Love studies and weird immigrants

Claude chats:

Links:

• [[ Love story Australian researchers becoming world leaders in the study of romantic love ]]
• [[ Sex 20 times a week New study identifies four types of romantic lover ]]
• [[ Transcript Why are birth rates falling With Alice Evans ]]

Love studies is an area of biological anthropology research focused on romantic love, “a motivational state typically associated with a desire for long-term mating with a particular individual”. It recently received some attention in The Guardian exposing the different types of lovers. Within the article was a follow-on link, explaining [that Australia’s survey data¹ on the topic is making it a hot-bed for such research](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/15/love-story-australian-researchers-becoming-world-leaders-in-the-study-of-romantic-love), which says:

Love studies is a relatively new field, but there are now dedicated conferences, journals and academics across more disciplines than you might think: philosophy, psychology, biology, literary studies, anthropology, law, social work and gender studies. It draws in robotics and popular culture and looks at a darker side – stalking, coercion, harassment and violence.

I am surprised to hear that the field is itself new but it does make sense, in retrospect- I remember a phase where I searched for Love literature, in a philosophical sense, but only found a couple books on the topic. At the time, I put this down to me not being very focused in my search for work on this matter but these two articles have spurred a desire to attend related conferences to learn more about the work and data as an academic to know how I can develop my own dataset and studies (even if it’s only for myself), while also being a long-term singleton.

A decade earlier, my interest was more personal and, at the time, felt novel due to a lack of exposure. In 2009, I’d just moved to California from Bangalore, leaving a girlfriend behind and trying to maintain a long distance thing. Over the next year, we’d break up and I was increasingly feeling lost there as an immigrant unable to build meaningful platonic and romantic bonds. Well over a decade later, these problems have taken a new shape as bond creation has been replaced with the downstream challenge of its maintenance- here, I am mostly speaking romantically. While the last 8 years have been fairly steady in London, I remain somewhat immigrant in my mindset and behaviours.

I feel my (and many others’) brain software accepts the idea of leaving a long-term lover behind as inevitable. In the search for meaningful romantic bonds, I also find myself stuck in a perpetual search for the home left behind. A home that offers secure refuge romantically, psychologically, and emotionally. Connection does get harder under these circumstances and people do posit about the reducing TFR² as a consequence of increased internet and smartphone use. But, I still feel like an understudied area is one of the displaced WEIRD immigrant (or I have remained poor at researching this area, which is more than likely).

Connection has gotten harder also, it appears, since COVID-19:

The rise in singlehood during the pandemic has been under-appreciated because our official data sources focus primarily on marriage and cohabitation, leaving casual and informal romantic relationships understudied. M J Rosenfeld