Salon (I’m digging their daily e-mail newsletter) has a great piece today on the science of love:

[Ian Kerner]: One trend I’ve noticed lately online is people being much more interested in people’s educational backgrounds. [Helen Fisher]: Yeah, particularly men. Men didn’t care about women’s educational backgrounds in the past. Now they care.

Do they want women to have more or less education than they have?

IK: Equal or superior. It’s not the traditional: “Oh my God, she’s making more money than me, my ego has been shattered.” It’s more like, “This is a two-income world we live in, it’s going to take both of us to make it.”

HF: They also want women closer to their age, and want them to have the same earning power. But you know what? It’s not different from the way we always were. We’re moving forward toward the kind of people we were a million years ago. For millions of years women commuted to work to gather vegetables, they came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal, the double-income family was the rule. In shedding what we regard as traditional family values, we’re actually going back to the real traditional configurations.

Fisher (an anthropologist) and Kerner (a sex therapist) work for Chemistry.com, the service with the clever ads targeting those who don’t fit into the eHarmony mold. They have some great insights on gender stereotypes, initial attraction vs. long-term love, etc. Give em a read.

Catch the Chemistry.com commercial after the jump: