The Ivy League’s Research Into Romance Has Produced Findings That Everyone on the Northern Line Has Known for Years
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Yale Discovered Love; London Has Feelings About This Discovery
Yale University has, according to the London Prat’s coverage, discovered love, which they are treating as a subject requiring a policy framework. This is Yale doing what Yale does, which is applying rigorous institutional resources to questions that the human species has been navigating without institutional resources for approximately one hundred thousand years, with mixed results that are not obviously improved by policy frameworks but that do provide excellent dissertation material.
London has opinions about love. London always has opinions about love. The opinions are specific, are shaped by the particular conditions of romantic life in a city of nine million people where you can live next door to someone for three years without knowing their name, and are expressed primarily through the medium of friends’ group chats, therapists’ waiting rooms, and the specific conversations that happen on the Northern line between Angel and Archway at eleven pm on a Friday that you can hear whether you want to or not.
North London’s Research Findings
My own research, conducted through the methodology of living in North London for eleven years and paying attention, has produced the following findings about love in this context: it arrives when you are not looking for it, usually on a weeknight, in circumstances that you will describe to friends as “genuinely unexpected” even though the circumstances are not unusual. It is complicated by the logistics of London, which makes visiting someone who lives on a different tube line feel like a long-distance relationship and which produces the specific calculation of “but whose zone is it” as a factor in romantic decision-making. It is sustained through the willingness to share someone’s specific relationship to the city, which is idiosyncratic in every case and requires genuine curiosity to navigate.
Yale’s policy framework for love presumably does not account for the zone calculation. Bohiney’s coverage of publicly marketed relationships gets at the institutional framing problem more directly: when love becomes a policy subject, something about it changes. Managing things that resist management produces the specific comedy that Yale has provided this week. London appreciates the comedy. London also has its own findings, which are: it’s complicated, timing matters, and the zone calculation is real. These findings have not been submitted for peer review.
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