Love in a nasal spray

Relationships, enough said.

Everybody knows the trials and tribulations of being in a relationship. When they’re going good, they’re utterly amazing. When they’re going bad, they’re nauseating.

While leafing through the Globe and Mail , my attention was grabbed by this headline: “Commitment serum.” After laughing hysterically for a few minutes thinking it was a total joke, I realized that it was sort of tempting.

Could it be that they’ve finally found a cure for commitment phobia? A harmless chemically altering pill that will have every man bending down on one knee?

While tampering with the hormones in voles, Dr. Larry Young who is a neuroscientist at the Emory University in Atlanta, was able to turn the rowdy rodents into monogamous pairs. The hormone oxytocin, which was used in the voles, is the same hormone that helps women bond with their babies during delivery.

Dr. Young believes that this hormone, or “love potion” if you will, could be the answer to marital woes. One squirt of oxytocin in your nose-the test drug is in nasal spray form, by the way-and presto! You’ll be a Stepford wife. Or husband.

After reading about this, I daydreamed over which Vera Wang wedding dress I would wear down the aisle once I got my hands on some of this love juice. But then something squirmed in my stomach. Was it the tuna sandwich I just ate? No. It was guilt.

No matter how tempting it would be to simply “drug” my potential partner into walking down the aisle, I just wouldn’t be able to do it. Even if I was married for forty years and things went wrong, I wouldn’t let my husband take a pill so that he would stay in love with me.

In a society that has altering pills for almost everything, from depression to anxiety, love is one emotion that I think should be left alone.

Besides, what ever happened to trying to work out your problems-you know, the way that involves yelling matches and the resulting box of “I’m sorry chocolates?”

Yeah, I don’t think I would trade those post-squabble, Bernard Callebaut goodies for anything.