Dr. Helen Fisher Taught Me What Hardline Christianity Gets Fundamentally Wrong About The Nature Of Love And Connection
Learning about the science of sex, love and attraction was precisely the kind of dangerous "liberal" sacrilege I'd been warned about.
Andrea Miller The moment I read the back cover of Dr. Helen Fisher's "The Anatomy of Love" in the student bookstore at Michigan State University, I knew I was in trouble. It was required reading for my freshman social sciences class, but the subject matter felt not just shocking but dangerous.
The SCIENCE of sex, love and attraction? This was precisely the kind of dangerous "liberal" sacrilege I'd been warned about before leaving my hardline Christian home. Love and sex were gifts from God, for certain ends, to be experienced exclusively under narrowly defined circumstances — the veering away from which I was assured would bring utter and eternal ruin.
As a good evangelical Christian kid, and more importantly a closeted gay one terrified and desperate for redemption, I knew what I must do about this book: call the professor who assigned it and say I needed a religious exemption from the material, like I'd been coached to do. The danger was simply too great.
But my brain was at odds with my gut. It churned with the sort of excitement that comes on the first hill of a roller coaster. Something about that book cover, the words on it, the biography of Dr. Fisher on the back — it felt like those pages might change everything. It turns out, they did.
Fundamentalist Christianity is, in the end, all about death — your every waking moment is about perfecting yourself so that you're finally worthy of love and goodness once you shuffle off this mortal coil.
But "The Anatomy of Love" was actually about the opposite — being alive, for millennia and right here, right now, together.
Dr. Fisher's research on the science of love, sex and attraction opened up an entirely new world where these things were no longer inherently risky stumbling blocks but natural, intrinsic, and beautiful parts of humanity that revealed the wonder of being alive.
The deeper I got into the book, the more the intricacies of how we're made and what we're made of began to unfurl like a sort of roadmap that led not to sin and downfall, as I'd been taught, but toward the best and most meaningful part of life, the one I'd been taught to deprioritize in favor of religious perfection — human connection.
To grow up under the strictures of hardline Christianity is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of love and connection — that it must be earned; that you have to qualify for it; that it can and should be taken away if you fall short of what the Bible supposedly requires you to be.
The notion of these things instead being innate, embedded in our history and DNA, as natural as breathing and eating and sleeping and all the other things about being alive that we never have to ask permission for, changed me forever.
"The Anatomy of Love" was one of the first steps of the long walk out of the world in which I'd been taught that, especially given my "proclivities," I must shrink, shut down, and close myself off to the possibility of love and companionship, or I'd pay for it dearly.
It let some of the first shafts of light into my brain that would eventually save me, and I hope Dr. Fisher knew just how important her work was — not just as a scientist and intellectual, but perhaps even more important, as an opener of hearts.
Because that changes everything.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.