"I'm not sure I would want to be married to someone I could only stand because I took drugs."
That's not how it works. The drugs allow you to explore feelings that you're otherwise not able to explore, and work through whatever emotional roadblocks you're having with your partner. Essentially it lets you find the source of your anxiety and problems, when normally you'd just be really anxious and unhappy all the time but you wouldn't know why. And then once you know why you are unhappy it allows you to communicate these feelings with each other so that you can use them to rebuild the relationship. It does also make you love and care much more about the other person's wellbeing, which is an important part of the process, but it's not why it works. The love and empathy part is just what allows you to fix your relationship, it's not actually what fixes it.
"I've never taken LSD but I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the sort of situation that trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill."
You should take some time to learn about what the experience is actually like. You're trivializing the psychedelic experience by saying that LSD trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill.
The love and empathy part is just what allows you to fix your relationship, it's not actually what fixes it.
This is akin to taking meds to suppress panic attacks in order to undergo therapy to truly circumvent the panic/agoraphobia loop. The drug is a tool; it can't relieve you of the responsibility to do the work yourself (no matter what lazy people may want to believe).
"On the other hand, there's no evidence for all this 'exploring feelings' stuff."
What I'm saying is actually the currently accepted scientific theory. What we see in PET scans is that MDMA shuts down part of the amygdala, which allows people to process emotions and experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Michael Mithoefer refers to this starting at 10:45 in this MAPS lecture:
There's no question that couples therapy would be vastly less effective without the increased pair bonding and empathy, but if that was the only mechanism in play then we wouldn't expect the relationship to still be vastly improved 12 - 24 months after just one session. (Otherwise we'd be seeing a large percentage of marriages happening between people who met at raves, which is not the case. People who hook up under the influence of MDMA don't seem to have any lasting 'extra' feelings for each other after a couple weeks, beyond what would be normal without the MDMA.)
That's not how it works. The drugs allow you to explore feelings that you're otherwise not able to explore, and work through whatever emotional roadblocks you're having with your partner. Essentially it lets you find the source of your anxiety and problems, when normally you'd just be really anxious and unhappy all the time but you wouldn't know why. And then once you know why you are unhappy it allows you to communicate these feelings with each other so that you can use them to rebuild the relationship. It does also make you love and care much more about the other person's wellbeing, which is an important part of the process, but it's not why it works. The love and empathy part is just what allows you to fix your relationship, it's not actually what fixes it.
"I've never taken LSD but I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the sort of situation that trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill."
You should take some time to learn about what the experience is actually like. You're trivializing the psychedelic experience by saying that LSD trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill.