How scientists labour on love and loss Nature asked them for their insights

Romance and relationships are research topics for some scientists in academia and the private sector

Relationships are central to the human experience. Over the course of a lifetime, most of us have, want, lose or think about them. But the study of romance, dating and relationships is not as romantic as it might sound. People are complicated; couples even more so. Funding is scarce, statistics are tricky and media reports tend to oversimplify findings with the unrealistic goal of providing clear advice for people who want to find a love match.

“We’re doing research that we know touches the hearts of so many people from so many walks of life,” says evolutionary biologist Justin Garcia, executive director of Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, which was established in 1947 to research issues around sexuality, gender and reproduction. “Whether that’s marriage, infidelity or romantic, sexual and relationship satisfaction, we can be talking about some of the most exciting and rewarding aspects of someone’s life and some of the most challenging and difficult ones. The power of romantic bonds across time and place is a great human unifier,” he says. Garcia’s latest research straddles the oddly separate worlds of relationship research and sex research, and includes work on consensual non-monogamy and distinctions between social and sexual monogamy.

Nature spoke to four scientists who study relationships, including Garcia. They shared what they love about studying love, what obstacles they face in the process — and how they navigate their own romantic lives.

KENNETH TAN: Studying love across cultures

Psychologist at Singapore Management University.

I started becoming interested in thinking about relationships when I was doing my military service in Singapore. I enlisted at the age of 19, completed my service and started university at 21. It was a time when many young guys had relationship issues; their partners left them for other folks in university while we were away in the army. I gave a lot of advice and shared a lot of similar stories with my friends. We spent many late nights just talking.

Early in my career, I went abroad to the United States to do a three-month training programme, which exposed me to the scientific study of close relationships. I had a partner at the time, and was thinking, ‘How do people navigate long-distance relationships?’ In Singapore, it’s something that you never think about because it’s a small country, so there is no travelling for three hours to see someone. It was a new experience for me and made me wonder how people maintain relationships. A big focus of my work has been understanding commitment.

I get questions from students and the public seeking personal advice about red flags, and how to get into — and out of — relationships and what to look for in a potential partner. They ask, ‘How many dates should I go on? Do I give this person a chance?’ It’s empowering to be asked, but it’s also challenging because you don’t want to give people the wrong answers. I try to tell students, ‘On average, this is what the work has shown, but everyone is different.’

When we’re trying to publish our work in US and international journals, we get pushback if we only have a sample from Singapore. We’re often asked to show similarities and differences with other cultures, regardless of whether we have any hypothesis on whether they’re different. On the one hand, it makes you think, ‘They’re not requesting that for US samples, so why do they want it for an Asian sample?’ But on the other hand, I think that ultimately, having that diversity and collecting data from multiple places enriches the science.

The cross-cultural work is still fresh, and there’s a lot more discovery waiting to happen. These are exciting times to be researching relationships and singlehood. Currently, I’m just one of two researchers studying the psychology of relationships in Singapore. I think that there are two or three others in southeast Asia. I spent six years in the United States, and I definitely miss the huge research network there. One of my goals is to build up the field in Singapore. As the work grows, hopefully the media will include an empirical angle in stories as well.

One thing about commitment is that you start to think of your own relationship as special. A lot of times, when I tell my wife during an argument, ‘Oh, this is what the science says about relationships, and this might be happening to us,’ she’ll say things such as, ‘We’re beyond the science. We’re not your science.’

JUSTIN GARCIA: People tell me things

Evolutionary biologist and executive director of the Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, at Indiana University and scientific adviser to Match.com.

My interests have always been in the evolution of monogamy. I’m part sex researcher, part relationship researcher. I go back and forth between these two worlds, and people are often surprised to hear that they’re separate fields. In the human sciences, you’ll hear people talking about social monogamy, also called pair bonding, as a relationship structure. It’s different from sexual monogamy, which is fidelity or sexual exclusivity. My colleagues and I had a whole section in a recent paper about distinctions between social and sexual monogamy.

It can be hard to get funding to study people’s romantic and sexual lives. The federal agencies are often worried about the word ‘sex’ in the title or the abstract of a paper. A lot of relationship scientists also don’t use the word ‘love’ in their studies. In the 1970s, a US senator criticized relationship and sex research as absurd government spending. That is very much a part of the history of these fields.

I came to the Kinsey Institute as a postdoc in 2011, and I have been scientific adviser to Match.com, the online dating service based in Dallas, Texas, since 2010. The late anthropologist Helen Fisher and I started a project with the company, called Singles in America. It’s an annual scientific study of more than 5,000 single people. We use a demographically representative sample to understand the attitudes and behaviours of more than 100 million single people — about one-third of the adult population in the United States. These are people who are moving in and out of romantic and sexual relationships at all stages of life. We’ve published a lot from that project over the years. The company doesn’t control what we publish, and its funding means that we avoid the challenge of getting federal grants. It has been a really rewarding collaboration.

Justin Garcia at an event with American-German sex therapist ‘Dr Ruth’, Ruth Westheimer.Credit: Kinsey Institute Library & Special Collections.

I’ll never forget the time that one of my senior colleagues on campus invited me for a coffee. She was a distinguished faculty member, and I thought, ‘Oh this is great, maybe it’s some kind of collaboration.’ I got there, and within two minutes, she took out her phone, turned it to face me and said, “Can you help me with my dating profile?”

One of the mistakes that she was making, and this happens a lot, was just thinking about what she was searching for. But courtship is about both searching and being found. You need a profile that someone can ask questions about, that they can engage with, that gives potential dates an opportunity to get to know you. So, they can say, ‘Oh, is that a picture of you hiking at Machu Picchu? I’ve always wanted to go there.’

People have told me about challenges in their relationships. I often remind them that I’m not a sex or couples therapist. I’ve been asked, ‘Don’t you get exhausted? You’re at a cocktail party and you’ve heard about everyone’s marital issues.’ But I take it as an honour that someone is willing to share an intimate piece of their life with me. And I think — what can we learn from it?

The fun of the work is that it’s interdisciplinary. It’s about the body, our brains, how we communicate, where we live, our development. I think that knowing more about ourselves makes us appreciate our relationships and the power of love even more. The challenge is that everyone has opinions about what you’re asking and concluding. They want to know, ‘How could you say that, because that’s not what happened to my cousin Billy and his divorce?’

SARAH STANTON: Steer clear of the love languages

Social psychologist and relationship researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

I study romantic relationships and how to make them better. I also investigate how to improve relationship experiences for people who struggle with them, either because they’re uncomfortable with intimacy or because their worries get in the way of them enjoying those connections. And I explore how relationships affect short- and long-term health and well-being.

Sometimes, the gap between the science and what’s written about it for the public is wide; findings often get misrepresented or overly simplified. People want to mention the five love languages as if they’re the solution to all relationship issues. The 5 Love Languages is a book first published in 1992 that assumes that each person has a preferred love language and that couples are more satisfied when partners speak one another’s preferred language. It’s such a bugbear of mine, because love languages are not formally based in science. They’re just some guy’s opinions. I am constantly being asked about them. Now I don’t even wait for it to be a question in my undergraduate classes. In lecture one, I say: “Disabuse yourself of this notion.”