“If we give an oxytocin blocker to female voles, they become like 95 percent of other mammal species,” Dr. Young said. “They will not bond no matter how many times they mate with a male or hard how he tries to bond.”

I don’t see how the anti-love drug would be liked by the abstinence only lobby.

Relative to birds, not so much.

Or gibbons, which are closely related to humans and great apes, but are lifelong monogamous.

As for monogamy, well, humans are naturally monogamous – relative to other mammals. We frequently pair bond and also frequently have sex outside pair bonds; relative to most other mammals, that’s an unusual amount of monogamous inclination. Relative to birds, not so much. Individual mileage, of course, varies. As does mileage of different cultures. If you’re talking about nature, rather than moral strictures, monogamy’s a relative thing, and our species seems to fall somewhere in the middle on the monogamous to nonmonogamous continuum.

I’m torn on the “love” drug and “anti-love” drug. My first thought was that I’d rather see the “anti-love” drug developed, because it would be more likely that people would just use it on themselves when they chose, rather than slipping it to other people who’d not have chosen it. Then I realized that parents could slip the “anti-love” drug to their kids. So both of them could have morally dubious applications. As well as, yeah, you really don’t seriously want to muck with your vasopressin levels.

Still, I can see the appeal of the fantasy of being able to turn those feelings on and off at will (as long as it’s the will of the person having the feelings, not someone else’s will).