Rebecca Moore ponders the ethics of a cure for love and wonders why people feel the need to tell the world about their romances

About a decade ago I was lying face-down in a starfish position on the floor of my bedroom, heartbroken.

I’d just had a horrible break-up and immediately forged an intimate – yet fleeting – relationship with my carpet.

Unbelievably, I was the one who’d done the dumping but, in that special way we females have, I was just as devastated as he was. Probably more so. Yes, I realised in that moment: love sucks.

The voice of Leonard Cohen began a chorus in my mind, “there ain’t no cure… there ain’t no cure... there ain’t no cure for love” and I have agreed with him ever since: until a research paper this week discussed the ethics of anti-love drugs.

The paper Biotechnology and the ethics of a chemical breakup is written by some Oxford University bioethicists and talks about the hypothetical case for “heartache” drug cures and whether the use of such drugs would ever be ethically permissible.

These ideas tread dangerously close to those dealt with in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, in which a couple break up and then each has their memory of the other wiped to stop the pain.

I’ll admit it, this film affects me quite profoundly because I can’t personally think of anything worse than wiping my memories of an experience – even a painful one. As the film progresses, the guy’s memories from the last days of a failing relationship – filled with anger and anguish – move backward in time, finally arriving in the early days of flirtation and love.

Of course, these memories are joy-filled and he tries desperately hard to hold onto them. By the end of the film I’m always a heaving wreck on the floor, a recurring theme in my life, apparently.

I hope they never create technology that can remove unwanted memories like this. Or at least, if they do, I hope I’m not in line for testing. As the ethicists acknowledge, although love can bring us pain, this pain can be beneficial since, “adversity can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other components of a life well-lived”. Indeed.

Every relationship I’ve had – which isn’t that many, thank you – has caused pleasure and pain. And the pain I’ve experienced usually hasn’t been caused by a direct action of another person but by the mental torture I’ve subjected myself to. Which tends to be true for most of my friends going through similar trauma because as humans we tend to be insecure, easily confused and, if this all weren’t enough, love makes us absolutely crazy. And I wouldn’t be without one of my crazy experiences: even the ones that have sent me reeling to the floor where I’ve been found days later, mumbling incantations and contemplating the nutritional value of carpet.

Indeed, I’ve learnt more about myself – and various bits of fluff – lying devastated on the carpet than I often learnt in an entire term’s worth of university lectures.