Relative to the focus of your blog and your particular curiosity concerning your findings on Match.com, I highly recommend Helen Fisher, PhD’s 2009 “why him? why her?”

The executive team at Match.com met with Fisher in 2004 to have her help them understand this fundamental question: “why do you fall in love with one person rather than another?” Her reply? “No one really knows….how two individual personalities match up remains unknown…And yet, whom you choose matters because it wil color every aspect of your life: your morning conversations in bed and at the breakfast table, your friendships, family reunions and weekend frolics; where you live, how you raise your children, most likely even your career. And certainly this will affect your tomorrows.”

Match.com became Fisher’s love incubator, romance petri dish and human attraction genome project and it provided her with a chance to apply the newest data in neuroscience to the essential question of who you love…and perhaps even help people find “the one.”

Fisher went on to become a consultant and scientific adviser to another Internet dating site, Chemistry.com, where she wrote the core statements in the questionnaire members would fill out; a questionnaire to establish their personality type. All the statistical data collected on this sample of 39,913 anonymous men and women, what Fisher called “the Personality Type Study” – as well as information from genetics, neuroscience, anthropology, psychology and other scientific disciplines – form the basis of Fisher’s understanding of four basic personality types: “Explorers, Builders, Directors and Negotiators.”

And what – you ask, are the key ingredients that compose these types? Brain chemicals. Dopamine, “the powerful and ubiquitous neurotransmitter” produces Explorers. Serotonin produces Builders. Testosterone produces Directors and estrogen produces Negotiators.

Perhaps more remarkable, is that Fisher’s “four types” mimic those four predipositoned characters or personality types known or discovered since the time of the ancient Greeks up until the modern day work of such pyschologists as David Keirsey and Meyers Briggs.

Hippocrates (460-370 BC), a Greek physician, first proposed the concept of four broad temperament styles based on the “four humors.”

Aristotle (384-322 BC) believed that human kind sought happiness in one of four ways: through sensual pleasure; by acquiring assets; in logical investigation, or in expressing moral virtue. Aristotle perfectly described core traits of Fisher’s Exloprer, Builder, Director and Negotiator.

Galen, a Roman doctor living in the second century AD, again defined the primary traits of these four types: sanguine, melancholic, phlegmatic and choleric.

Since then, the sixteenth-century Viennese physician Paracelsus, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and later philosophers and pyschologists, including Rudolf Steiner, Alfred Adler, Erich Adickes, Erich Fromm and most notably, Carl Jung – have all embraced the idea that each of us has inherited a specific constellation of biological traits.

In the late 1940’s Isabel Briggs Meyers and her mother, Katharine, began to devlop what has become the world’s most popular personality questionnaire, the so-called MBTI.

Then, in the 1990’s, the brilliant psychologist David Kieirsy, a protege of Myers, simplified her schema to fous on his four personality types: Artisan, Guardian, Rational and Idealist.

Further still, these four personality types are also represented in non-Western traditions. Several North American Indian tribes believed in the sacred medicine wheel representing the circle of life marked by east (eagle), west (bear), north (buffalo) and south (mouse.)

Fisher realized that the basic aspects of “who you are” began to evolve long before our human ancestors strode the earth. But why did our human forebears evolve the tendency to be far more attracted to some types than others – what the folks at Match.com originally asked?

You know the answer: Read the book!