The fiction of love potions and the reality of neurotechnology.
We're pleased to present this excerpt from Chapter 4 of Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships» by Brian D. Earp and Julian Savulescu.
If you’ve been alive sometime in the last thousand years, you will be familiar with the idea of a love potion—a magical liquid that when quaffed or applied makes a person fall passionately in love. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a love potion is introduced as a weapon in the marital war between the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania. To humiliate Titania, Oberon drizzles juice distilled from a “love-in-idleness” flower on to her eyelids as she sleeps, causing her to “madly dote” upon the first creature she sees—the donkey-headed Bottom. The flower’s magical juice also causes a tumult for the play’s mortal lovers; administered by the mischievous Puck, it makes Lysander and Demetrius both fall in love with the formerly spurned Helena, much to the dismay of Hermia, who was in the process of eloping with Lysander.
After many chases through the enchanted wood, all is set to rights, as this is after all a comedy. In Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde, a love potion is substituted for a death potion to avoid the demise of the romantic leads—but not until Act 3, as this is Wagner.
In both stories love potions force characters to assume emotions that are not their own. In many popular depictions, the effects of a love potion are often undesirable, even if the person deliberately seeks it out. Consider the 1960s chart-topper “Love Potion No. 9” by the legendary songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. In this song, the narrator, a self-described “flop with chicks,” visits Madame Ruth, who doses him with a black, turpentine-smelling potion brewed up in her kitchen sink. He’s suddenly disoriented and starts impulsively smooching everything and everyone he sees. This includes, as you might remember, a police officer who subsequently smashes his precious “little bottle.” Presumably, none of this improved the narrator’s luck with “chicks.”
In her Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling has a professor deliver a cautionary lecture to his students before they brew up a love potion: “Amortentia doesn’t really create love, of course. It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love. No, this will simply cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. It is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room.” In their potential to co-opt a person’s deepest emotions, Rowling suggests, love potions are sinister. They mimic the lack of emotional control that comes with infatuation, but act wholly outside the affected person’s free will.
In another book we’d happily explore why love potions and anti-love potions have been such powerful and enduring tropes in fiction. Perhaps it’s because they work as a desirable fantasy for anyone who’s ever experienced an unrequited crush, or because they capture some of the very real and disruptive effects of passionate love. Or maybe they’re just handy plot devices.
Our interest here, though, is in real-life neurotechnologies that act on the brain’s lust, attraction, and attachment systems, whether to strengthen a good relationship or help end a bad one. Although we have been referring to these interventions as love drugs and anti-love drugs for convenience, these neurotechnologies are altogether different from magical love potions. For one thing, love drugs (as we have been using that term) are real; for another, they cannot completely override a person’s free will, rendering them as pliable as a character in somebody’s play or opera.
As we will explore later, a major way to affect love in real life is to manipulate hormone levels. As the science writer Kayt Sukel notes in her book Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex, and Relationships, hormones have something of an outsized reputation: “From our earliest years,” she writes, “we are told that hormones can influence everything, from our boobs (or balls, as the case may be) to our brains to our behaviors. Hormones will flood our system. They will take over and rage out of control.” But we are not actually slaves to our hormones, especially once the storm of puberty has subsided. To see this, Sukel says, just consider the common rat:
Hormones actually control sexual behavior in this species—not mediate or motivate, but control. The female rat ovulation cycle lasts 4 to 5 days. When the female is at her most fertile, the hormone levels rise and her back arches up, exposing her private parts to the world. This reflex is called lordosis. It’s a sign to all the boy rats that the girl is ready to go . . . [she] does not have to consider whether she feels up to sex after a long day of running mazes in the lab. There is no worry about emotional readiness or whether she looks fat. Her hormone levels let her know it is time to get busy. So she does. Otherwise she cannot be bothered. It’s just that simple.
Not so with humans. According to Kim Wallen, a neuroendocrinologist at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center, “Hormones are not absolute regulators of behavior. The function of hormones is to shift that balance of behavior in one direction or another. The presence of certain hormones doesn’t mean you will exhibit a certain behavior but rather increases the probability that you might.”
The same thing is likely to be true of most real-life biochemical interventions into love and relationships, both now and in the future: there are no actual magic potions out there that will instantly transform your emotional life, making you fall out of love in a heartbeat with your spouse of thirty years, or in love, for that matter, with every pizza guy who shows up at your door. As the anthropologist Helen Fisher explains:
As you grow up, you build a conscious (and unconscious) list of traits that you are looking for in a mate. . . . Drugs can’t change [this] mental template. Altering brain chemistry can [influence] your basic feelings. But it can’t direct those feelings. Mate choice is governed by complex interactions between our myriad experiences, as well as our biology. In short, if someone set you up with Hitler or some other monster, no “slipped pharmaceutical love potion” is going to make you love him.
In other words, the most likely scenario for the foreseeable future, even as neuroscience progresses, will be more or less powerful loadings of the dice—not sorcery.
Unmasking love
Even so, we know that love drugs will be divisive. Some people, we presume, will welcome the advent of drug-assisted romance. “Better relationships through chemistry,” they might say (riffing on the old DuPont advertising slogan). Others will find the prospect of biochemical interventions into romantic relationships at the very least unsettling, if not abhorrent. Love, they might think, is not to be tampered with. It’s something you’re supposed to fall into, spellbound, if you are lucky enough to meet the right person. It isn’t meant to be under our control.
We get it. We’ve been in love. We’ve experienced the magic. And we understand why pulling back the curtain and talking about hormones and neurotransmitters might spoil the thrill. But we want to push back against this intuition, too. There can be great value, we suggest, in regarding love as something that is—at least to an extent—up to us. Something that requires choice, skill, and determination, not passivity and acquiescence. It is true that we cannot simply wave a magic wand to bring love in or out of existence (nor should we necessarily want to); but we can decide whether and how to intervene in the course of love, helping it to last or, where appropriate, expire.
I hope the future they write about becomes possible.
Posted by: Simon Stiel | February 15, 2020 at 05:40 AM