Would you take a 'love drug' to help save your marriage?

The use of recreational drugs in couples' therapy has gone mainstream, writes Rowan Pelling. Photo / Getty Images

I was at a drinks party last year when the conversation turned to sex, drugs and marital rock 'n' roll.

The specific topic was whether having sex in a state of altered consciousness could revitalise an ailing marriage – prompted by a medic saying she'd just read Love is the Drug: The Chemical Future of Our Relationships by Brian D Earp and Professor Julian Savulescu. I was surprised to discover that four middle-aged, pillar-of-society types in this group of loosely knit acquaintances had experienced sensual epiphanies on MDMA, while they all seemed surprised I hadn't.

"How can you call yourself an erotic expert, then?" said one of them, referring to the years I spent editing the Erotic Review magazine and writing sex advice columns. I said, rather priggishly, I'd always thought making love was the means to a high, rather than the other way round. But the truth was I felt a bit miffed to have any vestigial claim to hedonism whisked away by these long-married, esteemed professionals: a vicarage child, a doctor, a publisher and a novelist. It was also true most of them lived in Somerset or Wiltshire, where small towns like Bruton and Glastonbury have a generous share of well-heeled hippies.

The medic confessed that the first time he and his wife took the drug they were at an impasse in their marriage, where arguments had overtaken love and they felt they might part. But they'd gone to a party where they were offered what they thought of as a "party drug" and then spent four hours talking to one another while lying on a lawn and, "for the first time in 10 years, actually hearing one another." He swears it saved his marriage.

Since that conversation I've really noticed the idea of using drugs previously viewed as "recreational", such as MDMA and psilocybin (the psychotropic element of magic mushrooms), in couples' therapy has gone mainstream – despite the fact both are currently illegal in the UK. So mainstream, in fact, that evolutionary anthropologist Dr Anna Machin told the audience at Cheltenham Science Festival this week that "love drugs are definitely on the horizon", envisaging a world where a synthesised version of the human-bonding hormone oxytocin "could be available within a decade for people to squirt up their noses before they go out on a Saturday night – at the same time as a glass of Prosecco".

Machin, the author of Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships, speculated that MDMA could be licensed for use in couples' therapy within five to 10 years, though she also cautioned, "There are more ethical questions surrounding MDMA, so that is likely to take longer." However, phase-three trials involving MDMA are already well underway for the drug's use for people suffering from PTSD (notably with Armed Forces veterans, who have proved resistant to all other drugs and therapies) and the results are so positive that many experts believe it will be sanctioned sooner with that particular therapeutic remit.

But some couples believe the potential for MDMA and psilocybin to facilitate marital harmony is too great to wait for official clearance. The anecdotal buzz amongst the chattering classes that intimacy can be reclaimed – and profounder understanding and love sown – from marital battlefields is too noisy for some to ignore. And perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by this. My 50-something contemporaries, dubbed Generation X, include the original party-drug ravers who danced to techno all night long under the influence of Ecstasy (the pill form of MDMA) and discovered in the process that inhibitions were loosened and empathy for others enhanced. The Booker Prize-winning novelist Alan Hollinghurst spoke for many when he wrote about the way Ecstasy could transform a typically British buttoned-up male: one character in his 1998 novel The Spell describes his longing to relive "the magically protracted hour when he knew that his life had been given back to him".

Cynics may think this is all a quick-fix way of boosting libidos, but practitioners don't talk about sex so much as regeneration, intimacy, empathy, truthfulness and massively enhanced communication between two human beings. The buzz term for couples seeking those benefits is "guided therapy", where a trained psychotherapist or counsellor meticulously preps clients for their dose and sits with them when they take the drugs, helping steer them in a helpful direction and following up with detailed evaluation sessions.

One of the UK's most experienced practitioners for such treatments is the clinical therapist and "psychedelic guide" Sarah Tilley of BeautifulSpace.uk. The grounded, warmly charismatic Tilley has been leading psilocybin sessions as a key component of couples therapy for some years now and has more than 20 years' experience of working "with altered-state journeys" and her clients give glowing testimonials. Before she accepts new clients she interviews them, then has separate Zoom sessions with both partners so that the process and their aims are totally understood. But, because of the UK's drug laws, the couples she treats mostly fly to the Netherlands or Portugal for the active part of the therapy, so that every aspect of her treatment is "strictly legal".

I talk to Tilley over Zoom and she's scrupulous in saying that psilocybin can't offer "a silver bullet" for every aspect of a couple's problems, "but it starts a conversation and two previously estranged, or disgruntled, people can find they go to absolutely extraordinary places. Suddenly they're having intimacy when they haven't touched each other for years." She's at pains to explain the process isn't the least like taking drugs at a rave. "There's a sense of ritual – the lighting of candles and burning of incense – and ceremonies that lead to a sense of heightened consciousness. And with that comes enhanced communication."

I can't help wondering if the core reason so many couples approach her in the first place is because their sex lives have withered away. Tilley nods and says that, although there are usually many issues that need addressing, the nagging realisation that "we haven't touched each other for months" is often what leads people to her door. Sex changes over the course of a long relationship and patterns of avoidance, taboo and positivity need readdressing. "And if you can't talk about sex, you can't have good sex." She says that psilocybin helps people remember where their erotic story started and helps them reclaim it.

Tilley put me in touch with one of her current clients, Molly (not her real name), who works in mental health and cites recent research that suggests the "game-changing" potential of psychedelic drugs on mental trauma (Professor David Nutt, the former "drug tsar", has been banging the drum about this for some while). She told me she felt reassured by the fact Tilley has "a really significant history of using that type of therapy" and the thornier issue was persuading her husband to commit himself. Molly said the couple had, like many, been through an "incredibly stressful" time during the pandemic and there was a sense they were stuck in a rut". The pair had explored conventional talking therapy but it didn't offer the renewal she sought. What Molly wanted above all was "to find ways of connecting more deeply and I'm so grateful he agreed to that".

She relayed her experience of the "plant medicine" with great precision, saying the psilocybin "reveals the truth, creates new tracks and pathways of thinking. We'd got stuck in well-trodden grooves, and that kind of rumination is one of the hallmarks of depression. It helped me explain things to my husband in a new and different way… Instead of being in your own head you're able to see things externally. It allowed me to grieve for things in the past that had been challenging and difficult". I wondered if the experience had led to greater physical connection and she said it certainly did while they were abroad because, "all stress puts a brake on your desire".

The clear caveat with all of this is the unpredictability of different individuals' reaction to the same drugs. When a dear old friend insisted that a gang of us take magic mushrooms during our student days in the early 1990s, I had an iridescently wonderful time and felt I'd become one of the 12 dancing princesses of fairytale. But one person in our group was more unstable and went borderline crazy for a month. In a similar vein, I've only taken Ecstasy once and it left me feeling super-anxious, cold and de-energised, while everyone else felt ecstatic and super-tactile.

When I cite all this to a psychologist friend who has experience with psychedelics, he said that's exactly "why it's so important in a therapy context to have no expectations of what the experience will be like". Tilley tells me something similar, saying the process of taking psilocybin exposes vulnerabilities – which is positive in the sense that your partner sees you clearly and feels tenderness for that vulnerability, but requires careful supervision by an experienced practitioner.

My psychologist friend also points out you can't just "go and create great couples with MDMA. There are so many other factors that require social and political solutions: maybe one spouse has a job that totally overwhelms them, while another is exhausted from childcare". Drugs can't magically solve any of this. Then there's the philosophical issue of whether "love drugs" could create an ersatz glue, bonding people who feel no natural heat. But everyone I spoke to for this article poo-pooed that notion, saying drugs like MDMA can only rescue intimacy where there was a powerful connection in the first place.

In the end, I felt I could only really understand the benefits by quizzing a good friend from last year's party discussion about what occasional MDMA use brings to her marriage – and what it might salvage from the onerous duties of parenthood. "There's a reason these are nicknamed 'love drugs'," she said, with a certain dreaminess. "They eliminate all concerns about whose turn it was to make dinner, or take the bins out, or has a bit of a tummy. Instead, it allows you – no, forces you – to focus purely and simply on the sensation, both physically and emotionally, of love. And lust. Drugs bring a straightforwardness to the relationship: no more over-complications, or rehearsal of old resentments. They somehow cause the brain to erase the noise of modern, grown-up life, so that all you're left with is love." She paused. "Just love."