If I Could Just Stop Loving You: Anti-Love Biotechnology and the Ethics of a Chemical Breakup

Figures & data

Box 1 What is love?

As the Oxford English Dictionary would have it, love is “a strong feeling of affection” sometimes with “sexual attraction.” To poets like Charles Burkowski, “Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.” Ambrose Bierce takes a more cynical view: “Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”

Love, then, has different meanings—and there is no authoritative definition to which we can appeal. As Karin Weis states, “Love is not a uniform phenomenon. There are countless variations on the forms [pair-based] relationships can take [and] just as diverse as the appearances of love are the theories of love that try to fathom it” (see Sternberg and Weis 2006, 2–3).

In this article, we focus primarily on a psycho-biological account of love. This account suggests that the complex feelings, motivations, and interpersonal attachments that one would typically associate with the word “love” are actually grounded in, and in fact emerge from, a suite of neurochemical and behavioral subsystems that evolved to promote the reproductive success of our ancestors (e.g., Kenrick 2006). How, precisely, these underlying systems relate to “higher order” conceptions (and subjective experiences) of love is not yet fully understood—but it is clear by now that they do relate. Thus, while we do not claim that “love” is reducible to brain-states—at least not in any straightforward, non-trivial way—we will attempt to defend the view that brain-level, neurochemical interventions can affect feelings of love, in roughly systematic ways, according to a wide range of conceptual definitions.

As a consequence of this approach, when we refer to “everyday” or folk experiences and understandings in this article, we will use words like “love,” “devotion”, and “attachment” more or less interchangeably. When describing neurochemical subsystems associated with love, however, we will employ a more precise and consistent scientific nomenclature.

Sternberg , R. and Weis , K. 2006 . The new psychology of love. , New Haven , CT : Yale University Press .

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Kenrick , D. 2006 . “ A dynamical evolutionary view of love ” . In The new psychology of love , Edited by: Sternberg , R. , Weis , K. , Sternberg , R. and Weis , K. 15 – 34 . New Haven , CT : Yale University Press .

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