OK, not a pill, but rather, a dose of intranasal oxytocin, the love hormone? Honey, let me just grab a squirt of Flonase to keep my allergies at bay, and a quick hit of StaTru so I don’t fall out of love with you! That’s basically the idea behind some new research that aims to find out whether marriages could stay intact if couples had a little bit of help from their biochemical friend, oxytocin. The idea is intriguing — I’m picturing Ritalin’s laser-like focus, only for relationships — but it prompts a lot of questions and musings about what “true love” really is.
First of all, we’re bad at long-term romance, say researchers at the University of Oxford in a paper preview called “Could intranasal oxytocin be used to enhance relationships?” About half of marriages end in divorce with 20% to 72% of husbands straying alongside 10% to 54% of wives. People mean well, they want to stay together, but shit is hard, people change, life happens and there’s always biology there to fuck your shit up.
The fragility of our arrangement, the researchers note, is thanks to some “deeply-rooted disparities” between our high-minded ideals and low-minded loins.
Natural selection did not shape our basic mating strategies—nor our underlying brain chemistry—to foster life-long, monogamous matrimony in the modern world, but rather to promote the reproductive success of our progenitors in the environment of the Pleistocene.
We were only supposed to stick together to get a baby through its most vulnerable period, see. And that, as far as pair bonding was concerned, was all she wrote. Oh sure, you might see your Pleistocene-era baby daddy across the watering hole years later and wave hello, a little nostalgia in your eyes for the way you were, but oh well/starcrossed cave love/etc.
But that was then. We obviously moved on and decided pairing off 4-life had benefits, too: notably, a longer lifespan, not to mention increased wellbeing on multiple levels.
Nice idea! say the researchers. But not necessarily our most realistic innovation:
This discrepancy between the blind goals of natural selection and the conscious values of modern couples—and the societies in which they conduct their relationships—results in a serious tension.
And not just from the wrestling with one’s commitment versus one’s individual desires, but also how fucked everyone is, especially children, when it doesn’t work out. Most people want to be married, the researchers posit, but only 37% of couples “claim to be very happy in their marriages.”
From there, they knock down what might be all our most obvious retorts:
People can work harder on their relationships!
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
