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Are Love Potions Impossible?

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Page 1: Are Love Potions Impossible?

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February 14, 2008 (page A13)

IT'S A NOTION, NOT A POTION

By: Timothy Chambers

As Valentine's Day approaches, many people's thoughts turn to love. My own thoughtsturn to love potions: those bromides of yore which, as happy legend has it, inspire their 

imbibers with instant infatuation.

Literary treatments of such libations are often light-hearted. Shakespeare, for instance,

employs a love potion to heighten the farce in his "Midsummer Night's Dream." Hedepicts the potion poetically: "The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid Will make . . . man

or woman madly dote Upon the next live creature that it sees."

With all due respect to the Bard, though, I've long wrangled with the dark side of such

elixirs. If love could emerge from a bottle, rather than the heart, I worry that the upshotwould be a ghoulish one.

A student of mine once wondered what the big deal was. On her telling, love was a mere

metabolic urge, caused by a person's endocrine system. "If hormones give us no choiceover who we love," she asked, "then what's the harm if love were caused by a potion,rather than raging glands?"

Touche. In a roundabout way, I was grateful for my student's objection. It pressed me to

clarify what I meant by the amorphous word "love."

I have to grant my student part of her point. Yes, biochemistry is at the heart of the breathtaking sensation the Greeks dubbed eros and we call attraction. But a potion that

engendered only physical attraction, I would reply, is still two steps removed from

causing the complex emotion we celebrate on Valentine's Day.

First, the "love equals attraction" equation overlooks the role memory plays in love.

Consider how courtship works: A couple sets aside time to share activities - movies,dinners, walks on the beach, and so on.

When all works out well, dating gives love substance by adding an endearing ingredient:

memories of special experiences shared with one's beloved. Conversely, part of what

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makes Alzheimer's such a pernicious ailment is how it robs its victims of the memories

that tether relationships together.

So a true love potion would not only need to inflame infatuation; it would also need toimplant memories - false memories - of shared amorous experiences in the potion-

drinker's mind.

But that's a sinister thought. Memory, after all, forms the very basis of a person's identity.

To counterfeit a person's memories, as a real love potion would need to do, would thusfalsify the person the potion targets.

To reduce love to attraction also overlooks a second, spiritual, part of the emotion: faith.

"Love," a professor of mine, Jerry Shaffer, once mused, "is more than lust. It's lust plus

trust."

In other words, love connotes an investment of faith - the faith that one's beloved will prove trustworthy with a host of confidences and secrets.

This, of course, is what makes infidelity so toxic to a relationship. It corrodes the faith

that graduates a couple from mutual attraction to loving partnership.

A bona fide love potion, then, would not only have to arouse faux passion and counterfeit

memories, it would also need to force the potion's target into placing committed faith inthe culprit administering the tonic.

It's this last point which is most troubling of all: because faith is unworthy of the name if 

it isn't predicated on a free choice of the heart, informed by one's untainted perceptionsand personality.

This ethereal element of faith, along with the requirement that it be freely given to one's

 beloved, is part of why love can be such an unpredictable, shape-shifting condition. But

it's also why love has the deep magic it bears - a magic more wondrous than any potioncould ever deliver.