ROMANTIC INTERESTand women. For example, it’s been shown that men prefer the smell of a
woman when she’s near ovulation, compared with the low-fertility stage
of her cycle. Similarly, women show a heightened preference for mascu-
line traits when they are at the fertile stage of their cycle, and they also
take greater care over their appearance at this time.
Falling in love
According to the anthropologist Helen Fisher at Rutgers University,
humans have evolved three brain-systems for close relationships: one is
lustful and supports our sexual drive, another is activated when we fall in
love, and the third allows us to develop long-lasting, deep-seated attach-
ments – sometimes referred to as companionate love. Fisher and her
colleagues have scanned the brains of people who are in love and found
that the state appears more akin to an obsessive drive than an emotion.
When these lovers viewed a photograph of their partner, their brains
responded as if they’d just enjoyed a drug-fuelled high. Dopamine-rich
reward areas such as the ventral tegmental area in the limbic system (see
p.39) lit up like a Christmas tree.
The evolutionary purpose of our sexual drive is obvious – it moti-
vates us to mate and therefore reproduce. Fisher believes that the act of
falling in love allows us to zoom in on one partner, rather than endlessly
It seems that indicators of high male status, such as a flashy car, really do have an
impact on women.