Love is Biological Bribery, Anna Machin on Why We Love

 

We can all agree that, on balance, and taking everything into account, love is a wonderful thing. For many, it is the point of life. I have spent more than a decade researching the science behind human love and, rather than becoming immune to its charms, I am increasingly in awe of its complexity and its importance to us. It infiltrates every fibre of our being and every aspect of our daily lives. It is the most important factor in our mental and physical health, our longevity and our life satisfaction. And regardless of who the object of our love is – lover or friend, dog or god – these effects are largely underpinned, in the first instance, by the set of addictive neurochemicals supporting the bonds we create: oxytocin, dopamine, beta-endorphin and serotonin.
 
This suite of chemicals makes us feel euphoric and calm, they draw us towards those we love, and reward us for investing in our relationships, even when the going gets tough. Love feels wonderful but ultimately it is a form of biological bribery, a cunning evolutionary trick to make sure we cooperate and those all-important genes continue down the generations. The joy it brings is wonderful but is merely a side-effect. Its goal is to ensure our survival, and for this reason happiness is not always its end point. Alongside its joys, there exists a dark side.
 
Love is ultimately about control. It’s about using chemical bribery to make sure we stick around, cooperate and invest in each other, and particularly in the survival-critical relationships we have with our lovers, children and close friends. This is an evolutionary control of which we are hardly aware, and it brings many positive benefits.
 
But the addictive nature of these chemicals, and our visceral need for them, means that love also has a dark side. It can be used as a tool of exploitation, manipulation and abuse. Indeed, in part what may separate human love from the love experienced by other animals is that we can use love to manipulate and control others. Our desire to believe in the fairy tale means we rarely acknowledge the undercurrents but, as a scholar of love, I would be negligent if I did not consider it. Arguably our greatest and most intense life experience can be used against us, sometimes leading us to continue relationships with negative consequences in direct opposition to our survival.
 
We are all experts in love. The science I write about is always grounded in the lived experience of my subjects whose thoughts I collect as keenly as their empirical data. It might be the voice of the new father as he describes holding his firstborn, or the Catholic nun explaining how she works to maintain her relationship with God, or the aromantic detailing what it’s like living in a world apparently obsessed with the romantic love that they do not feel. I begin every interview in the same way, by asking what they think love is. Their answers are often surprising, always illuminating and invariably positive, and remind me that not all the answers to what love is can be found on the scanner screen or in the lab. But I will also ask them to consider whether love can ever be negative. The vast majority say no for, if love has a darker side, it is not love, and this is an interesting point to contemplate. But if they do acknowledge the possibility of love having a less sunny side, their go-to example is jealousy.
 
Jealousy is an emotion and, as with all emotions, it evolved to protect us, to alert us to a potential benefit or threat. It works its magic at three levels: the emotional, the cognitive and the behavioural. Physiology also throws its hat into the ring making you feel nauseous, faint or flushed. When we feel jealousy, it is generally urging us to do one of three things: to cut off the rival, to prevent our partner’s defection by redoubling our efforts, or to cut our losses and leave the relationship. All have evolved to make sure we balance the costs and benefits of the relationship. Investing time, energy and reproductive effort in the wrong partner is seriously damaging to your reproductive legacy and chances of survival. But what do we perceive to be a jealousy-inducing threat? The answer very much depends on your gender.
 
Men and women experience jealousy with the same intensity. However, there is a stark difference when it comes to what causes each to be jealous. One of the pioneers of human mating research is the American evolutionary psychologist David Buss and, in his book The Evolution of Desire (1994), he details numerous experiments that have highlighted this gender difference. In one study, in which subjects were asked to read different scenarios detailing incidences of sexual and emotional infidelity, 83 per cent of women found the emotional scenario the most jealousy-inducing, whereas only 40 per cent of men found this to be of concern. In contrast, 60 per cent of men found sexual infidelity difficult to deal with, compared with a significantly smaller percentage of women: 17 per cent.
 
Men also feel a much more extreme physiological response to sexual infidelity than women do. Hooking them up to monitors that measure skin conductance, muscle contraction and heartrate shows that men experience significant increases in heartrate, sweating and frowning when confronted with sexual infidelity, but the monitor readouts hardly flicker if their partner has become emotionally involved with a rival.
 
The reason for this difference sits with the different resources that men and women bring to the mating game. Broadly, men bring their resources and protection; women bring their womb. If a woman is sexually unfaithful and becomes pregnant with another man’s child, she has withdrawn the opportunity from her partner to father a child with her for at least nine months. Hence, he is the most concerned about sexual infidelity. In contrast, women are more concerned about emotional infidelity because this suggests that, if their partner does make a rival pregnant and becomes emotionally involved with her, his partner risks having to share his protection and resources with another, meaning that her children receive less of the pie.
 
Jealousy is an evolved response to threats to our reproductive success and survival – of self, children and genes. In many cases, it is of positive benefit to those who experience it as it shines a light on the threat and enables us to decide what is best. But in some cases, jealousy gets out of hand.
 
Emotional intelligence sits at the core of healthy relationships. To truly deliver the benefits of the relationship to our partner, we must understand and meet their emotional needs as they must understand and meet ours. But, as with love, this skill has a darker side because to understand someone’s emotional needs presents the possibility that you can use that intelligence to control them. While we may all admit to using this skill for the wrong reasons every now and again – perhaps to get that sofa we desire or the holiday destination we prefer – for some, it is their go-to mechanism where relationships are concerned.
 

The most adept proponents of this skill are those who possess the Dark Triad of personality traits: Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism. The first relies on using emotional intelligence to manipulate others, the second to toy with other’s feelings, and the third to denigrate others with the aim of glorifying oneself. For these people, characterised by exploitative, manipulative and callous personalities, emotional intelligence is the route to a set of mate-retention behaviours that certainly meet their goals but are less than beneficial to those whom they profess to love. Indeed, research has shown that a relationship with such a person leaves you open to a significantly greater risk that your love will be returned with abuse.

 
In 2018, the psychologist Razieh Chegeni and her team set out to explore whether a link existed between the Dark Triad and relationship abuse. Participants were identified as having the Dark Triad personality by expressing their degree of agreement with statements such as ‘I tend to want others to admire me’ (narcissism), ‘I tend to be unconcerned with the morality of my actions’ (psychopathy) and ‘I tend to exploit others to my own end’ (Machiavellianism). They then had to indicate to what extent they used a range of mate-retention behaviours, including ‘snooped through my partner’s personal belongings’, ‘talked to another man/woman at a party to make my partner jealous’, ‘bought my partner an expensive gift’ and ‘slapped a man who made a pass at my partner’.
 
The results were clear. Having a Dark Triad personality, whether you were a man or a woman, significantly increased the likelihood that ‘cost-inflicting mate-retention behaviours’ were your go-to mechanism when trying to retain your partner. These are behaviours that level an emotional, physical, practical and/or psychological cost on the partner such as physical or emotional abuse, coercive control or controlling access to food or money. Interestingly, however, these individuals did not employ this tactic all the time. There was nuance in their behaviour. Costly behaviours were peppered with rare incidences of gift giving or caretaking, so-called beneficial mate-retention behaviours. Why? Because the unpredictability of their behaviour caused psychological destabilisation in their partner and enabled them to assert further control through a practice we now identify as gaslighting.
 
The question remains – if these people are so destructive, why does their personality type persist in our population? Because, while their behaviour may harm those who are unfortunate enough to be close to them, they themselves must gain some survival advantage, which means that their traits persist in the population. It is true that no trait can be said to be 100 per cent beneficial, and here is a perfect example of where evolution is truly working at cross purposes.
 
Not all Dark Triad personalities are abusers but the presence of abuse within our closest relationships is a very real phenomenon, the understanding of which continues to evolve and grow. Whereas we might have once imagined an abuser as someone who controlled their partner with their fists, we are now aware that abuse comes in many guises including emotional, psychological, reproductive and financial.
 
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) questioned both men and women in the United States about the incidences of domestic violence they had experienced in their lifetime. Looking at severe physical abuse alone – which means being punched, slammed, kicked, burned, choked, beaten or attacked with a weapon – one in five women and one in seven men reported at least one incidence in their lifetime. If we consider emotional abuse, then the statistics for men and women are closer – more than 43 million women and 38 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
 
It is hard to imagine that, having experienced such a litany of abuse, anyone could believe that love remained within their relationship. But here the power of the lived experience, of allowing everyone to have their ideas about love becomes clearer. Because, while we have many scientific tools to explore love objectively, at the end of the day, there is always an element of our experience of love that is subjective, that another cannot touch. This is no more powerfully evidenced than by the testimony of those who have experienced intimate partner violence. In 2013, three mental health nurses, led by Marilyn Smith in West Virginia, explored what love meant to 19 women who were experiencing, or had experienced, intimate partner violence. For them, this kind of abuse included, but was not limited to, ‘slapping, intimidation, shaming, forced intercourse, isolation, monitoring behaviours, restricting access to healthcare, opposing or interfering with school or employment, and making decisions concerning contraception, pregnancy, and elective abortion’.
 
It was clear from the transcripts that all the women knew what love wasn’t: being hurt and fearful, being controlled and having a lack of trust and a lack of support or concern for their welfare. And it was clear that they all knew what love should be: built on a foundation of respect and understanding, of support and encouragement, of commitment, loyalty and trust. But despite this clear understanding of the stark difference between the ideal and their reality, many of these women still believed that love existed within their relationship. Some hoped the power of their love would change the behaviour of their partner, others said their sense of attachment made them stay. Some feared losing love, however flawed; and, if they left, might they not land in a relationship where their treatment was even worse? A lot of the time, cultural messaging had reinforced strongly held beliefs about the supremacy of the nuclear family, making victims reluctant to leave in case they ultimately harmed their children’s life chances. While it can be hard to understand these arguments – surely a non-nuclear setup is preferable to the harm inflicted on a child by the observation of intimate partner abuse – I strongly believe that this population has as much right to their definition and experience of love as any of us.
 
In fact, the cultural messages we hear about romantic love – from the media, religion, parents and family – not only potentially trap us in ‘ideal’ family units: they may also play a role in our susceptibility to experiencing intimate partner abuse. This view of reproductive love, once confined to Western culture, is now the predominant narrative globally. From a young age, we speak of ‘the one’, we consume stories of young people finding love against all the odds, of sacrifice, of being consumed. It is arguable that these narratives are unhelpful generally as the reality, while wonderful, is considerably more complex, involving light and shade. But research has shown that these stories may have more significant consequences when we consider their role in intimate partner abuse.

 
South Africa has one of the highest rates of partner abuse against women in the world. In their 2017 paper, Shakila Singh and Thembeka Myende explored the role of resilience in female students at risk of abuse, which is prevalent at a high rate on South African university campuses. Their paper ranges widely over the role of resilience in resisting and surviving partner abuse, but what is of interest to me is the 15 women’s ideas about how our cultural ideas of romantic love have a role to play in trapping women in abusive relationships. These women’s arguments are powerful and made me rethink the fairy-tale. Singh and Myende point to the romantic idea that love overcomes all obstacles and must be maintained at all costs, even when abuse makes these costs life-threateningly high. Or the idea that love is about losing control, being swept off your feet, having no say in who you fall for, even if they turn out to be an abuser. Or that lovers protect each other, fight for each other to the end, even if the person who is being protected, usually from the authorities, is violent or coercive. Or the belief that love is blind and we are incapable of seeing our partner’s faults, despite them often being glaringly obvious to anyone outside the relationship.
 
It is these cultural ideas about romantic love, the women argue, that lead to the erosion of a woman’s power to leave or entirely avoid an abusive partner. Add these ideas to the powerful physiological and psychological need we have for love, and you leave an open goal for the abuser.
 
Love is the focus of so much science, philosophy and literary rumination because we struggle to define it, to predict its next move. Thanks to our biology and the reproductive mandate of evolution, love has long controlled us. But what if we could control love?
 
What if a magic potion existed that could induce us, or another, to fall in love or even wipe away the memories of a failed relationship? It is a quest as ancient as the first writings 5,000 years ago and the focus of many literary endeavours, including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – who can forget Titania’s love for the ass-headed Bottom – and Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. Even in a world where science has largely usurped magic, type ‘love potions’ into Google and the first two questions are: ‘How do you make a love potion?’ and ‘Do love potions actually work?’
 
But today we know enough about the chemistry of love for the elixir to be within our grasp. And we don’t have to look very far for our first candidate: synthetic oxytocin, used right now as an induction drug in labour. We know from extensive research in social neuroscience that artificial oxytocin also increases prosociality, trust and cooperation. Squirt it up the nose of new parents and it increases positive parenting behaviours. Oxytocin, as released by the brain when we are attracted to someone, is vital for the first stages of love because it quiets the fear centre of your brain and lowers your inhibitions to forming new relationships. Would a squirt up the nose do the same before you head out on a Saturday night?

 
The other possibility is MDMA or ecstasy, which mimics the neurochemical of long-term love, beta-endorphin. Recreational users of ecstasy report that it makes them feel boundless love for their fellow clubbers and increases their empathy. Researchers in the US have reported encouraging results when MDMA was used in marriage therapy to increase empathy, allowing participants to gain further insight into each other’s needs and find common ground.
 
Both of these sound like promising candidates but there are still issues to iron out and ethical discussions to have. How effective they are is highly context dependent. Based on their genetics, some people do exactly what is predicted of them. Boundaries are lowered and love sensations abound. But for a significant minority, particularly when it comes to oxytocin, people do exactly the opposite of what we would expect. For some, a dose of oxytocin, while increasing bonds with those they perceive to be in their in-group, increases feelings of ethnocentrism – racism – toward the out-group.
 
MDMA has other issues. For some people, it simply does not work. But the bigger problem is that the effects endure only while usage continues; anecdotal evidence suggests that, if you stop, the feelings of love and empathy disappear. This raises questions of practicality and ethical issues surrounding power imbalance. If you commenced a relationship while taking MDMA, would you have to continue? What if you were in a relationship with someone who had taken MDMA and you didn’t know? What would happen if they stopped? And could someone be induced to take MDMA against their will?
 
The ethical conversation around love drugs is complex. On one side are those who argue that taking a love drug is no more controversial than an antidepressant. Both alter your brain chemistry and, given the strong relationship between love and good mental and physical health, surely it is important that we use all the tools at our disposal to help people succeed? But maybe an anecdote from the book Love Is the Drug (2020) by Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu will give you pause. They describe SSRI prescriptions used to suppress the sexual urges of young male yeshiva students, to ensure that they comply with Jewish orthodox religious law – no sex before marriage, and definitely no homosexuality.
 
Could such drugs gain wider traction in repressive regimes as a weapon against what some perceive to be immoral forms of love? Remember that 71 countries still deem homosexuality to be illegal. It is not a massive leap of imagination to envisage the use of SSRIs to ‘cure’ people of this ‘affliction’. We only have to look at the continued existence of conversion therapy to see that this is a distinct possibility. Love drugs could end up being yet another form of abuse over which the individual has very little control.
 
Evolution saw fit to give us love to ensure we would continue to form and maintain the cooperative relationships that are our route to personal and, most crucially, genetic survival. It can be the source of euphoric happiness, calm contentment and much-needed security, but this is not its point. Love is merely the sweet treat handed to you by your babysitter to make sure the goal is achieved. Combine the ultimate evolutionary aim of love with our visceral need for it and the quick intelligence of our brains, and you have the recipe for a darker side to emerge. Some of this darker side is adaptive but, for those who experience it, it rarely ends well. At the very least there is pain – physical, psychological, financial – and, at the most, there is death, and the grief of those we leave behind.
 
Maybe it is time to rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about love because the danger on the horizon is not the dragon that needs to be slain by the knight to save the beautiful princess but the presence of some who mean to use its powers for their gain and our considerable loss. Like all of us, love is a complex beast: only by embracing it in its entirety do we truly understand it, and ourselves. And this means understanding its evolutionary story, the good and the bad.
 
Tainted love.  Love is both a wonderful thing and a cunning evolutionary trick to control us. A dangerous cocktail in the wrong hands.  By Anna Machin. Aeon, April 29, 2022.

Love
 
 At its most basic level, love is biological bribery. It is a set of neurochemicals which motivate you to, and reward you for,   commencing relationships with those in your life who you need to cooperate with—friends, family, lovers, the wider community—and then work to maintain them. As we will see in the next chapter, the sensations which these chemicals induce in the individual—and which we call the sensation of loving or at least liking—are there to make you feel warm, content, euphoric and encourage you not only to seek out new sources of this sensation but also motivate you to keep investing in your relationships in the long term so that the feeling, and the survival-essential cooperation, never ends.
 
Love: The Route to Health and Happiness
 
Who am I really, in isolation? I am always in relation to other people. So there is something about the people when you are with them. They are bringing out your best self. Your happiest self. The person I most enjoy being. When I am with them there is a sort of lifting of ‘Oh, not only am I feeling this joy of being with you but I am feeling the joy of being allowed to be this version of me.’ There is a self-love that happens when you are with someone else you love that you can only get by being with them. Margaret
 
I am sure we can all imagine how critical we were to each other in the knife-edge environments of our evolutionary past, and there are certainly areas of the world today where having the cooperation of others is still the difference between life and death. But surely here in the west, where our environment is relatively benign, and the service sector has seen fit to try and make everything we need to survive accessible from our sofa, cooperation, and in particular our closest relationships, are less about survival and more just about fun and belonging. We know what the important things for a healthy life are: exercise, a balanced diet, not smoking and maintaining a healthy weight. That’s it. We have survival cracked. But a seminal study carried out by psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues in 2010 would beg to differ.

 Julianne collected the data together from 148 studies which had explored rates of mortality following chronic illness—cancer, cardiovascular disease and renal failure being the most prominent—and aspects of an individual’s social network. For some studies this was the size of their network, their actual or perceived access to social support, their social isolation or loneliness, or the extent to which they were integrated into their network. Having carried out some very complex statistics to ensure she was comparing like with like, she concluded that being within a supportive social network reduced the risk of mortality by 50 percent. That places it on a par with quitting smoking, and of more influence than maintaining a healthy BMI measure.
 
My friends bring a support system that I know I can rely on. There is a dependability with them that I can rely on regardless. If I need cheering up, I know I can go to Bruno. If I need advice, career advice, I’ll go to David. If I need emotional, mental-health conversations, I’ll go to Nick. They provide similar but different attributes that I know I can go to. Surrounding myself with this support system means that whatever trouble or difficulty arises, I have support. Doug
 
Since Julianne’s study, numerous other projects have reinforced this conclusion; that having good-quality social relationships (known as social capital) is the most important factor in your health, happiness and life satisfaction. Indeed, in 2019 a group from Harvard in the US, led by Justin Rodgers, repeated Julianne’s study with the body of social-capital and health research published in the period 2007 to 2018. After reviewing 145 studies (in fact 1608 articles were published in this time but not all made it through the robust selection criteria), the Harvard team concluded that your social capital—be this the size or cohesion of your social network, your level of reciprocity or participation, your levels of trust, belonging or rate of volunteering—had a significant impact on your overall mortality or life expectancy, your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, cancer or diabetes, the likelihood you are obese and your perception of your own health. As I write towards the end of 2020, studies finding a link between social capital and cognitive function in the elderly, adherence to HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis in at-risk gay men, reducing the risk of poor mental health following the acquisition of a disability and self-perception of health have been published. The question arises as to why being in good relationships has such a marked impact on our health? The reason is multifaceted, but explanations include the simple fact that having friends and family brings helpful resources such as money, practical care or health knowledge; that they make you feel better psychologically, which reduces the impact of stress on your body and improves your mental and physical health; or, most tantalisingly, that the neurochemicals which are released when you interact with those you love have a direct role in promoting the efficient functioning of your immune system.
 
‘Well, Hello, Beta-endorphin!’
 
I always feel better when I have seen my friends. So I saw one of them yesterday . . . I don’t get funny but I feel ‘Hmmm, I haven’t seen anyone for a couple of days.’ You get to offload . . . I need the balance of all my different friends. So mummy friends but also friends who I talk about books with and where we want to go. It is cathartic and we laugh. Life is busy and if you keep it all in your head it is unhealthy. Joan
 
We will learn in the next chapter that the sensation of love is underpinned by a cocktail of neurochemicals which are released when we interact with our friends and family. One of these neurochemicals—and the one I argue is the key to our ability to love in the long term—is known as beta-endorphin. Some of you may know this as the basis of your body’s natural pain-killing system or the source of the euphoric feeling which follows a bout of vigorous exercise—the phenomenon of the runner’s high—but it also appears to have a key role to play in the operation of our immune system. In 2012 endocrinologist Dipak Sarakar, who is based at Rutgers University in New Jersey, published his findings, based upon research in rats, that the mu-opioid and delta-opioid receptors had a role in the function of the natural killer cells which make up part of the mammalian immune system, ours included. The mu-opioid receptor, in particular, is the receptor in the brain upon which beta-endorphin acts, and as such Dipak’s work allows us to suggest that the release of beta-endorphin during social interaction stimulates the natural killer cells, meaning that unwanted pathogens are dealt with more efficiently than if social interaction has not occurred. This study still needs to be replicated in humans—the knocking out of some relevant genes in the rats makes this a tricky goal to achieve—but Dipak’s work offers the tantalising possibility that social interaction has an integral role to play in the operation of the body’s defence systems.
 
I hope it is clear by now that, whether we like it or not, we need each other and that love is the force which motivates us to overcome the difficulties of group living to cooperate at a level unmatched by any other species. We must cooperate to subsist, to learn, to raise our children, to innovate and create. We build complex and enduring networks encompassing our families, our friends, our co-workers and our lovers, which, regardless of individual differences, all follow the same pattern. Beyond the water, food and shelter that we need just to survive, our relationship with those we love has the largest impact on our health and happiness, our life satisfaction and longevity. Love has been around a long time but it is still as much about survival today as it has always been.
 
Excerpted from Why We Love, by Anna Machin, 2022 by Anna Machin.
 
Book Excerpt from Why We Love.  In Chapter 1, “Survival,” author Anna Machin describes the health benefits of strong human bonds.
 
The Scientist, March 14, 2022.

 

In an episode of the satirical comedy The Great, the reign of the reason-and-science-loving Russian empress Catherine nearly collapses when her husband Peter, the deposed emperor, storms into her private quarters, determined to imprison her. But seeing her tearful and in despair, he forgets his vindictiveness and hugs her. Later, he tells her, “I wanted your happiness more than my own.” “Wow,” she responds. “Indeed,” Peter says. “Love has done a strange thing to me. I wonder if you cut a man who has loved fiercely, you will see a different-shaped heart from a man who has not?”
 
Of course, no literal imprint of fierce love would be found in the heart if scientists went looking. But it’s safe to say that Peter was on to something. Love, scientists have shown, leaves noticeable and widespread traces of its impact on us. “Love is so important,” says evolutionary anthropologist Anna Machin, “that evolution has seen fit to engage every mechanism in your body to make sure you’re as close and bonded as you can be.”
 
Machin, who studies the genetics and neurochemistry of love—and has collaborated with the renowned Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar, of “Dunbar’s number”—is the author of a new book, Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships. In a recent interview with Nautilus, she says she tackles the whole spectrum of loving relationships from a variety of scientific perspectives to explain the nature of love. “If you’re a neuroscientist, you give one particular answer. If you’re a psychologist, give another one,” she said. “As an anthropologist—it’s a bit of a magpie profession—I gather all that together.” Machin’s responses to my questions were articulate and energetic, despite how far into the evening it was for her in England.
 
 
Why do you call love a form of bribery?
 
AM : The reason love evolved was to motivate and reward us for taking part in relationships, critical to our survival. That goes for our reproductive partners, children, and extending to our friends. Humans are highly cooperative because we have to be. A species will be solitary unless it absolutely has to cooperate with somebody else. And that’s fine, except it’s incredibly stressful. You have to spend a hell of a lot of time monitoring everybody else’s behavior, making sure you’re spotting those people who are trying to cheat you or steal from you.
 
And the way evolution made sure we cooperate was to come up with chemical bribery. At the basis of love are four neurochemicals. Each has a different role but together they motivate us or to give us confidence to go into social relationships. Ultimately, we get addicted to those chemicals. We get this hit of joy, of euphoria, of reward when we interact with the people important to our survival. It’s biological bribery. It’s like if I give my kids a sweet because they’ve done something good, which is bad parenting, but it works.
 
You also say love is about control. Why’s that?
 
AM : Because the only point of evolution is to pass genes down. This form of bribery is controlling us to make sure we do that. It’s a benign control. For most people, most of the time, the experience is lovely and warming and beneficial in terms of health. Unfortunately, our biology to seek love, crave love, find love, keep love, is a weakness. That visceral need can be exploited, it can be used to make us do things we don’t necessarily want to do. And that’s the cost of love. It can be used to manipulate or abuse or coerce us. That’s what separates us from the animals. Animals don’t use love to manipulate others. We do.
 
You say it’s scary that a baseline level of oxytocin, one of the neurochemicals of love, can predict whether a couple will be together six months later. Why’s that scary?
 
AM : When it comes to a relationship, it’s a little bit scary to know that part of that relationship is written in the stars before you even started. That’s because people with higher levels of oxytocin generally are more open to relationships, they are more committed to wanting to work toward a relationship. In fact, there are many things that go into whether a relationship will last—oxytocin levels, genetics, upbringing, your attachment profile, the support of your family. So it’s the private me talking, saying, “Oh my God, you meet someone, you think they’re wonderful, but the relationship is partly already written.”
 
 
Is love blind?
 
AM : Yes. What happens when you fall in love for the first time is the activation of various areas of the limbic system and the neocortex. But we also see deactivations. These deactivations occur mainly in the brain area linked to “mentalizing.” Mentalizing is the ability to tell someone’s intentions, and you need to be good at mentalizing to spot a liar or a cheat. To be able to tell if somebody is lying, you need to be good at understanding what their motivation is. But what happens when you fall in love for the first time is that bit shuts down. It just decides it’s not going to work anymore. For that reason, your friends can see this person is not necessarily good for you, that maybe they’re going to cheat on you or they’re lying to you, but you cannot see it.
 
Why would being blind in love have evolved?
 
AM : It’s interesting. Why would that have evolved? Why would that be something that was retained? Is it something to do with the same way that oxytocin lowers your inhibitions? Maybe it’s to remove some of the hurdles that you might place in your own way when you’re going to try and start a relationship. If you were constantly paranoid that everybody’s going to cheat on you or steal from you or lie to you, the species wouldn’t get very far. So maybe we have to remove that ability so that we have confidence and enough belief in the person that we fall in love with that we will carry on doing this. We see the same deactivation occurring when people listen to a charismatic religious leader.
 
Why do we fall in love with one person and not another? Or maybe I should ask, Why do we have lust for one person and not another?
 
AM : That’s very much a sensory input. Lust is an unconscious emotion. It takes place entirely in the limbic area of your brain. It happens within the first nanoseconds of you seeing somebody across a room. You’re going to use all your senses. They’re going to tell you things about that person’s health, their ability to protect, to provide, about the strength of their genes, particularly if you’re looking at sort of asymmetry within the face. You’ll listen to the tone of voice and what they say. And what they say is a good indication of cognitive ability or flexibility of intellect, or sense of humor.
 
Initially, you take in this information unconsciously. The algorithm in your head will decide, OK, this is somebody for you or this isn’t somebody for you. We all have a biological market value on our head, which is linked to the likelihood of reproductive success. The more likely you are to be reproductively successful, the more wealthy you are in terms of your biological market value. That classic thing when you see someone across the room and you think either, “Oh my God, they’re completely out of my league.” That’s basically what your brain’s thinking or, “I can do so much better.” That’s part of the calculation. If you get a tick from your algorithm, then oxytocin and dopamine are released and off you go, and you fill that chemical sort of job, that lustful feeling, that chemistry that develops between two people. The conscious brain kicks in pretty quickly after that, but the first moments are completely unconscious.
 
Why do you say the biology of love can sound non-feminist?
 
AM : The reason for that is I often get called out. I do a lot of public speaking and I explain to people the rules of mate choice as biology sees them. But a lot of women, in particular, find it hard to accept that they are still looking for a protector and a provider. I try to explain that even though they are now capable of being independent, financially independent, they’re still looking for that in the man. These mate-choice rules are evolutionarily incredibly ancient. Whenever we see mate choice in any species, this is what we see. One reason why some women are in a position where they’re financially comfortable, and don’t need a man for that, is because they live in a culture where there’s a certain amount of gender equality. That has come about partly from feminism. But feminism hasn’t touched evolution, partly because it’s very recent. Women have only been able to control their contraception, for example, for about the last 70 years. That’s nothing in evolutionary time. Something as deep-seated as mate choice only changes in human behavior when it’s pretty much universal among the species, and there is not equality in a vast number of countries in the world, so it’s not going to touch it.
 
 
What do you mean when you write that “cross-sex cooperation is cognitively the costliest of all cooperation?”
 
AM : This is something that people find difficult to accept. You always get cooperation within a sex before you get cooperation between the sexes. You’re only driven to cooperate with the opposite sex when you’ve exhausted your own. The reason is we’re trading similar currencies in our own sex.
 
When we look at the environment in which we evolved, the biggie was childcare. We have these dependent babies. To be able to function, you need help with those children. And women would turn to their female kin first to do that. Cooperation is all about reciprocity. We want to make sure the balance sheet is even. You don’t want to be the one always doing all the helping and never getting anything back. From a survival point of view, that’s not a good thing to do.
 
With men, you tend to be trading things like alliance, support, help in fights. When you get men and women cooperating, particularly in the human evolutionary line, you are trading those different things. Women still want childcare. I would like you to help me raise our children, but the man is there because he basically wants to have sex and produce some more children with her. You’re trading sex for childcare.
 
So those are two different currencies. Your brain is having to do a currency calculation. And when we look at the way the brain has evolved, we see the development of cognitive architecture that enables you to start doing those more complex calculations. So cross-sex cooperation is so much harder at the fundamental level than cooperating within your sex.
 
You say there’s a difference between how mothers and fathers form attachment to their kids. How so?
 
AM : Attachment is a deep, psychological bond between two people. A mother’s attachment is based purely on nurture. The strength of that attachment will be based upon the sensitive and positive way she nurtures that child. For a father, nurture is important, but there’s an added element that comes from the cortical area of the brain. That’s the bit saying, “OK, I’m going to push your developmental boundaries. I’m going to make you more resilient. I’m going to push you into the world beyond the family.” What joins all fathers around the world is they have this role in scaffolding the child’s entry into the social world. That’s the underpinning of what they’re involved in developmentally.
 
People can sometimes find that difficult because they’re like, “Well, those are just culturally gendered roles.” Yes, you can argue that, but it also has an evolutionary explanation, which is the fact that evolution doesn’t do redundancy. It doesn’t cause two individuals who have input into something to have the same role if that’s not required because that’s just a waste of energy. Bear in mind that human children take a huge amount of emotional, cognitive, and practical input to raise. So it’s important that the parents fit together well and give that developmental environment.

 
What does your research say about parenting in a non-traditional family?
 
AM : What happens is we see changes in the brains of a single parent or a parent in a same-sex couple. The human brain is incredibly plastic. All parents have the ability to nurture, to challenge, to build resilience. We see changes that enable the brain in a single individual to behave in ways like a mom or dad. If we look at say, the Aka people in the Congo, where the fathers spend about 60 percent of their time in physical contact with their children, you will see a different way of parenting. As with everything, some parenting is biological, and some is environmental and contextual. What we found universally with men is they have a role in building resilience in pushing their child into the world, but they do that in a culturally specific way. It depends on the environmental context of what that world is.
 
 
How does our upbringing as kids affect our love lives?
 
AM : Let’s say you had a secure attachment to your parents when you’re a child. That means you had sensitive parenting, they were aware of your emotional and physical needs, and met those needs. You were secure, you did not suffer anxiety, you did not suffer abandonment. That’s bathing your brain in oxytocin and dopamine and beta endorphin, and you’re producing low levels of cortisol, you’re producing this highly efficient brain, you’re not going to see neuronal death, which is what happens with neglect. When you go forward, you’re going to have the biological underpinnings and the psychological underpinnings to be able to build good attachments, to build healthy relationships, and know when a relationship is not healthy for you, in which case you should leave.
 
Unfortunately, the opposite happens. We see brains bathed in a high degree of cortisol. We see active neuronal death, which means you see reductions in gray and white matter in those pro-social areas of the brain. They do not go forward with those abilities to do all that, to do the reciprocity, the trust, the empathy. The behavior they have watched, which is relationship behavior, is not good and that’s something that they will replicate going forward. But they also do not have the powerful biological underpinnings to enable them to be able to have good relationships.
 
You say we underestimate the love that comes from friendships. That might be starting to change. There was a widely read article in The Atlantic recently that touched on this titled, “It’s Your Friends That Break Your Heart: The older we get, the more we need our friends and the harder it is to keep them.” How does that headline strike you?
 
AM : We tend to privilege romantic relationships and maybe parental relationships, but we take our friendships for granted. But they are incredibly important to you. They are the only platonic relationships you get to choose yourself. You don’t get to choose your family but you get to actively choose your friends. In fact, our research shows that you are much more similar to your friends than you are to your lover. If you’re a woman, you are more emotionally intimate with your friends than you are with your lover. If you’re a man, your friends bring this ease of being able to really be you.
 
So our friends provide a lot to us. And we neglect our friendships at our peril because often our friendships outlast our romantic relationships, and they are the ones that are really your stable foundation. You need them in your life for your mental health, your physical health, for your longevity, and your well-being. But I do think we underestimate them. I interview so many people for my research, and particularly when I interview British people, I’ll ask them, “Do you love your friends?” And they’ll go, “Hmmm, I don’t know whether I love them.” And then I’ll say, “Well, do you love your dog?” “Oh God, yeah! I love my dog.” And it’s just this thing that we don’t consider the fact that we could love our friends. And I think that’s maybe a peculiarly British thing that’s quite restrained that we wouldn’t admit that.
 
The philosopher Alain de Botton has argued that romanticism has severely distorted how people think about love and what to expect from it. What do you think of that?
 
AM : I agree with him. The narrative is unhelpful. This idea of the chivalrous prince rescuing his princess from a castle. It sets up an incredibly idealistic view and very gendered view of what romantic love is, which doesn’t reflect the reality for most people. The idea that there is the one—well, we can quite clearly tell from the inputs that go into what attracts people that there’s more than one person in the world for you. Also, from an anthropological and sociological point of view, it’s a narrative that works for society because it’s a controlled narrative: We can have everybody pairing up with one other person and we set in place all these rules. We have these zero-sum ideas of love. But the idea of romantic love doesn’t reflect the reality of people’s existence, particularly with increasing singledom. The idea that romantic love is the most powerful love is unhelpful because it demotes all the other ways that you can love in your life. And none of them are weaker than romantic love, but we seem to think that they’re not as good. They’re not as important.
 
The narrative also doesn’t help people get out of abusive relationships. If you tell a child that love is like a fairy tale, you’ll get swept off your feet, that love lasts against all odds and will help get over any hurdle, that doesn’t help in the context of abuse. It leads to the idea that you have no control over this person that is abusing you. When you do. So it’s a really unhelpful narrative. And it’s a narrative that’s spun mostly today by commerce. You can have the perfect wedding with your soulmate. That’s the be-all-and-end-all of life. I sound cynical, but I completely agree that romantic love is not a helpful narrative.
 
Has becoming scientifically knowledgeable about love affected your personal relationships in any way?
 
AM : It hasn’t affected it in a negative way at all. People say, “Well, it must have been because you spend your life in cold science, analyzing what love is.” I think if that’s all I did, I think it would. I think if you reduced it constantly to a set of neurochemicals or a genetic driver, I think maybe you would. But because I do it from an anthropological perspective, and spend a lot of time talking to people about their love, I just find love an amazing phenomenon. The more I study it, the more in awe I am of its complexity in the human species.

Love Is Biological Bribery.  Evolution uses all its tricks to make sure we procreate. But love in humans is a many-splendored thing. By  Brian Gallagher. Nautilus,  February 14, 2022

I have spent much of the past decade talking to people about love. I make it clear that any type of love is a welcome topic but when I ask what love is, my interviewees often shoot straight to romantic love. This is partly down to the inadequacy of our language: that small word has to do a lot of heavy lifting. But it is also because of the multibillion-pound industry that has convinced us the search for “the one” is the be-all and end-all. Mention love and that’s where we immediately go.

 
But does this obsession with romantic love still reflect the lives we lead? In my new book, Why We Love: The New Science Behind our Closest Relationships, I have spoken to people from different backgrounds who have made me rethink our acceptance of romantic love as the dominant narrative. For some it is not a priority, for others it is a restrictive stereotype, while for others it can be a source of risk. As Valentine’s Day comes round again maybe it’s time for a different perspective.
 
Human love is a special thing, unique in its longevity and the sheer number of beings we are capable of loving. We can love our family, our friends, our lovers. We can also love across the species boundary and the spiritual divide. And as AI romps ahead it may be that one day we can find love with an avatar or robot.
 
In part, writing my book was driven by a desire, born of a decade of research, to get us to re-engage with and celebrate the different types of love in our lives. All forms of love carry the same joys and benefits as romantic love. In some cases, such as with our best friends, the love we have for them can be more emotionally intimate and less stress inducing than any we have with a lover.
 
Demographic data shows that the downgrading of romantic love is, to some extent, already happening. Figures from the Office for National Statistics and Relate show that by 2039, one in seven people in the UK will be living alone and today only one in six people believe in “the one”.
 
This change is particularly striking for women. Go back 100 years and your survival was predicated on finding a man who would support you and your inevitable brood of children. But with emancipation and the arrival of contraception women can choose not to partner themselves to anyone else and can remain happily child-free.
 
Instead, they can build loving relationships with other people and beings who are capable of fulfilling all their needs. Relationships, science shows us, are underpinned by the same biological and psychological mechanisms and are as beneficial to health and wellbeing as romantic love. Any hierarchy of importance is a cultural construct.
 
Even when we consider romantic love there is a spectrum of opportunity beyond monogamy which we rarely acknowledge. At one end are the aromantics who do not experience romantic love. It shows how far we have swallowed the romantic love narrative that they are characterised as being cold and unloving. But my aromantic interviewees do not lack love. They have full and loving lives, with family, friends, even queer platonic partners with whom they may have children. Their main issue is navigating a world where every person, every media outlet appears to be obsessed with romantic love.
 
At the other end of the spectrum are the polyamorists. A group who experience romantic and sexual love with more than one partner. Again, the all-pervasive narrative of romantic love has led us to depict those who practise polyamory in a less than favourable light. They are characterised as being promiscuous, immoral, untrustworthy and dissatisfied.

 
But to be successful, polyamorous relationships have to be based on trust, truth and open communication. They are moral because love for another is openly acknowledged rather than hidden in the secret of an affair. And while people can stay in monogamous relationships because of the legal ties that bind them, polyamorists recommit to their relationships every day.
 
The power of the romantic narrative to drive dating behaviour and commerce is clear but it may also have darker consequences. In 2017 the testimony of 15 women regarding intimate partner violence (IPV) was published. It was clear that one of the issues with IPV was the stories these women had heard about what love was. Love overcomes all obstacles and must be maintained at all costs (even when you’re being abused). Love is about losing control, being swept off your feet, having no say in who you fall for (even if they are violent). Lovers protect each other, fight for each other to the end (even against the authorities who are trying to protect you). It is interesting to contemplate the power of our words. We speak without thinking but the stories we tell our children have consequences.
 
Perhaps when ones survival, social standing and acceptance is predicated on coupling up, the obsession with romantic love is understandable. And it will always have a place in the spectrum of love. But we can experience love in so many different ways that we underestimate, even neglect. We are missing out on so much.
 
Maybe it’s time to admit that for a significant number of people romantic love is no longer the ultimate goal, that Valentine’s Day is a commercial invention that has run its course and that we need to embrace all the opportunities for love in our lives to fully experience what it is to be human. It’s time for an inclusive celebration of love rather than an exclusive one. Time for a rebrand.
 
Romantic love isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Here’s why we don’t need it. By Anna Machin. The Guardian, February 13, 2022. 

Friends bring a sense of freedom and relaxation to our lives. This may be in part because we are likely to pick friends who are similar to ourselves—the concept of homophily. So we tend to select friends with whom we share our sex, ethnicity and age, our behavior, personality and degree of altruism. Indeed, my colleague Robin Dunbar, who has spent many decades exploring the dynamics of human relationships, has identified seven pillars of friendship; the more pillars you share, the stronger the friendship and greater the love. These are: language, where you grew up, educational history, hobbies or interests, musical taste, sense of humor and your world-view.

 
It is argued that such homophily has a psychological and evolutionary benefit. In the first instance, choosing friends who are like us reinforces our views and beliefs, making us feel more confident in our identity. But it also allows us to cut down on the precious energy—known as the cognitive load—we devote to trying to predict what they may think or do next because, due to the similarity, they are most likely to do or think exactly what we would do or think in the same circumstances. And for the first time, the idea that friends think alike has some solid evidence from the scanning room.
 
In 2018 psychologists Carolyn Parkinson, Adam Kleinbaum and Thalia Wheatley set out to explore whether the homophily we exhibit with our closest friends was reflected in a similarity in the way we perceive, interpret and respond to the world. Was the ease of relationship we find with our friends partly down to the fact that we just think the same way?
 
They recruited 279 students—the entire cohort from one year of a graduate program. They asked the students to complete a questionnaire listing everyone on the program who they would deem to be a friend. They then set about, with the welcome help of a computer, creating a social network for the class, illustrating every link, or tie, between the students. Their prediction was that the closer two people were to each other in the network, indicating a stronger tie, the more similar their neural response would be.
 
Placing 279 students in an fMRI scanner would have been prohibitively expensive, so a subset of 42 students was used for the scanning study. Once in the scanner, everyone watched the same set of videos in the same order. Videos were chosen to cover a range of topics and to be sufficiently gripping so as not to encourage the mind to wander. And what the researchers saw confirmed their hunch: that homophily extends beyond hobbies, ethnicity, age or sex to include our brains. The signals seen in the brains of friends—both in the unconscious and conscious brain—were more similar than those between people who were more distant in the network. And to test their model they viewed paired sets of neural activity scans, and just by establishing how similar or different these scans were, they could predict how close the two people were in the network. Now that is a concrete finding.
 
The question remains: do we become friends with those who think the way we do, or by being friends do we come to perceive, interpret and respond to the world in a similar way simply by being together? Because this study only allowed us to glimpse a snapshot in time, the answer is unclear. We would have to follow a friendship from its very moment of creation. But, as with all things human, it is probably a bit of both—a degree of homophily and the influence a friendship brings to bear on shaping our behavior and psychology.
 
The Future is Single
 
There is a weird idea that you are supposed to get everything from your romantic relationship but I realize the huge amount of love I have in my life. I do miss having a very specific romantic connection, but I feel the love of my friends. Living in a house share with real friends makes me realize that a lot of what I thought I wanted from a relationship was a close, daily friendship really and I get a lot of that from my house share.
 
–Margaret
 
Why do I argue that neglecting your friends places you at considerable risk? Because for a significant number of people their friends fulfill the role of a romantic partner, a child and even a whole family in their lives. They are your survival-critical relationships. Recent data from the 2015 US census has predicted that six percent of the current adult US population will remain single for their entire life. Now obviously some of these will have children—a particular interest of mine is the rise of the platonic co-parenting relationship—but for the majority this means no lover and no kids. In this case, two groups of people become the key attachment figures who will underscore your health and happiness as an adult. Your siblings—if you have them and get on with them—and your best friend or friends.

 
Research on the power of the attachment between friends is only in its early days, but in her 2017 study looking at the role of best friends and siblings in the lives of female singles, New-York-based psychologist Claudia Brumbaugh found that best friends played a crucial role both because of our close similarity to them and our freedom to choose them. The larger a single person’s friendship network, the less likely they were to exhibit an avoidant attachment style. And it would appear that our friends may know us at least as well as we know ourselves.
 
In their study of the brain activity associated with considering our own personality—self-referential thinking—and the brain activity of a peer considering our personality, the brain activity is strikingly similar. Psychologists Robert Chavez and Dylan Wagner recruited a small but tightly knit network of 11 students, five of whom were female. Having completed the usual battery of questionnaires, each participant was placed in the scanner and directed to think about their own personality and that of each of their ten peers. When scans were compared, the brain pattern seen when an individual—let’s call them A—reflected on their own personality matched that of the pattern seen in the scans for their ten peers when they were also thinking of A’s personality, but not when they thought about the personalities of the other members in the group, say B or C. This study shows us not only that, again, friends show synchronous activity when attending to the same task but that our friends definitely know us at least as well as we know ourselves.
 
 
Friendship, Love and Prosecco
 
Nick is the quintessential best friend. We have known each other since school. We have had many many experiences and memories together and he is someone I can always turn to for a chat… someone to lift me up, to brighten me up. He is one of the people I am my truest self to. The closer the guys get, the more shit they give each other, and with me and him nothing is off the cards, everything is up for debate.
 
–Matt
 
Claudia’s study focused on the friendships amongst female participants, and it is the case that there is a sex difference in both the number and nature of the relationships we build with friends and, maybe, in the love we experience with them. Repeated studies have shown that men’s friendship groups are less tightly bonded and are less emotionally close than those between women. And while it is very likely that a woman can identify a best friend or two, this tends to be anathema to a lot of men. While men like to carry out activities with their friends, women tend to prefer the opportunity to share intimate chats. Why do we see this difference? It might all lie in the impact our neurochemistry has on us.
 
In 2018 a group of Chinese researchers, led by Xiaole Ma, reported in the journal NeuroImage the findings of a study that aimed to explore the different impact the administration of synthetic oxytocin would have upon the experience of emotional sharing in men and women. They recruited 128 pairs of same-sex close friends and, having placed one in an fMRI scanner and another in an adjoining room, showed both a set of images of people, landscapes and animals selected to represent three points on the emotion spectrum: positive, negative and neutral. Some of the pairs had been administered with a nasal spray of oxytocin, while others had been given a placebo. Having completed the task with their friend, they then completed it with a stranger and then alone.
 
What Xiaole and her team found was that where women were sharing the experience of watching the images with a friend, and had been given oxytocin, their experience was significantly more positive than if they had done so with a stranger or alone. This seemed to have been underpinned by a reduction in the activity of the amygdala—the site of our negative emotions, including fear and anxiety—and an increase of activity in the reward centers of the brain, which was, in all likelihood, reflecting the release of dopamine which accompanies any increase in oxytocin. This is the fingerprint of unconscious love.
 
However, the same could not be true of men. In this case, activity in the amygdala increased. It would appear that women gain a considerable benefit from sharing emotional experiences with their female friends—reduced fear and anxiety and an increased positive mood—which might explain why we relish the opportunity to catch up over a glass of prosecco and why our conversations tend to focus on the emotional and intimate, whereas men prefer to avoid these occasions at all costs and head for the football field or meet in a large group of friends instead. Can we say, then, that for women there is such a thing as friendship love but not for men? I think this is very unlikely to be the case, but until we place a man in a scanner and recreate the relationship he has with his team of mates in the lab the jury is still out.
 
Excerpted from Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships by Dr. Anna Machin.
 
How Important Is It to Be Friends with Yourself? Dr. Anna Machin on Platonic Love and Choosing Friends. LitHub, February 11, 2022.

What can the social and life sciences tell us about the most fundamental and unquantifiable human experience—love? Anna Manchin, evolutionary anthropologist at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, England, is interested in the the the most inclusive possible answer, one that, unlike previous books on the subject, considers friendship and family on par with romantic love, as well as polyamory, chosen families, queer love, and touchingly, the love we feel for pets, celebrities, and deities. 

Why We Love: An Afternoon with Dr. Anna Machin and Robin Dunbar. Books & Books, February 10, 2022. 

Weidenfeld and Nicholson 

Love is unpredictable and complex. After spending many years researching its layers, I remain in awe of how it engages every mechanism in our bodies and infiltrates every aspect of our lives. But for a species like ours that craves certainty, this can cause all sorts of problems.
 
The first recorded evidence for an “elixir of love” dates back to 4000 years ago. Ready access to love drugs is at most a decade away. Indeed, they are already being used therapeutically to support couples in the US.
 
The experience of love is underpinned by four neurochemicals: oxytocin, dopamine, beta-endorphin and serotonin. Oxytocin is key at the start of relationships because it lowers our inhibitions to making new bonds, then dopamine motivates and rewards us for carrying out this survival critical behaviour. Serotonin underpins the obsessive elements of love, while beta-endorphin addicts us to love in the long term.
 
Drugs that may be capable of mimicking love are already in use. The first, oxytocin, is utilised to induce labour, but research shows that it can also increase sociability, trust and empathy. The second is recreational drug MDMA or ecstasy, which is capable of inducing euphoria, empathy and love for our fellow humans.
 
Arguably, taking a drug to induce or maintain love is no different to taking an antidepressant, because both supplement neurochemicals that naturally exist in our bodies. Add to this the link between having healthy relationships and good mental and physical well-being, and prescribing these drugs could revolutionise someone’s quality of life. But whether these drugs work is dependent on the individual.
 
For a significant minority of people, recent research has found that oxytocin leads to increased social confidence and trust, meaning that they are more likely to form new relationships. For some, it has the opposite effect and studies have shown that it can cause negative interactions and even racism. Some people feel the impact of MDMA and others don’t.
 
This raises many ethical questions. It might be fine to decide to take a love drug yourself, because that is your risk, but is it fair when it affects someone else’s life? Where there are power imbalances in a relationship, or even abuse, could one party be coerced by the other to take the drug? And what if one of you stops and the other doesn’t?
 
Those who argue for the use of love drugs sometimes say these risks are minimal because use of the drugs would be regulated. But this is an overly utopian view of the world and our behaviour.
 
While being in love is wonderful, losing love can be debilitating. Drugs might be able to help here too. What if we could find a drug that would inhibit our feelings of love or erase painful memories?
 
One possibility is antidepressants known as SSRIs. People who take them for depression report loss of libido and reduced emotional reactions. Could we harness these aspects and, with a bit of tweaking, make a love-inhibiting drug? Maybe. But anecdotal evidence – reported in Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu’s book Love is the Drug – that SSRIs are being prescribed to young men in strict religious communities to repress homosexuality should sound a warning bell. Not everyone will stick to prescribing rules.
 
With all innovations comes the responsibility to explore both the positives and negatives of their impact. Technology has revolutionised how we find love in the past 20 years: tests for genetic compatibility are now commercially available.
 
Love is so central to our lives that it is crucial that we decide what we would accept and what is unconscionable before the juggernaut of science and commerce runs away with us.
 
Love drugs are coming and they bring big ethical problems with them.  Drugs to help people fall in love are increasingly becoming viable, but they could cause harm as well as happiness, says Anna Machin.

New Scientist, February 9, 2022.

 Website Anna Machin