PhD thesis in Human Geography, University of Sussex, 2025.

Love migration is migration which is primarily motivated and undertaken for the pursuit of a couple love relationship. Love migrants are, therefore, people who identify love as their own or their partner’s primary motivation for migration

Many people don’t just migrate for work, lifestyle, or marriage; they often make this significant move to be with a partner, seeking connection and love. This thesis refers to this experience as love migration, aiming to explore the profound ways couple relationships unfold in the context of migration.

Drawing on narrative interviews with 47 couples in Brussels, London and Barcelona — in which each couple also chose an object through which to talk about their relationship — the thesis examines how migrating becomes meaningful as an act of love, how couples negotiate who moves and where, and how objects and everyday touch carry the emotional life of mobile relationships.

Abstract

Taking love as the analytical focus on mobile couple relationships, in this thesis I present a novel conceptualisation of migrant couples as ‘love migrants’. Focusing analytically on love shows that migrating becomes meaningful as an act of love and as a process through which love migrants distinguish their relationships from non-mobile couple relationships. Giving a central place to love in my research demonstrates that love migrant couples draw on embodied knowledges and material belongings to understand their feelings and experiences of relationships.

My methodological approach is informed by feminist perspectives and gives primacy to participant voices. I use creative methods in which narrative interviewing is accompanied by a material approach where participants choose an object to talk about. This creates space for contemplation of emotional, tactile and non-verbal aspects.

The substantive chapters engage with negotiating migrating for love, materialities of love, and love migrant subjectivities. In Chapter 4, I show how migrating (or not) for love becomes a meaningful symbolic act and discuss the intricacies of how couples negotiate which partner will migrate and to where. I argue that the desire for day-to-day intimacy and touch is a central motivation for migration in love migrant lives. In Chapter 5, I argue that the objects chosen by couples indicate multiple and contingent understandings of love. I develop my argument that everyday touch and intimacy is important in love migrant lives through attention to the objects. In Chapter 6, I analyse how love migrant couples construct subjectivities through discourses of cosmopolitanism and argue that the objects chosen indicate a form of social capital related to love.

Overall, I argue that my perspective articulates an under-researched view on migration and allows insight into how couples experience and understand migration, adding complexity to existing frameworks. I aim to connect research on love with research on mobile couple relationships to explore the emotional side of couple relationships in mobility through the novel concept ‘love migration’.

What’s in the thesis

Chapter 4 — Negotiating love migration. Why couples move for love, how they decide who migrates and to where, and why the desire for everyday co-presence — rather than economic calculation — drives these moves.

Chapter 5 — The materialities of love. What the objects couples chose (a towel, a T-shirt, a coffee pot, a guitar) reveal about how love is understood, performed and remembered across a migration.

Chapter 6 — Love migrant subjectivities. How couples craft a sense of who they are through migration, cosmopolitanism and taste — and how love itself becomes a form of social distinction.

Read the thesis

Cite it as

Salt, Y. 2025. Love Migration: Narratives and Materialities of Mobile Couple Relationships. PhD thesis, University of Sussex.

Related publications

• Salt, Y. 2026. Love As a Lens on the Economic and Gender Processes of Couple Migration. Population, Space and Place, 32, e70307. Open access: doi.org/10.1002/psp.70307
• Clarke-Salt, Y. 2017. Loving over Skype: Tactile Viewing, Emotional Atmospheres and Video Calling. Journal of Popular Romance Studies, 6, 1-21.
• Clarke-Salt, Y. 2017. Between the Covers: Couples Making Books Together as a Practice of Love. In The Materiality of Love: Essays on Affection and Cultural Practices. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Yvonne Salt (previously published as Clarke-Salt). ORCID: 0000-0001-8887-7058