4 min readFeb 21, 2026 07:35 AM IST
First published on: Feb 21, 2026 at 06:43 AM IST
A 2026 IPSOS report placed Indians among the least satisfied with their love lives, alongside the Japanese and South Koreans. The aftermath of Valentine’s Day offers a chance to revisit how the Indian economy structures and shapes our romantic impoverishment.
My first thought is to say love is great business for the consumer economy. The industry of appetites and appearances — food, fashion, beauty — represents a sizeable share of the luxury spending the Indian economy thrives on. But the economic story of love extends well beyond roses and dinner reservations. In bringing love into conversation with the economy, I am interested in how labour markets shape the conditions under which relationships form, evolve or fray.
An ambitious question, certain to be mocked by those who frame the economy as stocks and statistics, is: How much love does our GDP growth generate? The answer, the per rupee supply of love, depends on who you are and how we define love.
Economists typically reduce love to transactions — who pairs with whom, how assortative mating shapes inequality and how caste and class filter matrimony. Romance is sharply circumscribed by social norms in India; inter-caste and inter-faith marriages remain meagre. This data maps discrimination, revealing how finding love often feels like a brutal competition — harshest for those who don’t conform to idealised standards of bodies, gender roles, incomes or social status. But these facts alone cannot construct a more loving economy.
What’s missing is a broader conception of love — not as a market for spouses, but as an enthusiasm for the world and the communities we build. Romance is hardly restricted to marriage or coupledom. Love exists in friendship, curiosity, mentorship, art, institution building, pursuing causes or conversations with strangers and alternative kinship networks.
If we treat love as a public good rather than a private acquisition, we can ask better questions: What economic conditions enable people to form nourishing relationships? What investments help a society cultivate more loving citizens? I offer three pillars to anchor love in economic policy.
First, romance in our public lives requires broadening our circle of friends, lovers and ideas. It demands reviving the modern project of strangers intermingling, breaking each other’s hearts or changing each other’s worldviews. Yet, in a country where women make up only a tenth of the police force and a third of the urban paid workforce, where safety in public remains scarce, and where love or breakups are often paired with intimate partner violence, how much freedom do we truly have to choose partners, ideas or enthusiasms with ease? Love requires investments in freedom of movement, tax incentives for a diverse associational life and safe spaces for all.
Second, in a monetised economy, our capacity to love is rooted in wages, working conditions and welfare. An economy that makes people miserable with job anxiety, unreliable contracts, endless hours of work and stagnant salaries ensures all authentic romantic possibilities escape our lives. Worse, it can entrap us into experiencing pair bonds as insurance schemes, spawning dysfunctional co-dependent relationships where love becomes competition for security or status.
Third, a policy-centric study of love is better served by measuring leisure than subjective rankings of romantic satisfaction. Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “It’s only when you have leisure that you learn.” Love requires rest and reflection. Yet in a country where investments in care labour are low and time poverty is acute — especially for women and disadvantaged groups — many struggle to find the free time or psychological safety to cultivate the vulnerability love requires. Decision-makers are building an economy where loneliness feels ubiquitous and love becomes a luxury. We must rescue romance from policy conversations that treat emotional health and leisure time as an afterthought. This also requires deeper scholarship on the “economics of love” beyond the obsession with studying marriage.
Love is a metaphysical mystery, perhaps best left to literature. But it is also an economic attribute — an incentive for our economic participation, currency that circulates through our labours, and a measure of our freedoms and well-being. For those who think the notion of love in the economy is too fuzzy, perhaps it is time to be less cynical. The economy shapes our intimacies as much as our incomes.
Bhattacharya is an economist and author. Views are personal
