Romantic Love Was Never Designed to Be Equal

We like to believe romantic love is about connection, choice, and equality.

Two people meet.
They fall in love.
They build a life together.

Simple. Beautiful. Fair.

Except romantic love, as an institution, was never designed to be equal. It was designed to function—socially, economically, reproductively. Equality was never the point.

That’s not cynicism. That’s history.

For most of recorded time, marriage—the legal container of romantic love—was not about affection. It was about property, lineage, labor, and control. Women were exchanged through marriage like assets. Love, if it appeared, was a bonus feature, not a requirement.

Historian Stephanie Coontz notes that marrying for love is a relatively recent invention, becoming common only in the last 200 years. Before that, marriage was strategic. Romantic feelings were considered unstable, even dangerous.

What didn’t change when love entered the picture, though, was power.

Women were still economically dependent. Still legally subordinate. Still responsible for unpaid domestic labor. Love was added on top of inequality, not used to dismantle it.

That imbalance didn’t disappear—it just got romanticized.

Today, we tell women that love requires compromise. That good relationships need patience, understanding, sacrifice. These sound neutral until you look closely at who is expected to do most of the adjusting.

Women are more likely to relocate for a partner’s job. More likely to reduce work hours after children. More likely to take on the mental load of running a household. Sociological data across Western countries shows that even in dual-income homes, women perform the majority of unpaid labor.

Yet this imbalance is rarely framed as structural. It’s framed as personal choice.

“She wanted to.”
“She’s better at it.”
“She cares more.”

Care becomes destiny. Love becomes justification.

Even modern relationship advice quietly reinforces this. Women are encouraged to communicate better, nurture intimacy, manage emotions—essentially, to do more relational labor. Men are encouraged to “show up” and are praised disproportionately when they do the bare minimum.

The emotional economy of love is skewed, and we pretend it’s natural.

The language of romance plays a role here. Women are taught to equate love with endurance. To see suffering as depth. To believe that if something hurts, it must be meaningful.

Men, on the other hand, are socialized to see love as supportive rather than consuming. A place of rest, not obligation.

That difference alone makes equality difficult.

Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir argued that women have historically been encouraged to dissolve themselves into love, while men are encouraged to grow through it. One becomes the ground. The other becomes the figure.

You can’t build equality on that foundation.

Even desire itself isn’t neutral. Studies in psychology show women are more likely to prioritize emotional connection and stability in relationships, not because they’re inherently wired that way, but because their social and economic survival has long depended on attachment.

Romantic love has functioned as a safety strategy for women in a world that offered few alternatives.

And when love is tied to survival, negotiation becomes impossible.

Capitalism quietly benefits from this setup. The nuclear family—powered by women’s unpaid labor—has been one of the most efficient systems ever created. Care is privatized. Burnout is individualized. Inequality is framed as intimacy.

If a woman is exhausted, it’s a relationship issue.
If she’s resentful, it’s a communication issue.
If she leaves, it’s a personal failure.

The system remains untouched.

This is why equality in love feels so hard to achieve even today. Not because people don’t want it, but because the scripts we’re working from were never written for fairness.

We’re trying to retrofit equality into a structure built on imbalance.

That doesn’t mean romantic love is doomed. But it does mean honesty is required.

Equality in love isn’t about splitting chores perfectly or using the right language. It’s about recognizing that love has always carried unequal expectations—and choosing, consciously, to dismantle them.

It means questioning why compromise so often means women shrinking.
Why emotional labor is invisible.
Why women leaving unequal relationships are called selfish rather than sane.

Writer bell hooks once said that love cannot exist where there is domination. That’s not poetic. It’s practical.

Love doesn’t become equal by wishing it so. It becomes equal when power is redistributed—emotionally, economically, socially.

Until then, romantic love will keep pretending to be mutual while quietly running on asymmetry.

The uncomfortable truth is this:
Romantic love wasn’t designed to be equal.

But it can be redesigned—if we stop confusing tradition with truth.