Love’s a tough thing to get any kind of grasp on to be honest. It means so many things to so many people. A real blanket term.
I suppose the kind of love that immediately springs to mind is the classic romantic movie kind. And I’m guessing this is the type the pharmacists are busy trying to bottle.
Let’s say they succeed and the fairytale love potion becomes reality, along with its antidote, as if it were a poison lol, though from the op, its not so much presented as an antidote but more as an ameliorative agent to ease the feelings of heartache and loss when love ends or is cut short.
I’ve been heart broken twice. It hurts I’ll admit. Not forever, though who knows…? Those two times were due to break ups from short(ish) relationships. Perhaps my heart only got cracked a little. It was all a long long time ago. Thirty goddamn years.
Would I have taken an anti-heartache pill at the time…? Hmm. Dunno. Maybe.
“Love is a religion of two.” Popped into my head fairly early on this morning when I was thinking about what my experience of love has been. Also it struck me that this is one subject that has very, very few experts lol. Say you want to be a doctor. 6 years of medical school, and still all you’re good for is an internship as a glorified stethoscope holder following a real doc around the wards. I didn’t really become anything approaching a good teacher until I’d been doing it for 10 years. How many people experience 10 year plus relationships these days…?
Sorry, wandering. So, on the horror story side. Someone spikes your drink with testube love. Boom, you’re in love with Spike the spiker. Depending on how well, how authentic a breed of love the dose engenders, would you even care if you’d been spiked or not…? Love overcomes all etc.
I don’t think you would. I think you’d go home with spike, and as long as Spike was even a half decent match, didn’t live on skid row with rats and have facial tattoos, I think you’d give it a go. How sad a thought is that. If you are single, you are astonishingly vunerable to love, whether you want it or not, whether you think you are ready or not, deserving or not, doesn’t matter - we are all at home to Mr. Cupid. Thinking back on how some of my relationships began - the utter randomness involved, the awesomely short amount of time it sometimes took to transition from single to not single - We are all potentially only an hour or so away from happy ever after.
Scary thoughts. Your friend tries to rescue you. Tries to give you the antidote. I think many would not only refuse but fight like hell not to take it.
Imagine if you are in a wonderful, loving relationship, something that is possibly the absolute center of your life, and someone comes along with a needle that will suddenly take all that away… If you’re not, imagine then that someone doses you with something and suddenly, you don’t love your mother anymore. Or your sister. Or your child…
How hard would you fight against that…?
Scenario 2. The love addicts. You have your love potion. You have your unlove potion. You have a free weekend, you have Tinder. Why not fall deeply in love, and be over it by work on monday…? Why not do that every goddamn weekend…? Why not get so used to doing that, that when you fall in love the old-fashioned way, by accident, you automatically unlove yourself in the groggy depths of monday morning…?
Scenario 3. For the love of big brother. Trump sees his popularity rating is trailing off. Time to love bomb the country.
The possibilities for abuse are insane.
But then, that movie-star love, that first blooming of love’s sweet blossom, the first embered breath of love’s flame, that kaboom in the club at 3am in the morning. Is that all love is really…?
Eh. Love’s seed perhaps. Love’s conception. Love before it can walk and wipe its own bottom.
Love is a religion of two. I’m old. 50 and a bit. I’ve been married now for 24 years. Couple more years and I will have been married for longer than I’ve not. To the same woman even. Attention span of a Brontosaurus, even more so when you think I’ve spend my life in classrooms surrounded by 18 year old students with daddy issues. (Did that sound creepy…? Yeah, it did. Ouch. Sorry, I meant to imply that me and my wife don’t stay together because we are so desperately ugly no-one else could be with either of us and still keep their lunch down, and that we don’t live on a desert island with a collection of feral cats).
We love each other even when we don’t love each other very much. Peaks and troughs etc. We believe in each other I guess is the most honest way to put it. Our house is our church, and our holy book is a photograph album full of pictures of us looking less wrinkly.
That, I think, is beyond the skills of a chemist.