Maintaining enduring romantic love can be challenging when people reach midlife, a time when questions surrounding one’s “progress” in life arise.  In the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany, the largest proportion of divorces and separations takes place during midlife, and across the world people report a decline in well-being and happiness around the age. Yet, despite these demographic patterns, many still pursue and achieve a lasting relationship.

This ethnographic project investigates the daily rhythms of enduring love in midlife  (35 to 60 years old) among individuals of diverse backgrounds in West European societies. It asks how people in long-term romantic relationships keep love alive at midlife while facing societal challenges: work pressures and precarity, parenting expectations, multiple care responsibilities, shifting social and economic policies, changes in gender and family norms, fear of commitment, and fear of missing out. The insights will enable a (re)consideration of dominant notions of what makes for a meaningful life over time.

From September 2025 to August 2026, the three core researchers, Dr. Rahil Roodsaz (PI), Jasmine Bruce-Rogers (PhD-candidate) and Avery Franken (PhD-candidate), will conduct ethnographies in Amsterdam, Berlin and Malmö respectively.  Within each city, the project is focused on an individual socially mixed neighbourhood: Waterlandplein in Amsterdam, Kreuzberg in Berlin, and Möllevången in Malmö. Conducting neighbourhood-based ethnographies allows for deeper knowledge of the places relevant to participants’ everyday lives. Rhythms of Love aims to collect diverse accounts of enduring love at midlife to move beyond universal notions of love and midlife. 

Rhythms of Love employs creative and sensory methodologies. In practice, this means that in addition to anthropological interviews, we use audio emotion diaries, professional photography, and informal go-along conversations (ie. moving through the neighbourhood and doing everyday activities together). This will allow us to explore and communicate the experience of romantic love in audio, visual and spatial modes of expression. The results of this research project will be shared in academic and public spaces through journal articles, monographs, blog posts, a conference organised by the Rhythms of Love team and a photography exhibition. 

The project is funded from 2024 to 2029 by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) Vidi Scheme (VI.Vidi.221C.033), and is based at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam.