Are antidepressants taking the edge off love?

Sure, we know about the sexual side effects of SSRIs. But researchers now wonder if that's the only aspect of romance the drugs can influence.

LOVE'S first rush is a private madness between two people, all-consuming and, if mutually felt, endlessly wonderful.

Couples think about the other obsessively -- on a roller coaster of euphoria when together, longing when apart.

"It's temporary insanity," says Helen Fisher, an evolutionary anthropologist at Rutgers University.

Now, from her studies of the brains of lovers in the throes of the initial tumble, Fisher has developed a controversial theory. She and her collaborator, psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson of the University of Virginia, believe that Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and other antidepressants alter brain chemistry so as to blunt the intense cutting edge of new love.

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