Luckey wants oxytocin in marriage counseling; a 96-couple trial found it added no benefit to therapy

Palmer Luckey, founder of the defense company Anduril, told the My First Million podcast that he would "try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling." A clip of the remark was circulating on X on October 8, 2026, where one reshare had reached 326.2K views.

What was said on the podcast

Asked what he would build if he started again from nothing, Luckey answered with the sentence above. According to a quotation reproduced by the finance site BigGo, he went on: "We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well," and "There's a lot of people who want to stay together." The same passage has him adding that most people who do not want to stay together "should stay together, especially for their kids", and that the whole field is "totally unregulated".

He also pointed to the shelf. "You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on Sigma Aldrich chemical supply right now," he said, according to BigGo.

A recap of the episode on The Fabulous adds that Luckey called the hormone at least as safe as SSRIs, the antidepressants, and that the idea was offered as speculation. Nobody on the show presented a trial. The hosts, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri, described the human evidence as small studies not replicated at scale, and BigGo's own summary says the pitch comes with "no efficacy data". Both pages are secondary retellings of an audio episode, which we could not listen to.

The evidence the hosts reached for first was not a journal at all. According to BigGo, Parr's "consumer signal" is a subreddit called r/oxytocin, where people with Asperger's and PTSD dose themselves daily and post journals, some describing eye contact with their children suddenly becoming easy. The Fabulous recap says the hosts had followed such communities for years, and that companies are now starting to sell the hormone as a nasal spray, the only practical route since it cannot be swallowed as a pill. BigGo is blunt about the weight of all this: the journals are self-reported, the studies the hosts describe have small samples, and a story about oxytocin improving team performance came secondhand from an unnamed doctor who never said what counted as a team. Anyone who has watched an app promise love in a week will recognise the genre, a fringe idea carried by a famous voice. The hosts themselves compare it to GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and psychedelics, ideas that once sounded fringe and later did not. Fringe, the recap says, does not mean fake. It sometimes means early.

The pair-bond story the pitch leans on

The biology Luckey waves at is old. Oxytocin is a hormone the body releases during childbirth, breastfeeding and close contact, and the recap says it also rises with steady eye contact with a dog or a partner. Prairie voles, one of the few mammals that mate for life, have been studied for decades, and the hosts note their oxytocin levels are unusually high.

In people, the best-known early work compared couples. In a Scientific American feature of February 12, 2013, the psychologist Ruth Feldman of Bar-Ilan University in Israel described measuring the hormone in new lovers and in singles. "The increase in oxytocin during the period of falling in love was the highest that we ever found," she said. Couples with the highest levels were also the ones still together six months later, and they touched and laughed together more often.

Feldman is careful about what that means. She says it is still not clear whether oxytocin produced the stable bond or whether couples who were less connected simply failed to trigger the system. A hormone measured in a cheek swab is a trace of a relationship, and traces do not tell you which way the arrow runs.

Spray, then argue

The stronger test is to give people the hormone and watch. At the University of Zurich, the couple therapist and researcher Beate Ditzen had partners spray oxytocin or a placebo and then discuss a subject that usually led them to quarrel, such as who did the housework or how they spent free time. The feature reports that in a first experiment both men and women communicated better and had lower cortisol, a stress hormone.

In a later study the picture split. Women who received oxytocin showed a drop in an enzyme tied to social stress, while men showed a rise and reported more intense emotions. The men were nonetheless better at communicating during the conflict: they smiled more, held eye contact more and were more open about their feelings.

Ditzen herself warned that the results do not show the hormone directly causing these behaviors.

That is the rough edge of the field. A quarrel in a lab is a long way from a marriage at year twelve.

A couples trial that came back flat

The closest thing to Luckey's proposal that we found in a full clinical trial is a study from the Medical University of South Carolina, published on May 12, 2025 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry by Julianne C. Flanagan and colleagues. It is not about divorce. It tested intranasal oxytocin, 40 international units, against a saline placebo, added to Alcohol Behavioral Couple Therapy for couples in which one partner had an alcohol use disorder.

The design was strict: double-blind, randomized, 12 weeks, run from 2018 to 2024. Ninety-six couples took part, 49 in the oxytocin group and 47 in the placebo group, and both partners in a couple received the same drug. The participants took it 30 minutes before each therapy session, and they completed an average of 10.2 sessions.

The authors' conclusion is plain: oxytocin "was safe and tolerable but did not provide additional benefit beyond ABCT at the end of treatment." Couples in both groups improved substantially on drinking and on alcohol problem severity, but not on relationship functioning, and no difference between the groups emerged on any of the three.

Two cautions apply. The couples were in treatment for a drinking problem, so the result says little about ordinary marriages with ordinary conflicts. And the page we could read gave the abstract, not the full paper, so the funding is not stated here.

What the trial does give is a base rate. When oxytocin was put in the room with a real therapy and a real control group, therapy did the work.

When a famous effect did not replicate

The doubt is wider than one trial. In 2005, Kosfeld and colleagues reported that oxytocin sprayed into the nose raised the money people sent to strangers in a trust game, which made headlines as a hormone for trust. Later studies were inconclusive, and a registered replication published in Nature Human Behaviour on June 8, 2020 tried again with a large double-blind, placebo-controlled design and a statistical power above 95%.

It found no effect of oxytocin on trusting behavior in the condition that matched the original. An exploratory analysis suggested the hormone might raise trust in people with a low disposition to trust, but the authors say this requires confirmation. The study was funded by the University of Zurich, and the funders had no role in the design or the analysis.

Put beside Ditzen's careful warning, it explains why researchers who work on the hormone tend to sound less sure than the people who sell it.

What a spray cannot supply

Even the optimists in the 2013 feature set a limit. Adam Guastella, a clinical psychologist at the University of Sydney, thought oxytocin could help people in couple therapy by easing empathic communication. The article describes a study of his, the first to test oxytocin on couples in therapy, as unpublished at the time. Couples were asked to discuss a topic that usually led to conflict and then to try to solve it. Guastella expected those who received the hormone to interpret the problem less hostilely and to criticise their partners less, and no result from the study appears in the article. His other work, it says, found that people given oxytocin remember happy faces better than angry and neutral ones.

His own caveat is the line worth keeping: "If people are not connected at all, then oxytocin is not going to force that connection." The same piece notes that good communication predicts relationship success, but that communicating well does not ensure partners stay together. The aim of therapy, it says, is to help two people understand each other's point of view and reach a mutual decision, even if that decision is to part.

The podcast recap lands in a similar place from the other side. Its hosts say that in the small trials they cite, oxytocin does not create affection out of nothing. In the words of one host, "It's not a love potion. What it does is it highlights or amplifies what you feel." A hormone that amplifies what is already there needs something to amplify.

That is where the oldest ingredient comes back in. A bond that holds is made of repeated acts: showing up to the session, sitting through the quarrel, coming back the next week. The hosts' own suggestion for a home version costs nothing, which is 30 to 60 seconds of silent, close eye contact with a partner or close friend. They add that research supports it only loosely and that their evidence is mostly anecdotal, and that one host's wife began crying within 30 seconds.

A kilogram of powder from a chemical supplier is on offer, as Luckey says. The record so far offers a 96-couple trial that found no added benefit, a trust study that did not replicate, and a field whose own researchers still ask which way the arrow points.

Sources

• Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial Examining the Efficacy of Intranasal Oxytocin to Enhance Alcohol Behavioral Couple Therapy, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, May 12, 2025
• A registered replication study on oxytocin and trust, Nature Human Behaviour, June 8, 2020