Love During Collapse

Whether you are currently in a stable partnership or searching for a soulmate, you likely view intimacy as a source of emotional satisfaction. In stable, affluent societies, love is influenced by Romanticism, which emphasizes individualism and the pursuit of happiness. It encourages the search for a soulmate.

However, when civilization collapses, this soulmate myth might be self-destructive. The new environment will require bonds based on survival rather than romance. In some situations, love takes on twisted forms, unthinkable to us today.

History shows what this might look like.

When individuals perceive a resource as rare or at risk, its perceived value increases. History shows fluctuating sex ratios and the immediate threat of struggle or death radically altered the biological market for partners. Also, when potential partners are scarce, individuals become less picky and are more likely to marry young to avoid future insecurity.

Conversely, in stable environments, an abundance of partners leads to higher selectivity and a decrease in the perceived value of any single bond, often resulting in delayed commitment.

In crisis, humans generally respond to the threat of isolation by amplifying positive perceptions of available partners while downplaying their negative traits. This pro-relationship bias gives a psychological buffer against the terror of facing the collapse alone. This explains why many relationships form quickly in environments like the Czestochowa concentration camp; in his memoir The Flower of the Human Heart, Sigi Siegreich recounts meeting Hanka on New Year’s Eve in 1944 and marrying her only 17 days later, immediately following liberation.

The stable pairbond was the most common relationship pattern within concentration camps. Unlike romantic partnerships in the free world, prisoners often formed these pairs specifically for mutual survival, creating a unit that could navigate the camp’s brutality and bureaucracy. Instead of pairing based on shared interests or physical attraction, partnerships were based on the reciprocal exchange of survival skills.

These bonds differed fundamentally from current expressive intimacy, which prioritizes emotional fulfillment. In a state of total attrition, individuals redefined "attractiveness" as absolute reliability, the certainty that a partner would not steal a shared ration.

While extreme conditions often shut down libido and dopamine-driven lust, the neurochemistry of bonding remained tied to the release of oxytocin. As documented in the "tend-and-befriend" research by Shelley Taylor, this attachment hormone facilitated the deep, platonic foxhole loyalty required to lower stress levels and allow for communal rest amidst constant threat.

Secondarily, these pairbonds provided a semblance of humanity amidst total dehumanization. When the camp transferred or killed one partner, a replacement often soon followed, as the survival costs of being a loner were high. Even survivors who claimed they survived independently were often aided by someone who cared for them as much as for themselves.

Combinations often expanded beyond the pair bond. As nuclear family structures disintegrated under the pressure of war and genocide, humans instinctively organized into survival clans or pseudo-families. These groups often included unrelated people.

In her memoir Return to Auschwitz, survivor Kitty Hart noted that "alone one could not possibly survive", which led to the formation of "little families of two or three." These groups performed several critical functions. Members often adopted the roles of lost parents or siblings. Older prisoners might mentor younger ones, while younger prisoners provided the physical vigor needed to assist their substitute elders.

The group served as a vessel for collective hope. Groups also allowed for specialized labor, based on skills or shifts. These groups rarely functioned as polyamorous romantic units. Instead, members modeled their bonds on traditional familial hierarchies to ensure maximum stability and avoid the complexities of multi-partner sexual dynamics during a crisis.

This phenomenon was not unique to the Holocaust. During the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, friends formed pseudo-families where each member was prepared to give their life for the others. Similarly, in the wake of the Somali state’s collapse, clan loyalties surged dramatically as traditional lineages offered the only haven for security and resource distribution.

Throughout history, the clan is a central pillar of survival.

While the stable pair and the survival clan are resilient, beyond a point even these break down. The 872-day Siege of Leningrad and the 1932-1933 Holodomor in Ukraine show how extreme starvation can destroy intra-family bonds.

During the Siege of Leningrad, a "starvation policy" claimed nearly one million lives. The daily bread ration was only 125 grams for non-essential workers, providing roughly 300 to 500 calories of largely indigestible filler. The physical and psychological toll was catastrophic. In her study The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, Alexis Peri analyzes personal diaries from the period which reveal that "romantic desire withered" as the body focused entirely on biological maintenance.

The physical deterioration was so extreme that 17-year-old Elena Mukhina looked in the mirror and saw "an old man" looking back at her, as starving children had teeth fell out. Family dynamics underwent a radical reversal. Children took on adult responsibilities, becoming caregivers for their weakening parents and effectively skipping the developmental stage of childhood to become tiny old men and women. In many instances, the desperation for rations became so severe that family members turned on one another, stealing bread from their own kin to stave off death for a few more hours.

Arguably, the Holodomor provides the most harrowing example of family collapse. The man-made famine induced rare social anomalies. In her comprehensive history Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, Anne Applebaum documents cases of mothers killing and eating their own children. In Zaporizhzhia, Kharytyna Nyshchenko strangled her two young children due to "prolonged exhaustion" and "clouding of consciousness." Peasants often abandoned their children in urban centers, hoping the state would save them, only for the state to unload them out in the open country where they died of exposure. Soviet propaganda also actively destroyed the parent-child bond by encouraging children to report on their parents for hiding wheat, pitting parent against child.

These cases suggest that while love can act as a survival strategy, the fundamental drive for self-preservation can ultimately override this as collapse deepens.

During war, famine or collapse, love becomes warped and sex is often systematically weaponized. The Nazi camp system designed the registration of prisoners as a ritual of sexual humiliation. Officials stripped, shaved, and subjected prisoners to invasive physical examinations. SS officials delighted in these procedures, using rods to check for virginity or performing examinations to assert total dominion over the prisoner's body. This established a camp value system where sexual modesty was erased and the body became an object of the state.

Within the camps, a hierarchy of camp aristocrats emerged, men who worked as organizers with access to the black market. These men often used their status to solicit sexual favors from female prisoners. Examples from survivor memoirs illustrate the grim reality of these transactions.

In her memoir I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, Dr. Gisella Perl recounted asking a Polish worker in a women's camp latrine for string in exchange for bread. The man refused the food, instead rudely demanding sexual favors while his hands were "filthy from his work".

In Five Chimneys: A Woman Who Survived Auschwitz, Olga Lengyel initially appreciated the "human-sounding voice" of a man named Tadek who repaired beds in her barrack. However, after giving her a potato and a shawl, he began fondling her, revealing that his "gifts" were merely a down payment for sexual access.

Following liberation, society rarely stigmatized men who visited camp brothels or engaged in sexual relationships, whereas women who engaged in "sex for survival" were often branded as prostitutes and ostracized. In occupied territories like France, horizontal collaboration (romantic or sexual relationships with German soldiers) became a common phenomenon. Following liberation, these women faced brutal recriminations. Vigilantes publicly humiliated approximately 20,000 shaven women (femmes tondues) as a way for French men to reclaim their masculinity from the memory of the German occupation. These relationships produced an estimated 200,000 occupation babies, whom the public considered a betrayal and also exiled or stigmatized after the war.

During most catastrophic situations there exists a power imbalance between classes of people. Those with power will hoard resources while most go without. To cross this bridge, sex and intimacy can become a currency of exchange. Sexual barter can be via an explicit arrangement or manipulation. Often these relationships morph into something somewhat real, where purpose is masked by a sheer veneer of romance.

One of the most complex psychological phenomena in collapsing civilizations is the formation of emotional links between the victim and the victimizer, driven by a more diverse range of motivations, from strategic survival to genuine affection.

Stockholm Syndrome describes a psychological response wherein a captive begins to identify with and empathize with their captor. A captor often initiates the bond by threatening a victim's life and then choosing not to kill them, causing the victim’s terror to transpose into intense gratitude for being “given life". Over time, victims in enforced dependence begin to interpret rare acts of kindness, such as being offered food or permitted to talk, as evidence of the captor's humanity or benevolence.

Experts often draw the distinction between Stockholm Syndrome and "trauma bonding" based on reciprocity. While trauma bonding is a one-way response to cycles of abuse and kindness, Stockholm Syndrome involves a mutual empathy. This mechanism essentially serves as a survival strategy. By aligning with the captor’s goals and believing in their goodness, the victim may secure their safety in a world where the captor is in complete control.

In Auschwitz, Helena Citronova and SS Lance Corporal Franz Wunsch developed a relationship that saved the life of Helena's sister, Rozinka. Wunsch obsessed over Helena, keeping a photograph of her in her striped uniform and cutting out her face to place it in other, safer photographs. Helena later admitted that, although she initially hated him, "in the end, I loved him" because he intervened to save her sister.

With sexual relationships comes conception, often unplanned. Biological urges persist, despite the irrationality of child rearing in a hostile environment. However, the reality of collapse radically alters the nature of infant care and the decisions surrounding it. Mothers in crisis environments may revert to any means to keep infants alive. As Iris HeavyRunner and Joann Sebastian Morris documented in their research on traditional resilience, Indigenous grandmothers recount stories of surviving hard times by feeding infants rabbit brains, caribou broth, moose broth, and boiled rice water. Elders often framed these practices through a lens of resiliency, with one stating that infants fed animal brains grew up strong and tough.

During the Holodomor, hunger often forced mothers to make critical choices about which child to feed or whether to abandon an infant. During the 19th-century population crises in Russia, foundling homes in St. Petersburg and Moscow received tens of thousands of children annually. These institutions utilized "turning cradles," allowing mothers to deposit infants unseen to protect their identity.

As David Kertzer documents in Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control, this crisis echoed historical patterns such as in pre-industrial Italy. Before the institutionalization of the ruota degli esposti (foundling wheel), desperate parents, driven by both extreme poverty and the paralyzing social stigma of being unwed, frequently discarded infants in gutters or on the streets, leaving their survival to pure chance or the pity of strangers.

While the pair and clan act as primary buffers against death, a significant portion of the population during a collapse finds itself involuntarily alone. These individuals often experience the highest mortality rates and the most rapid psychological decline. Without a witness to their existence or a partner to share the logistical burden of survival, the loner is vulnerable to chronic stress, poor resource access, weak defence, and eventual exhaustion.

In the the concentration camp, the "Muselmann", the prisoner who had surrendered to apathy and was marked for death, was often someone who had lost their primary bond or failed to integrate into a pseudo-family. Without the social pressure to wash, eat, or stay upright, the individual faded.

Viktor Frankl observed that those who found themselves without a social connection or a future-oriented goal involving another person were the first to succumb to typhus or starvation.

Another subset of individuals chooses solitude as a deliberate survival strategy. They often view other humans as liabilities or potential threats. In the early stages of a collapse, where social cohesion is replaced by predatory behavior, choosing to be alone can increase survival odds by reducing exposure to violence and betrayal.

The daily life of the strategic recluse is stealthy. They avoid the visibility required to maintain a clan, preferring to hide resources rather than share them. This strategy, however, leaves them vulnerable to minor injuries or illnesses that would be survivable with even basic communal care.

As documented by survivor Selco Begovic in his accounts of the Siege of Sarajevo, those who survived longest in total isolation often possessed high levels of pre-existing technical self-sufficiency. However, even these individuals reported a cost to their choice. Begovic describes a man who hid in his apartment for months, avoiding all human contact; while he survived the physical violence of the streets, he emerged with profound social atrophy, having lost the ability to read facial expressions or trust verbal cues.

Love today is already changing. Young couples aren’t having kids, knowing that famine and war await. The American dream is no longer attainable, so the nuclear family is already dying. Many are simply opting out.

That doesn’t mean love won’t exist. Instead, the lessons of the past show us the persistence of physical and emotional bonding as a survival strategy.

Love won't disappear, but it won't look like it does today.

I hope you can find what you need.

Thank you for reading. My name is Sarah and I run Collapse2050 by myself. It is a place for the collapse-aware community to learn, debate and connect. Please consider subscribing. The site is free for all, but paid subscribers and one-time contributors help to cover hosting and production costs. Thank you. Sarah