A Pill To Kill The Love
There is a lot of nonsense out there on social media about GLP-1 agonists, the popular pills that help diabetics and are increasingly prescribed for weight loss. I’m using the word nonsense here in its formal medical sense, to mean social media histrionics that aren’t backed up by any kind of decent studies. That said, I’ve never let nonsense get in the way of a good medicalized story about relations between men and women, so why would I start now? According to a Korean plastic surgeon on X:
We initially thought GLP-1s like Ozempic, Tirzapeptide and Retatutride just reduced food cravings. Now, we know they work for alcohol, cocaine, gambling and other addictions too.
But do you know what runs on exactly the same circuit?
Falling in love.
GLP-1 receptors sit in the exact same brain regions that light up when you’re in love.
The insane thing about them is that they don’t just suppress appetite. They suppress wanting in general, including romantic craving another person.
Something like 60M+ people are now on anti-desire drugs and it happened in the blink of an eye.
I predict in the coming years, we will see people on these drugs be less able to fall in love. We will also see them fall out of love, or be unable to feel it, in relationships that were previously great.
If your girlfriend or boyfriend started taking GLP1s and your relationship started failing, there’s a good chance that’s why.
How about it, people? I’ve personally experienced the loss of interest in alcohol. Not the loss of love though. But love a couple decades in is different — experientially and presumably biochemically — than it is in the early years.
Your anecdotes in the comments are solicited. But remember, it’s all nonsense until they figure out how to do a rigorous scientific study. (Have they isolated the biochemical basic for romantic cravings well enough to do that study? I have not a damned clue. But I’m pretty sure a Korean plastic surgeon isn’t that far ahead of me.)
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=34980
Ok, I’ll play.
A quick look around shows he might have something. I searched for oxytocin, the ‘love hormone’ and GLP-1 and found that there is a cocktail of the two being used for weight loss as there’s a synergy.
Which kind of confirms a hypothesis I’ve heard many times that people in love tend to lose their appetite, leading to weight loss. Which of course gets blamed on all that exercise they’re getting, being freshly in love and all that.
If oxytocin does indeed influence pancreas function in a positive way, then that’s a biochemical basis for that theory.
Conversely at the other end of the body, where oxytocin is produced as part of the process of falling in love, then there may be a negative feedback loop preventing over production of oxytocin, where GLP-1 is inhibiting production of oxytocin. Which if true would support the thesis that falling in love could be inhibited. Whether that is true is very dependent on molecular shape and interactions, but if they both work in one context, they may in another. A plausible theory, if untested yet. It should be possible to test.
Certainly when I’m with a lover I tend not to have much appetite, and when we’re apart I graze and snack, something I don’t do when we’re together.
So now explain feederism…
No experience with them, but love sure looks like an addiction. This would not surprise me one bit. Drugs tend to have their effect on anything that uses the pathway they are involved in. Sometimes that’s good (the first line drug for a kidney stone is actually a prostate drug–does the same thing to the ureters that it does to the prostate), but very often it’s an undesirable side effect.
And I suspect passionate vs long time companions makes a difference. Almost 40 years at this point, the companion part means an awful lot more to me than the sex part.
Finagle, that looks a lot like the same sort of theorycrafting our good plastic surgeon is doing, and I generally agree with it. I will be interested to hear if any ErosBlog readers feel they’ve experienced the effect in practice.
Loren, I am not 100% certain that love (or lust, or new love, or attraction, or what poly people call “new relationship energy”, or any of a dozen other ways we can chop and parse the many notions of love) can be comprehensively assumed to have a biochemical basis. It’s an attractive theory — many interesting things that happen in the brain do seem to have a biochemical basis — but I am wary of that extrapolation without evidence for it that I haven’t seen, if that makes sense.
Not at all sure about the veracity of these claims – does Ozempic really suppress appetite for alchohol and psychoactive drugs? – but we are witnessing a vast experiment here. I’m not sure anyone really knows what the wider or longer-term impact of these weight loss drugs are. There is anecdotal evidence that people who stop using them gain weight quicker than those who simply stop following a weight-loss diet.
Jim, “anecdotal evidence” comes close to being an oxymoron, but the problem is that pretty much by definition we don’t have good science on long term effects of any drug until a bunch of people have used it for a long time and a bunch of double blind studies get done, which doesn’t always happen, or huge epidemiological/population studies get done, which is super expensive and also doesn’t always happen. So we do end up talking about anecdotes because those are all we have. And although I’ve never taken Ozempic, I’ve taken a couple of other GLP-1 agonists and personally experienced them completely blowing up my interest in drinking alcohol. Liquor cabinet is still full but I haven’t been to the liquor store in a year. Pour maybe three drinks a month now instead of perhaps five to eight a week. It’s just an anecdote, but something happened there.
@Jim
there’s lots of papers out there publicly on how GLP-1 drugs interact with the dopamine system in the brain which is linked to addiction.
Similarly there are papers about weight coming back faster after you stop, it’s more than anecdotal, and frankly looking into it I think it’s predictable.
Long term the UK has seen a big rise in gall bladder failure since these drugs were certified. There’s also been a problem with fraudulent misrepresentation by people to get prescribed them. The costs to our healthcare system are also rocketing as drug companies raise prices here.
It’s hard to avoid conspiracy theory level thinking once you start looking into these drugs, so I’m stopping.
Thank you both.
These type of blockbuster drug are exactly what Big Pharma crave, of course – huge potential market and designed for long-term use.
It’s right to be wary and hard not to be cynical.