Love story: Australian researchers becoming world leaders in the study of romantic love

Is romantic kissing a fetish? How long does love last? Are dick pics the modern-day version of showing off your hunting prowess with a bison carcass? What is love?

For all the books, poems and lyrics about it, we know very little about love, actually.

Love is an emotion; it can be thought of as a motivation (like hunger, or thirst); a product of evolution (all the better to reproduce); a hormonal, neural and chemical reaction (with dopamine, oxytocin and others lighting up the brain); it has a physical outcome (horniness, an adrenaline-fuelled heart rate increase). Its expression is culturally constructed (in different times and places); and it evolves (from being “gaga” in love to something more companionable).

Adam Bode, a love researcher, PhD student and biologist from Australian National University, says scientists have been “disinclined” to study it.

“There’s a feeling of being embarrassed about it, that you won’t be taken seriously,” he says. Despite that, he says, “Australia is fast becoming the world leader” in the study of “romantic love”.

She says love was seen as “still a little cheesy, cringeworthy, intimate – a more intense thing to speculate about” than sexual desire, but that was changing along with expanding ideas about love and family.

“Particularly generation Z and the millennials, they’re very embracing of many different forms of love,” she says. “And also we’re widening our ideas of what’s possible with love … The love of the planet, love of humanity … all other kinds of love, new family forms, families chosen not by blood, but by friendship.”

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.

And yet, for something so complicated, it can feel entirely instinctive, natural, and for some, mystical.

“It’s an idea, as well as something we think is natural, something that is physical as well as psychological, spiritual and creative,” Reid says. “The creativity part of it is where social construction comes in – we’re creating ideas of love.”

Clare Davidson, an Australian Catholic University research fellow and author of Love in Late Medieval England, says historians of emotions also engage with the scientific aspects, while anthropologists canvass the spiritual and mystical dimensions. She takes any evolutionary perspectives on love “with a grain of salt”.

“There are biological aspects, things that can be imaged in the brain, but they have developed through someone’s life,” she says. “So someone in a different culture might not get the same images from the same stimulus.

“A fact I really love from the more anthropological comparative cultural perspective is that less than 50% of cultures in the world do romantic kissing.

“It makes kissing seem like a fetishistic thing … but [to us] it seems natural.”

Bode says part of the reason Australia is ahead in the love studies stakes is that he and his colleague, associate professor Phil Kavanagh (from the University of South Australia and the University of Canberra), have the best data – by which he means the Romantic Love Survey 2022. It’s a longitudinal study of 1,556 young people in the first flush of love (which, for this purpose, is the first two years or less).

Bode was the lead researcher on a study recently published in Behavioral Sciences based on that data. It looked at the link between the behavioural activation system (BAS) and romantic love, using their survey. The BAS, he says, is an ancient “biopsychological system that’s deep at the bottom [of] our brain that directs our behaviour … It affects our behaviour by creating emotions, thoughts and movements to achieve goals”.

He speculates that the same system that once prompted men to demonstrate their hunting prowess might now lead them to send dick pics to the objects of their desire.

They have used the BAS to develop a tool to measure “specific bio-psychological mechanisms that likely contribute to romantic love”, which they hope can be used in future neurological and psychological studies.

The article speaks of the rosy nature of reciprocal love and of its potential darker side. The loved one is idealised and put on a pedestal. Lovers are willing “to expend effort to gain reward” through courtship, and to shift their appearances or behaviour to be more desirable – and they might obsessively monitor social media pages.

The researchers write that people in romantic love may have “learning deficits”.

“The most cogent example of this is the instances of obsessive pursuit (usually committed by men), which occurs in the absence of rewarding interaction from the loved one,” they write.

“Men, in particular, but not exclusively, have a tendency to misinterpret politeness or friendliness for sexual interest.”

Bode says it’s clear that feelings of love on one side can lead to unhealthy, harmful activities, including love-bombing and partner surveillance. Reid describes it as a “continuum”.

“Sometimes love can become tyrannical – that’s when it can go into those problematic issues around consent and interpersonal violence,” she says.

“That idea sits alongside the fact that many people would still describe romantic love as a mystical experience that alters their reality in some way. Those two things are happening at the same time.”