Is love really a drug?

Chris Smith asked comedian Rosie Wilby...

Rosie - There's actually an anthropologist, Helen Fisher, who's done an immense amount of work into the stages of love when we go through lust, love, and attachment. And in fact, there are different chemical states of the brain that are attached to these different stages and they're very distinct separate stages. So it does actually mean that being a human being, having a monogamous lifelong relationship is pretty challenging because you can be in love with one person, in lust with another and attached to another one. So it makes marriage and monogamy quite challenging and tricky. And so indeed we do become so attached to our partners as we get longer established into a relationship, we are releasing these very addictive opiates. And we all quite literally, as Paula mentions, suffer a withdrawal when that person is suddenly removed from our lives. Particularly if you are the person who thought the relationship was going along swimmingly and the other person has maybe dumped you by email like I was many, many years ago.

Chris - You're not sour about it at all?

Rosie - We like to joke, laugh at ourselves about the breakups and the way we respond to them and not have goodies and baddies and heroes and villains. And I joke that I felt much better once I'd corrected her spelling, which was actually fine, but it's more a joke about my own pedantry. I changed the font as well. Wingdings was far preferable.

Chris - One of my friends, who I worked with, failed a medical exam and she actually said she felt like she'd been publicly dumped when she got the results of the exam. It's like a personal affront. I wonder therefore, if our love for our subject and the things we do a lot, as well as being in love with other people, whether subjects work the same way and our hobbies and so on.

Rosie - Definitely. Anything that we become attached to. And what I've been particularly fascinated in is how the relationships that don't even get started are some of the ones that we become the most attached to. And if you visit the Museum of Broken Relationships, which is in Zagreb, in Croatia, not in Split, which would've been brilliant, some of the exhibits that have the most heartfelt dedications next to them are the ones where somebody maybe met somebody and they thought they were amazing, that was the person for them, but no relationship actually really happened. It's like this sort of unopened Christmas present full of potential that never gets explored. You never take the rose tinted glasses off.

Chris - Best breakup story on the breakup monologues?

Rosie - Well, there've been so many, and I'd love people to listen to the podcast, but there was a very dramatic one from a friend of mine where her boyfriend went off on his bike after she had dumped him and he was involved in an accident. And when she got to the hospital,

Chris - She apologised for loosening the wheels?

Rosie - <laugh>. When she got to the hospital and all his family were there, nobody knew that she had broken up with him. And when he awoke from his coma, he'd forgotten that she'd broken up with him as well, <laugh>. And so she had to stay with him for a little bit longer.

Chris - That's a great story. Does this mean also, Paula goes on to say, could we combat rejection in love in the same way that we treat people who have drug addictions then?

Rosie - What's really interesting is something that I have done episodes about and written about in the book is the area of research that a neuro ethicist I know is looking into and into the idea of love drugs and anti love drugs, which would either help us to stay in a relationship, drugs like MDMA, which before it became outlawed as a rave drug, were used in couples therapy and drugs like SSRI antidepressants, which could be used as a sort of anti love drug, which would help you attach, uncouple from perhaps an abusive partner who you don't want to feel this sense that you must stay with

Phil - It's kind of interesting that you mentioned MDMA there, because we just had the news. I don't know if it was last week or the week before, Australia has started or has enabled the use of MDMA and psilocybin from magic mushrooms for various mental health conditions.

Chris - Yeah, that's absolutely right. It was the end of June. The regulator in Australia allowed the use, under certain conditions, of those two agents, ecstasy and psilocybin. It's quite good literature though, supporting their use in people with really profound depression states where they appear to get really quite good benefit from using them. The interesting thing about ecstasy is that Merck, the drug company that invented that in about the early 1900s, around the time of World War I, they were looking for drugs that would suppress hunger among troops and they gave him a load of ecstasy and then discovered they didn't want to fight anymore!