This article focuses on the analysis of daydreams and fantasies people have regarding their partnerships in ‘non-moments’, moments in which we have time to take a break or to daydream. This article makes a strong case for the relevance of the shift from the isolation experienced within these ‘non-moments’ towards an altered experience of this isolation, which has been moulded and partially broken by the possibility to share our dreams in real time, and communicate with our significant others (here, partners), while tearing us further apart from those who share with us these moments in the same place. The analysis of such non-moments will help us to shed light on how our intimate relationships are woven on a daily basis, and how electronic communication is part of a differentiation process in which we can share our imaginaries just as we produce them.

This article aims to provide a contribution to the debate about concepts that describe the empirically rich phenomenon ‘romantic love’. The great variety of different facets of romantic love that exist and that we encountered in over 100 qualitative interviews and 4 focus group discussions carried out in Spain (Barcelona) and Germany (Leipzig) have inspired us to rethink existing definitions of romantic love. Rather than emotion or bond, the concept ‘linking emotion’ might help to capture usually rather unconsidered dimensions of romantic love. In order to discuss the value of defining love as linking emotion, this article will point at the 4 most important dimensions of love that we encountered in the analysis of our interviews. Results of our analysis will be compared with existing definitions of love, the usefulness of different concepts in order to define love will be questioned. Our empirically driven bottom-up approach will allow to discuss the usefulness of defining love as linking emotion.