by ANGELA CHEN
Stop that! The Kiss by Francesco Hayez, 1859 IMAGE/Corbis
Passion stabs, unrequited love hurts and taboo desires can torment the spirit. Is it time to fix our love lives for good?
mer Bonne means well; that much is certain. As director of psychiatry at Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Hospital, Bonne has seen patients – young men – come in again and again to treat the problem of their shameful, too-high sex drives. And Bonne has a ready solution: Prozac.
Prozac is one of the antidepressants that Bonne and other rabbis have prescribed to yeshiva students, not because they are depressed but because such drugs have the well-known side effect of lowering libido. Bonne believes, as reported in 2012 by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, that these sexual desires put conservative Jews ‘in conflict with their values and cause them mental problems, even to the point of depression’. In the face of societal stigma and the frustration of betraying one’s religious values, he thinks it only humane to do what is necessary to soothe these urges and make life easier.
Bonne isn’t the only one using drugs to control sex drive and attraction. Oral naltrexone, a medication that treats addiction by chemically blocking narcotics, has also been used to suppress an addiction to internet pornography..Lupron, a prostate cancer therapy that suppresses sex hormones, is now being used to chemically castrate men with sex addiction. These are initial, clumsy examples of how we may one day use drugs to more directly manipulate our experiences of love and desire. The possibilities are many: a spray that stops us from feeling pain over a breakup; pills that permit someone to fall out of love with, and then leave, an abusive partner; a vaccine to immunise us from desire, leaving more space for creative work and less to cheat on a spouse.
Tampering chemically with love – whether easing a painful, unrequited obsession or changing one’s sexual orientation – is seen as taboo because society now places love in an exalted category all of its own. We see whom we love and how we love as among the most important parts of our identity. Love trumps most of our other values, such as ambition or even the desire to be free from suffering. Doctors readily prescribe drugs to heal bodily injuries so we can be in control of our bodies. Activists fight to de-stigmatise medication that helps mental-health problems.
Love alone is untouchable, one of the last frontiers where the ability to manipulate or shun an experience seems to be asking for too much – but why? Love is in many ways a chemical reaction, and when love causes intense suffering or conflicts deeply with other values, people who want a chemical solution should, providing they give informed consent, have one. Access to anti-love drugs could bring some of us closer to one of the core values of Western society: personal autonomy, and a future where we control our lives and become the people we most want to be.
By insisting that no one can opt-out of the love experience, suffering and all, we often ignore the very real damage that love can cause simply because the source of the damage is seen as so necessary. When it comes to deciding whether to treat suffering, we hold the pain caused by love to a standard much higher than the pain from many other conditions, even as anthropologists and doctors argue that the experience of love can function as an addiction, or a mental illness – and even when suicide can result.
Everything that happens with romantic love has a chemical basis, says Helen Fisher, a bio-anthropologist who is one of the world’s leading authorities on love. For instance, researchers know that the neurotransmitter dopamine promotes pair bonding and monogamy. In a series of studies with prairie voles starting from 2003 to the present day, University of Michigan researchers have shown that males injected with a dopamine blocker became less monogamous. Fisher has repeatedly stated that love acts like an addiction because not only do people in love act like those with an addiction, but fMRI studies show that feelings of romantic love activate the same regions of the brain as those activated by substance addictions. She frequently compares the pain of a devastating breakup to the pain of drug withdrawal, but doctors are far more likely to see the latter as rightfully deserving a treatment such as naltrexone.
It has come to pass, writes the cultural theorist Laura Kipnis, that ‘saying no to love… isn’t just heresy; it’s tragedy: for our sort the failure to achieve what is most essentially human.’ To opt out of this one experience is to be monstrous, a loser, someone who must be fixed.
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