When it comes to communicating about sex, there's often a gap between what we want to say and how we say it, and even the gentlest of words can come off as confrontational. Criticism, expressed or perceived harshly, can be the sexual kiss of death.

Anthropologists have long observed that women are "face-to-face" communicators, while men do so "side by side." This means that women are much more comfortable with direct eye contact, which probably has a lot to do with the long history female history of maternal nursing, cuddling, and generally fawning over their infants while staring lovingly into those big baby eyes.

Men, on the other hand, find direct eye contact extremely confrontational on an instinctive level. As Dr. Helen Fisher writes in her remarkable book, Why We Love, "This response probably stems from men's ancestry. For many millennia men faced their enemies; they sat or walked sat by side as they hunted game with their friends."

As a sex therapist I get asked all the time, "How do I talk to my guy about sex without making him defensive?" Now I will offer the advice, "unless you want your words to usher him into battle, use evolution to your advantage, and have a sex-talk while taking a walk or a drive."

Thanks Dr. Fisher for the infinite wisdom that abounds on every page of this remarkable book!

This book covers a number of recent discoveries in the neurochemistry of romantic love, many from the author's own lab. These are often told in a narrative style, describing the participants (names changed). In my opinion somewhat more space could have been given to other investigators' work.
The writing is generally fluent and thought-provoking in the American style. I objected to Dr. Fisher's recurrent 'just-so' explanations for various aspects of romantic love: she maintains that every aspect of love has had a purpose in our recent evolutionary past. However I (and many evolutionary theorists of the mind) think that linkage to a selected trait is a more likely explanation - that some aspects of the mind were selected for immediate survival value, but these brought along other traits that have developed into the modern mind.