Can a drug make you fall in love? │ How Love Makes Us Human with Dr Anna Machin

Is there such a thing as a love drug? What impact do drugs have on our love lives?

Ultimately, love is about control. After all, it's the mechanism that evolution has come up with to make sure we pair up and reproduce all for the good of those genes and finding an elixir of love is the stuff of legends and adventure stories. Think of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream or Donizetti's opera of the same name.

And there are things I could tell you to do to shore up a failing relationship or get over a breakup just by changing your behaviour, or in the latter case, eating some chocolate. But because we now know so much about the neurochemistry and neuroscience of love, we're at the point where real elixirs of love are tantalisingly close.

You can already buy oxytocin online. You can squirt it up your nose to increase your empathy and your trust and reduce your defensive behaviour. Certainly, you could do so on a Friday night before going out and hopefully it would reduce your inhibitions to starting new relationships. Research into MDMA is surging ahead because people who take this as a recreational drug find they have permanent increases in empathy and the most wonderful feelings of love for everybody. And the SSRIs which are used to treat depression have a side effect of reducing libido and limiting your emotional responses.

But there are lots of ethical questions around the idea of taking drugs to either help you fall in love or help you forget a bad relationship. How do these drugs make us feel? What are the benefits and dangers? Some have suggested that we use them simply as therapy drugs to help mend broken relationships in the case of MDMA, or help people forget harmful relationships in terms of the SSRIs. And maybe there is a use here where drugs are properly regulated in an area of life where we would not normally interfere chemically. But who decides who gets the drugs? And if we accept they're okay for fixing romantic love, what about in child-parent therapy?

But many may wish to use these drugs or stop love in different contexts which are unregulated, for example, there is a recent study that has shown the effects of using oxytocin in a general population. People were administered oxytocin by a squirt up the nose and then asked to go out and interact with each other. Now, for the vast majority of people it did do what would be expected which was lower their inhibitions to forming relationships and make them more social. However, in a small number of people using oxytocin can increase envy, ethnocentrism and ingroup/outgroup behaviour which is not the desired result. There's also the case of what happens when somebody takes a drug and doesn't tell their other half and the influence that has on everybody's life.

Let me tell you an anecdote about somebody who took MDMA recreationally. There was a guy who went clubbing every weekend under the influence of MDMA. He met a girl and they fell in love and he used to go back every weekend to go clubbing with her. However, after a couple of years they decided they should move in together, so he moved back home, and they found a flat. However, it quickly became apparent that he wasn't actually in love with her and the reason for this was that during the week, he did not take MDMA. His love had been artificially induced. Now, it's up to the individual to decide what they take and the dangers associated with it but in this case, he had influenced her life in a negative way and we have to think ethically about whether or not that's acceptable.

There is also concern that the use of SSRIs to reduce libido or reduce sensors of love could be used in repressive regimes, or oxytocin and MDMA could be used to coerce people in relationships. But let's look at the other side of the argument. Is ingesting a drug any different to the endogenous drugs which underpin our relationships in the real world? Beta-endorphin after all is an opiate. And what's the difference between a chemical intervention and a psychological behavioural intervention in therapy? Why do we feel uncomfortable about the chemical intervention? And if relationships are so fundamental to our well-being, to our health and happiness, should we not be trying to make them as healthy as possible ensuring all should be able to have them by using love drugs. It's up to you to decide.

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