What is the Love Migration Project about?

The Love Migration Project is about love, migration, relationships, living apart from your partner, meeting someone from a different country, meeting someone in a different country, moving abroad, settling. Essentially it is about love and migration.

Many people migrate because they fall in love. Couples might move together and find this changes things about their relationship. Yet others fall out of love when they migrate. And still there are those who move to get away from a relationship gone wrong. There are those who are looking for love while they are mobile. There are those who settle once they find someone special. And some do not want to get involved until they are settled. In this sense, the Love Migration project considers how contemporary couple relationships are negotiated, using the space of migration to concentrate the focus when couples are potentially faced with being geographically separate. As some researchers have theorised (e.g. Giddens, 1991, 1992), in contemporary society, people only stay in relationships for as long as they are convenient. They have further suggested that technology and the ability to travel has meant that relationships, including couple relationships, can traverse space in increasingly easier ways. Speaking to couples who migrate because of their couple relationship seems like a good place to examine these theorisations.

Why do we need this research?

The project is an innovative approach in the study of personal life which provides insight into how couples understand and experience their relationships in migratory contexts.

This research includes learning about people in all forms of love migration relationships, for example; people who are in a relationship with someone from or living in another country; people who are mobile whilst in a relationship; people who have migrated to get away from a relationship. In short, the project is about the power of love to compel people to move around, or to stay put, or to have long-distance relationships; or to stay put in a place which is not their own country.

What is the inspiration behind the project?

Having lived and loved in several countries, I have often wondered why so little attention is paid to this aspect of migration. One of my motivations for this project is to add an emotional dimension to research about migration as personal life features strongly in many people’s migration.

Others have commented on the ways that love is important to forging links between countries. Umberto Eco has said that Europe will be united through culture. He praises the Erasmus project for allowing people to meet each other, and potentially fall in love. As he puts it, it goes ‘a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children’ and this is what will create a sense of European identity – love.

The Love Migration Project explores this idea by collecting people’s stories about their experiences of love migration. Stories of love found, love lost, love in process.

Participation

The fieldwork phase of this project has now ended.