somebody, to get to know some of their values first and their religious background and some of their goals and their interests.

[It is also] a more efficient and effective way to meet someone in the world that we live in today. So I'm not surprised that there are a lot of dating services and that they're working for people. Basically Chemistry.com… it's my child and I'm fascinated with it and believe in it strongly. Match.com, the parent company, came to me two and a half years ago and asked me to help them create a dating site for long-term, serious relationships. And one of the main things we say is "come as you are." It's not a site that wants to pigeonhole you and push you into marriage necessarily. Most people in America today are looking to be in a committed marriage, either in marriage or out of marriage. That's what we try to offer. The theory behind it is as follows: As I said, I'm hoping to trigger the brain chemistry for romantic love in people. So not only can they feel that chemistry, they can sustain that feeling of romantic love; that is possible to do. So I did a lot of studying… why did you fall in love with one person and not another - and as it turns out, psychologists don't really know.

They do know you tend to fall in love with somebody who is from the same socioeconomic background, ethnic background, same general level of education these day, same level of intelligence, same general level of good looks, same general religious values and sense of humor. That's really all they know. They know something about exchange theory, you know, that the rich man will gravitate toward the beautiful woman and they will exchange those kinds of resources, and in the same way the rest of us will gravitate to someone to whom we can give what they need and who we can receive what they can give us what we need. But that's about all we know. But they know when they give long questionnaires to people who have been married for many, many years, they don't find any pattern of personality connection at all. Some extroverts marry other extroverts, some marry introverts. One trait that is important to one couple has no level of importance in another. There's no pattern. So I began to think that maybe there's more to this than people have been looking at.

Maybe we're also drawn to people who are biologically different than us. For millions of years it would have been adaptive to have a baby with someone who is somewhat genetically different so we could create more genetic variety in our young and also come to the job with a greater array of parenting skills. That's the core idea - that we are attracted to someone who is similar in terms of background, education, religion, looks, etc., but someone different in terms of biology. So I did a lot of reading in genetics, I've got my Ph.D. in that, so I've come to think that people fall into four very broad, basic genetic categories. One are people who are high on dopamine - and I call them the explorer.

The next group is what I call the builder, who spends a lot of activity in the serotonin system, and then the third are people who spend a lot of time in the estrogen system - that can be men as well as women - and I call those the negotiators, and the fourth I call the directors - people who spend a lot of activity in the testosterone system. For example, there is very good genetic data now that people who express a lot of activity in the dopamine system, the explorer, tend to be risk-taking, novelty-seeking, spontaneous, curious and creative - - those five basic traits. People who express certain activities in the serotonin system, the builders, tend to be calm, social, popular, they have more close system, they're good at networking, they're very good at managing people, they're very conscientious and loyal, they tend to be traditional, conventional - and some of them get particular genetics for being quite religious.

Let's see, the negotiator type, those who spend a lot of activity in the estrogen system, they tend to be compassionate and nurturing, very good at reading people, they have very good verbal skills, they're imaginative - that's an outstanding trait of the negotiator, they tend to be intuitive, they tend to be idealistic. And the last, the high-testosterone type, the director, are decisive, they are very good at rule-based systems, everything from math and computers to building bridges and the basic sciences or carpenters and mechanics. They tend to be, let's see, what are some of the other traits of the director. Oh, they can be very musical as music has a spatial note to it.

So anyway, what we do on Chemistry.com is we ask you all of the basic questions that you have to ask. I mean, you have to ask about their religion and what age group they're looking for, what ethnic group they're looking for, what their interests are - I mean, that everybody matches by. That's standard and necessary… What the Chemistry.com test is - ok, you ask all the general questions, but I also ask 56 questions to try to figure to what extent you are an explore, a director, a negotiator or a builder… I am, for example, largely an explorer and a negotiator. I am very secondarily a director and really not at all a builder. And then we watch who is attracted to who - because we ask them to come back to the site after they've met and tell us if they're attracted to people. This way we can match them better and I can also understand more about mate choice. And as it turns out, my hypothesis does hold up, that people are attracted to those who are not like themselves biologically.

A: Well, one of the things I was wondering is what the difference is between Chemistry.com and other sites, like Match.com and E-harmony.

HF: Okay, well Match.com is very different because you do all the shopping yourself. I've never been on it, but what I know about it is that you pay your money and you sign up and you re just given a huge array of profiles and faces, and you just choose the ones you are interested in and contact those people.

Chemsitry.com, you go on the site, you take my questionnaire, along with other questions, and we send you something with what we know about your personality, so it's a learning experience as well as a shopping trip. Then we provide you with, I think, five matches a day, and you need to respond some way or another to those five matches before you get five more. So this way it preserves your anonymity. Your face isn't out there, you don't do the shopping yourself, you're provided with a group of people whom we think could work with you, and you're obliged to take a look at them before you get some more. So another part of this is unlike Match.com where you go immediately into e-mailing and meeting somebody.

We do something - it's called a 1,2,3 meet process - once you say "that's an interesting man, I'd like to meet him," and he agrees because he's received your profile also, then you go through a series of relationship essentials - what's really important to you, and you tell this person some of the things that are really important to you and he tells you what's really important to you, so you get to know something about them. Then you correspond through the Chemistry.com site and you can ask them two questions and they ask you two questions - these are essay questions - and then you meet. We do try to get you to meet as soon as possible because it's really not love at first e-mail, it is love at first sight.

The point is to walk into that first coffee date of 20 minutes -don't even recommend more than that - knowing some really fundamental things about a human being, so that you have something to talk about and that some of these basic things have been covered. So that's the basic difference between Chemistry and Match. Now, I don't really know that much about Eharmony and I did take their test and I do know something about psychological profiling. And I don't know… they didn't get me right, I'll tell you that. It took me two and a half hours to fill out that questionnaire, and when it was all said and done they made me into an extrovert and that would have killed any relationship that I would have met through them.

A: So would you say the personality assessment and matching system that you do [at Chemistry.com] weeds out any relationships that are solely based on physical attraction or someone's photos?

HF: I think that romantic love is something like a funnel and the very first thing you do is look at a person. On a date, dating sites, in a bar, in a restaurant, in a gym, when a girlfriend introduces you - the visual signals people give out are very important, and when you walk into a party and see someone, the very first thing you do is you look at someone and realize if they are in or out. And then you go on to find out what their values are, what their background is, what their education is, and once again you weed them in or out. And then you go on to find out what their interests are and quirks of their personality that appeal to you, what they can provide for you - so I would never want to say that looks is not part of the experience. It's been for millions of years and it will continue to be for millions of years.

Looks is part of the mating process and I don't think it would be wise for anyone to deny that, since it would not be factually correct. But what we try to do is provide you with a lot of other things about this person as well, so you could look at someone and know they are extremely good looking, but they don't come from a religious background you could possible cope with, so that's that for you. And so we try to give you enough data about this person and vice versa you can make your first impression on a broader base of qualities than just good looks. And by the way, people do tend to fall in love and marry people who are of their same general level of good looks.

A: So what do you have lined up to talk about in your blog next?

HF: Well, tomorrow I will read what everybody else said. We're now talking about adultery. The one for today, I wrote it this morning very early… I talk about the monogamy gene and I think I will respond to other peoples' comments about adultery. I've studied adultery in 42 cultures, I know some of the biology of it now, I know people's opinions about it around the world and I would guess that some of my colleagues are going to deliver some of the standard American misunderstandings. And I will try on Friday to bring some science to a very hot discussion that is often delivered with very few facts. And I think one thing I would really like to say on Friday is Americans tend to think men are much more adulterous than women.

All of our data shows that - bad to the 1920s data shows about one-third of men will be adulterous at some point in their lives and that women about 15 to 20 percent will be adulterous. Well, none of us can figure out who all these men are having sex with. I mean, simple math - if a lot of men are being adulterous, who are they being adulterous with? There is one study in England that concluded that women are lying and men are bragging; that women are just as adulterous as men. And I've often thought that was the case myself, but I've never been able to prove it, but two weeks ago I read an academic article and there was this one little figure in it that said when you remove from the group of people who are adulterous those men who have had more than 20 extramarital relationships in a year - when you remove those highly adulterous men and look at the general population, women are just as adulterous as men.

So on Friday I might try to talk a bout female sexuality and our misunderstanding of it, and how as women become more and more powerful in the job market, we are seeing women not only become more economically powerful, but also become more sexually powerful too and more socially powerful too and what we're really seeing is a huge motion forward toward becoming the women we are a million years ago. A million years ago, up until the farming tradition about ten thousand years ago, women commuted to work to gather their vegetables, they came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meals, the double income family was the rule, and women were just as sexual and social and economically powerful as men.

And I think I'm going to say it over and over in my blog because I think we have a vast misunderstanding of women, and I think we have a vast misunderstanding of men. You know men are more dependent on their marriages than women are. Teenage boys are more dependent on their girlfriends - three out of four people who kill themselves when a relationship is over is a man, not a woman. I will keep hammering away at the myths that Americans have about men and women and see if we can't set the record straight.