Their house, surrounded by colonial-style mansions, was a modernist glass box, the heat came up from the floor, the hi fi system rocked, privacy was afforded by an abundance of land on the other side of the glass walls. She went to boarding school and got excellent grades.
Ten years later, people were viewing it as an okay pursuit – for other people.
"Now, people are saying 'it's for me too'," says Fisher, on the phone from New York.
How to find your match Type: The Director Traits: Analytical and logical, straightforward, decisive, tough minded, and focused.
How to find your match Type: The Negotiator Traits: Imaginative, intuitive, empathetic, and emotionally expressive, and have good verbal and social skills.
Broadly speaking, explorers seek to partner with fellow explorers; and builders seek fellow builders.
However, a director will do best with a negotiator and vice versa.
So you gotta find out what you like about the person and focus on it."WHAT'S YOUR TYPE?
Dr Helen Fisher's questionnaire serves to divide people into four personality types: explorers (the fun, adventurous ones), builders (reliable home-makers), directors (the powerful, bossy kind) and negotiators (empathetic communicators).
These four types are an expression of different neurochemistry and the varying role played by dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and oestrogen/oxytocin in our brains. But as a guide to whittling down prospective dates, it seems to appeal to the masses – more than 13 million people worldwide have taken the questionnaire.
In the spring of 2007, 500 couples who read O participated in an online survey I developed to explore how happy different personality combinations are together. More than 70 percent said they would marry the same person again—after an average of 16 years together. But what about those of you who haven't yet found real love?
Do you embrace adventure or would you rather stay home and play Connect Four? Firstly, its creator has cred: New York-based Fisher is not just chief scientific advisor to match.com, but a well-respected academic and the author of five best-sellers on the evolution of sex and love – an area she's been studying intensely since the 70s. The company launched in the 90s when online dating carried a loserish stigma.