“You know... I haven’t even gotten married yet, and now I’m already depressed about it.”
I’m a hair under five minutes into an interview with Brian Earp, researcher at Oxford University’s Institute for Neuroetihcs. For years, Earp and his colleagues have been looking at love and its workings in the human brain: how it starts, how it grows, how it shrivels, how it ends on a friend’s couch clutching a bottle of vodka and swearing never to touch the stuff again (love, that is - you will always have vodka). He’s authored papers on how and in what circumstances we should control love with drugs, and is co-authoring a book on the subject with the director of Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Julian Savulescu, due out this year.
But for the moment, we’re talking specifically about marriage, and what our brains make of this uniquely human invention. Not a lot, it turns out. The same brains that evolved to have as many offspring as possible while losing as few of them to wild predators, aren’t naturally inclined towards giddy poetry and romcoms.
“I’ve depressed myself,” Earp says after I interrupt, with a laugh. “People make jokes about being on their first marriage – they’re fully expecting that marriage isn’t the sort of thing that’s going to last a lifetime. And if we did think that, we’d be ignoring the evidence around us. Overwhelmingly, it just doesn’t seem to be the case.
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“Maybe marriage is just about trying to anticipate trade-offs and making decisions that bind future choices in a rational way. But it certainly takes the romance out of it.”
Despite indicators to the contrary, Earp is by no means depressing to talk to. He’s not a pessimist. But nor is he the only person to recognise that films like Love, Actually are out of sync with love, actually. Love often falls short of the concept we expect. If it didn’t, we’d all be married to our childhood sweetheart and celebrate Valentine’s Day every day.
But stats from the Office of National Statistics tell a different story. 42 per cent of marriages in England and Wales end in divorce, with half falling apart in the first decade. Yet, through some weird combination of culture and chemistry, most that make it to the altar believe their love is special.
But what if there were a drug to stave off divorce and keep the love alive? We treat depression, anxiety and other emotion-based responses with drugs. If love isn’t working for us, why not add a chemical?
Increasingly, many couples are. The chemical oxytocin is often referred to as the 'love hormone', and in some circles is touted as a miracle cure-all for relationships. It’s a natural human bonding agent, released when we fall in love, hug a friend or cradle a newborn baby. Oxytocin nasal sprays can be bought online for less than a bottle of date-night wine (though, whether you’re actually buying oxytocin is down to the scrupulousness of the seller). But Earp is not convinced.
“A lot of the initial observations don’t seem to be replicating well,” he explains. “A lot of things about it improving trust and eye-gazing, and increasing attention to relationship cues were observed in one-off experiments with no sense that they would work outside the lab." As a result, he has shifted to researching the benefits of MDMA, the substance commonly sold illegally in pill-form as ecstasy.
“In the 80s, it was used for that purpose by a network of relationship counsellors that are now publishing research. It shows some couples found – under clinical conditions and with the help of a therapist – MDMA allowed them to shift their thinking and approach the relationship in a healthier way. Or potentially discover that the relationship wasn’t right for them.
"I think MDMA would be much more likely to have a potentially robust effect on many couples."
‘James’, a 40-year-old ecstasy user for more than 20 years, shares his experiences of MDMA with WIRED, picking out two relationships from his teen years in which ecstasy, for better or worse, played chemical cupid.
“It was beautiful at the beginning,” he says of his second relationship, which lasted six years. “Hooking up with someone and feeling love and then being on ecstasy on top of that. It is something that is impossible to describe. Being with her when I wasn’t high was great too, and the love was there; although in a different way.
“There is a vulnerability that allows you to actually feel the love you have with no distraction. It’s like when something goes wrong in your life and it feels like your whole world falls apart, and then you get a hug from your loved one. If you ever experienced that, where you totally submit to it, it’s really comforting, deep and consoling. At that moment you just know that everything is OK. I see being on E with your loved one as similar to that.”
‘Colleen’ describes a markedly similar experience with psychedelics (the category of drugs that includes LSD, mushrooms and DMT). Like James, we meet and talk via the same online drug forum, where usernames and the relative anonymity of the internet allow people to discuss drug experiences freely.
“I wouldn't say that my present feelings about my partner actively change while tripping, but tripping allows a certain kind of vulnerability that doesn't come as easily or as often in everyday life situations,” she says. “Because of this vulnerability and mutual understanding coming from the shared experience of psychedelics, it's easier to connect on a more emotional level than just talking to another person. I still feel very affectionate and bonded toward my partner when sober, but the experience of tripping helps speed up the process of bonding, so to speak.”
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The darker side of that process appears when ‘boosting’ love that already exists, gets confused with a relationship that only survives on drugs. The second relationship James shares began when he was 17 and highlights how easy it can be for people to trick themselves into relationships built on neurochemical engineering alone.
“I met her in the pub,” he says. “She was nice, attractive, but I wasn’t really into her. [Then] the E kicked in and of course, that changed. At the time, going to school, I would only see her on a Saturday night and I was always on E. Of course, love blossomed, and I kind of went with it: Saturday night loved up with her and Sunday afternoon feeling like hugs in the park. The relationship went on for two years.
“It was great – but not real. Sadly, it was real for her, and when we moved into a flat together it lasted a few months. I really hurt her without meaning to. Without the drug, there was no love on my side... She was a great person: attractive and intelligent. The truth, though, was the MDMA created this false sense of love.”
That’s the problem with reducing love to an easy-to-follow recipe: at what point does love stop being ‘real’? And if we can use drugs to essentially fake our way into a relationship, couldn’t the same approach be used in reverse to force two people out of love? An ‘anti-love’ drug that squeezes the requisite chemicals out of your brain and wrings ten years of a person out of you.
In fact, we do it already – inadvertently. Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) are the most commonly prescribed antidepressants in the UK. But since so much is still unknown about the workings of the brain, we find different SSRIs have different side-effects for different people. Reported side effects include blunting a person’s ability to empathise with others, and ‘anorgasmia’, a dysfunction whereby orgasm cannot be achieved.
The potential for misuse, could be enormous. In certain societies, why waste time and effort separating or imprisoning ‘mismatched’ or homosexual couples if you can just tear out any amorous feelings, root and stem, with a course of pills?
“It is a very serious concern. Though I’m not sure that it’s different from the way that any new technology might be misused in a different context,” says Earp. “But should we ban all antidepressant medication? Should we take all SSRIs off the market because some groups in some countries are using them to suppress the libido of gay [people]? I think we need to keep trying to fight those bigger battles over the norms we should try to promote in societies.
“But I’ve had a bunch of people email me since I wrote my Love Addiction paper, saying, ‘this helps me makes sense of things so much; I keep finding myself drawn to these awful men and I get so attached and I throw myself at them, and if there were some kind of pill I could take that would just calm down those desperate attachments, I would take it tomorrow’”.
Should we control love with drugs? We already can, for better or worse. And as our understanding of the neuroscience behind love advances, we’re only going to get better at it – whether our goal is to deliberately create a love (or anti-love) potion, or we accidentally discover an amorous side-effect in other new medicines. But in doing so, we are in danger of losing part of what makes love so great in the first place: that bolt-from-the-blue unpredictability.
“There is an answer to what’s going on in our brains when we fall in love,” says Earp. “Some people will find that really helpful and might find that love now has new dimensions which they can explore. They might find that thinking of love as an ancient bond that we share with our ancestors makes it seem even more amazing, rather than the kind of fairy dust explanation of love where we have no idea where it comes from or how it works.
"Maybe grounding it in the history of the species will give it an importance that wasn’t there before.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
