‘Never drop without your significant other, cause that way lies ruin’: The boundary work of couples who use MDMA together

This qualitative interview and diary study (n=14) investigated the context in which romantic couples use MDMA and found that it occasioned shared experiences which could modulate and enhance existing feelings of closeness in the process of being subsumed into things that couples enjoyed doing together, to the effect that it refreshed and revitalized their relationship.

Abstract

“Introduction: MDMA has a variety of pro-social effects, such as increased friendliness and heightened empathy, yet there is a distinct lack of research examining how these effects might intertwine with a romantic relationship. This article seeks to compensate for this absence and explore heterosexual couples’ use of MDMA through the lens of the boundaries they construct around these experiences.

Methods: Three couple interviews, two diary interviews and eight written diaries about couples’ MDMA practices were analysed. Douglas’ (2001) and Stenner’s (2013) work around order, disorder and what lies at the threshold between the two are employed here. This conceptual approach allows us to see what happens at the border of MDMA experiences as crucial to their constitution.

Results: Two main themes are identified in the data. First, MDMA use was boundaried from daily life both temporally and corporeally: the drug was tied to particular times in people’s lives as well as the performance of rituals which engaged the material world and reenchanted everyday spaces and selves. Secondly, other people are excluded from MDMA experiences to varying degrees in order to preserve the emotionally intense space for the couple alone.

Discussion: This paper claims that MDMA use forms part of a spectrum of relationship ‘work’ practices; a unique kind of ‘date night’ that revitalises couples’ connection. Hence, MDMA should be recognised as transforming couple as well as individual practices. Finally, it is suggested that harm reduction initiatives could distinguish more ‘messy’ forms of emotional harm and engage with users’ language of ‘specialness’ to limit negative impacts of MDMA use.“

Authors: Katie Anderson, Paula Reavey & Zoë Boden

Summary

This article explores heterosexual couples’ use of MDMA through the lens of the boundaries they construct around these experiences. The article claims that MDMA use forms part of a spectrum of relationship ‘work’ practices, and suggests that harm reduction initiatives should recognise this.

Introduction

MDMA (ecstasy) is well-known for its sociable and empathic effects, but there is a paucity of research examining its impact on intimate relationships. There have been mixed results, with some studies reporting beneficial effects and others reporting detrimental effects.

This paper seeks to clarify the connection between MDMA consumption and heterosexual couple intimacies, by exploring how couples perform ritualised acts to mark out the boundaries of special MDMA experiences, which allow them to feel aspects of their love, intimacy and relationships in new ways.

Closeness and MDMA use

Beck and Rosenbaum (1994) discussed MDMA and interpersonal relationships in detail, highlighting the enhanced connection and communication users reported. These bonding effects permeated beyond the time and place of ecstasy use, and solidified friendships in the long-term.

Farrugia (2015) argues that gender might play a role in the value of social experiences on MDMA, and that this might transform men’s affective capacity more broadly.

Researchers studied the ways in which partners who used heroin or cocaine daily acted out a mutually-reinforcing dynamic of care and collusion, sustaining their drug dependencies. The couples shared a safe haven against a hostile world, laden with social stigma and material difficulties.

These studies point out that drug use can be co-productive, creating and protecting from difficult interpersonal dynamics. They stand apart from epidemiological studies which seek to conceptualise MDMA use as either irrelevant or damaging to social connections.

There is a lack of granularity with respect to how the relational dynamics are affected by MDMA, and it is helpful to know more about how this mechanism functions if we want to understand why people are taking MDMA and the impact it is having on their lives.

This paper takes a qualitative approach to understanding couples’ MDMA experiences, and how they are embedded within and affect their relationship. It adds to the growing body of new materialist AOD research that seeks to map the socio-material relations of drug use.

We share an emphasis on the role of the material, the non-human world of objects and rooms, and how it co-constitutes drug experiences. This study focuses on the social networks within which romantic couples use drugs.

The boundaries of intimacy

Intimacy is determined by a protective boundary that occludes distractions from the world and other non-intimates. Trust is a core way in which exclusionary boundaries are put into action.

Couples use ritualistic practices to construct symbolic boundaries around their MDMA use, which tributise their experiential ‘flow’. These boundaries include relational, emotional and spatio-temporal dimensions, which are constituted and reinforced.

Spatial-temporal experience is understood here as mutually co-constitutive, and space is not a static container of the events of life. Space is a process, and is interwoven with other threads (temporality, embodiment, emotion, cognition, social relations etc.) to produce experience.

Our argument is theoretically informed by psychosocial process philosophy, and in particular by Mary Douglas (2001) and Paul Stenner (2013), who are interested in how systems are ordered based on what is excluded from them.

Douglas’ work speaks to the ritualisation of MDMA experiences and how couples exclude the noise of the surrounding world in order to establish a total structure of thought. Rituals can make an experience more vivid by sharpening focus, enclosing desired themes and shutting out intruders, or by mnemonically reminding participants to enter particular states. They can also shape our experience by actively reformulating the past and returning us to an earlier state of cleanliness and purity.

Stenner’s work is helpful in appreciating who must be excluded from MDMA space-time to maintain couple intimacy, because it discusses how phenomena are created and maintained not only through what is included but what is excluded.

Coupledom is all about two people meeting, coming together and establishing a more long-lasting connection, but on closer inspection, we can see that a specific ‘third’ looms large. This third can be said to mediate between the two positions in the system and thus be creative of the system.

MDMA use becomes part of exclusive, shared couple space and thus mandates protection. This can be seen in the previous example of a drunken liaison disrupting the couple system.

A practices approach to intimacy entails thinking in terms of the things people do to ‘enable, generate and sustain’ a subjective sense of special closeness. This approach can be extended to couple relationships, for example by discussing the importance of negotiated couple time, ‘date nights’.

Datacollection

We recruited 14 participants from the UK, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and USA, conducting interviews and collecting diaries between 2015 and 2016. The participants were from two studies: one with couple interviews and one with diaries and optional diary interviews. The first study involved couple interviews, and the second study involved individual diaries and optional interviews. All participants were currently in heterosexual relationships, and were recruited through a variety of online forums and word-of-mouth.

All interviews were in-depth and semi-structured, and specific attention was paid to the context of couples’ experiences. Five objects or photos were brought to the interview to remind the couple of specific drug experiences.

Participants were advised to complete a diary every day for a week around when they happened to be taking MDMA with their partner. An interview was optional and was structured around the diary.

Dataanalysis

All interview transcripts and diaries were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six stages of thematic analysis. Themes were found through coding adhered more towards ‘deductive’ (theory-driven) and ‘latent’ approaches.

Assembling the temporal borders of ‘special’ MDMA space

Couples actively constructed boundaries between ‘special’ MDMA space and the everyday, with MDMA use often jutting out from the flow of daily activities. These boundaries often had a temporal aspect, marking out certain times within which they would take MDMA.

Karl and Tomás have been waiting for this day for a long time, and Ken has found that taking MDMA too much reduced the emotional value for him.

Couples felt that taking a certain amount of time off between uses legitimised their drug use, and derided use that was ‘[too] much’ and seen to neglect health.

Infrequent use of MDMA does not make an experience idyllic, but something about MDMA experiences combined with occasional use produces this impression. Couples take MDMA together for many reasons, but the main thread running through their accounts is the way it made them feel.

Couples tied MDMA use to special times and significant events in their lives, and framed overuse as unacceptable. This was in contrast to studies which depict couples either as a kind of cage, locking partners into cycles of problematic drug use, or a factor to be considered in interventions attempting to regulate individuals’ use.

Eliminating and enchanting everyday life

MDMA experiences were part of a ritualised process for couples, which involved pushing out of daily concerns and reordering spaces, objects and their own bodies.

Carrie: We ate healthier the days before, we took a nap, we made the house clean, we have flowers, a kettle on, chewing gum, and a water bottle with us, so we can be together and talk without anything disturbing us.

The preparations for MDMA use seem all-encompassing and bestow a real sense of occasion. The participants speak about cleansing their bodies and their environments, and about separating MDMA space-time from its everyday uses.

If rituals can shape our experience of MDMA, then wiping away unhealthy habits, physical grime and mental noise of everyday life might also help augment our experience of intimacy.

I find it easier to understand what he needs when I’m not concerned about what I think about it, because I can focus all my attention on him.

Carrie’s everyday cognitive self is barricaded from MDMA space-time through her ritualistic diligence, including a dirty flat, yoga and meditation, and pre-empting physical needs by resting and eating properly. This creates an idealised, simpler kind of intimacy where she can focus only on her partner.

Carrie’s ritualistic practices of separation make room for non-everyday ways of feeling and being, and her MDMA use could be seen as a particular kind of date night. She feels a more visceral love for her partner on MDMA, which she can remember and re-feel in daily life.

We take vitamins and magnesium, drink juice, buy wheat beer, have ginger tea, clean the flat, take a bath, and hang tapestries on the walls to make the flat look pretty.

Eva and Lars perform ritualistic acts of self- and environmental purification before taking MDMA together. These acts fashion a symbolic frame, holding inside desirable elements and holding outside undesirable elements, such as everyday disorder, ‘untidiness’ and the grime accumulated on and within their bodies and flat.

Many of these aspects of their relationship relate to the spatial rearrangement of their environment. For example, the way they modify the light with ‘candles’ and ‘glowsticks’ could be seen to offer them new possibilities for being, and bring them closer together.

Ritual can be seen to modulate couples’ experiences as they initiated friends into MDMA use.

We’ve discussed how to deal with the newbie, what to avoid and push, and what to do if he gets anxious.

Ken’s ritualised symbolic frame keeps undesirable elements in and desirable elements out, creating a controlled, safe and emotionally sanitised space. This frame soothes his anxiety and helps him prepare for the ingestion of a powerful, psychoactive drug.

Not all couples prepared to the same degree as Ken, Eva and Lars or Carrie, but Karl buys glowlights to provide some psychological breathing space, and Jenny brings a blinky ring to her and Mark’s joint interview.

Couples perform ritualistic preparations before using MDMA, which serve to shape and enhance the way they feel. They repurpose everyday tasks, items, bodies and spaces to create a sense of specialness, which is reflected in how they talk about a revival of existing feelings of love and connection.

Lars and Ken take MDMA to celebrate their relationship. They feel closer and more connected after taking the drug.

Being on MDMA doesn’t construct entirely new ways of relating and feeling, it extends and enriches existing feeling. Couples attempt to control and influence the atmosphere of their MDMA experiences through rearranging their space, cleansing, planning out music/activities or bringing in particular items.

Couples mark out MDMA space-time through and with the everyday, arranging spaces and selves, and regulating their MDMA experiences together. MDMA is not portrayed as a corrosive force on their relationship.

Policing the intimate borders of MDMA space-time: just the two of us?

Assembling ritualised space-times necessarily involved excluding certain things, and taking MDMA together was often seen as a couple ‘thing’. This was performed in different ways by different couples, including excluding others physically and excluding others but still allowing them to be present.

Ryan and Abby always hang out together, even if they are with friends. Abby would stay put until Ryan got back from the loo if he went off to the loo.

While they go out with their friends, couples’ nights revolve around being with each other, prioritising each other’s musical preferences and dutifully waiting if one of them goes ‘off to the loo’. This extends to MDMA use, which becomes a thing couples do together.

Since we got together, we have never partied without the other, and if my wife wasn’t around, I doubt I’d be in the mood to party. When I was single, the best advice I ever got on using X was to talk to multiple people.

While the idea of a boundary is presented as organic, its origin is later located in his friend’s ‘good advice’. Ken is wary of falling in love with a stranger on MDMA, and keeps moving around to erect an emotional barrier.

The emotional risk tied up with MDMA use might be magnified if already part of a couple, because the level of intimacy wrapped up with MDMA is only to be experienced when both partners are there.

While other couples did not articulate the emotional dangers of taking MDMA without a partner in the same way Ken did, their actions suggest a different story.

Couples experienced the emotional power of taking MDMA together, like an intensification of positive and muting of negative feelings. They might want to share such intense feelings with their partner or they could be worried about sharing such intense feelings with someone else.

Conclusion

This paper has illustrated how couples draw boundaries around their MDMA experiences, by orchestrating self and space. These rituals produce an idealised kind of space, which is capable of pushing out everyday concerns and re-enchanting familiar feelings.

MDMA experiences can enhance existing feelings of closeness and refresh the connection to each other. This is part of the broader spectrum of relationship ‘work’ practices that sustain couple relationships. Couples use rituals of separation and purification to create a space-time where experiences of intimacy and pleasure are modulated in significant ways. These experiences can last well beyond the MDMA space-time, into their everyday lives.

Drug policy should develop a more nuanced view of drug use, which is not a monolithic negative category, but rather emerges from the patterns of activity and feeling people experience on them.

The credibility of harm reduction initiatives that do not engage with users’ understanding of risk and pleasure has already been cast into doubt. This research argues that this might include more ‘messy’ forms of emotional harm, which have hitherto been absent from harm reduction material.

Drug experiences are continuous with practices that couples do to sustain their relationship, often called relationship ‘work’ though it doesn’t often feel like work for couples.

Acknowledgments

Everyone who gave up their time to speak to me is incredibly grateful, and I am indebted to London Southbank University for their support.