The Brave New World of Chemical Romance

With Hamilton on my mind, I had a fanciful thought while reading the new book Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships. The Founding Father, stressed and tired and focused on getting his bill for a national bank through Congress, could have saved himself a lot of grief if, in his moment of weakness with the temptress Maria Reynolds, he’d had an anti-love drug to cool his loins. Instead his response to her feminine wiles, as conjured by Lin-Manuel Miranda, is to pray, “Lord, show me how to say no to this.” It didn’t prove effective.

Love drugs harken back to fairytale fantasies about potions and spells, but the notion isn’t purely fiction. The authors of Love Drugs—Julian Savulescu, an Oxford philosopher, and Brian Earp, a Yale doctoral candidate in philosophy and psychology—make plain that our brain’s love, lust, and attachment systems can be affected by real-life neuro-technologies. With cogent arguments, vivid experimental detail, and engaging storytelling, the authors show that chemical interventions to foster, enhance, and diminish love will only become more sophisticated as scientists discern the biochemical nature of the romantic bond.

Aficionados of Aldous Huxley’s and will find both entertaining and sobering. In fact, was almost titled . “There is a part of me that still prefers ,” Earp says. “I think a lot of people think this is a pro-love drugs book. We tried not to says, ‘There’s a real danger here.’ Maybe if I could wave a magic wand I’d go back to . But it is what it is.”