Call me old fashioned, but the prospect of taking a drug to prolong feelings of love—or mute the pain of a breakup—sounds like a creepy, high-minded cop out to avoid experiencing the full panoply of human emotions. However well intentioned it may be, technology like this would be ripe for abuse:

Perhaps we could design "love drugs," pharmaceutical cocktails that could boost affection between partners, whisking them back to the exquisite set of pleasures that colored their first years together. The ability to do this kind of fine-tuned emotional engineering is beyond the power of current science, but there is a growing field of research devoted to it. Some have even suggested developing "anti-love drugs" that could dissolve abusive relationships, or reduce someone's attachment to a charismatic cult leader. Others just want a pill to ease the pain of a wrenching breakup.

... At first blush, love may seem like a poor prospect for pharmacological intervention. The reflexive dualist in us wants to say that romantic relationships are matters of the soul, and that souls ought to be free of medical tinkering. Oxford ethicist Brian Earp argues that we should resist these intuitions, and be open to the upswing in human well-being that successful love drugs could bring about. Over a series of several papers, Earp and his colleagues, Anders Sandberg and Julian Savulescu, make a convincing case that couples should be free to use "love drugs," and that in some cases, they may be morally obligated to do so...

Go read the whole thing, which includes a fascinating Q&A with ethicist Earp about other potential uses for love drugs, including helping apathetic mothers bond with their offspring. Then tickle me perturbed.