When Love Was a Structural Risk

Farshid Rashidifar
Jun 6
4 min read

Farshid Rashidifar, MSW, RSW.

Psychotherapist & Relational Psychology Analyst

In the modern world, romantic love is widely regarded as the natural and inevitable foundation of marriage. But across much of human history, love was neither the aim of marriage nor a virtue praised in public life. Instead, it was frequently treated as a destabilizing force—a threat capable of disrupting family loyalties, inheritance lines, and societal cohesion.

In many traditional societies, love was not something to be celebrated but something to be controlled. Emotional intimacy outside socially sanctioned structures was considered dangerous. The moral opposition to romantic love in these settings was not just about individual virtue; it was about protecting a social order. Love, in this context, had to be regulated not because it was immoral, but because it was unpredictable.

Ancient India: Marriage as a Social Pact

In ancient India, marriage was conceived not as a personal union, but as a social and economic contract. It served to maintain caste boundaries, lineage continuity, and property rights. Pre-marital infatuation was seen as a form of behavioral deviance that risked undermining inter-family power dynamics.

Texts like the Kama Sutra are often misunderstood in the West as celebrations of romantic freedom. In reality, these texts were embedded in a larger social structure that strictly regulated the expression of desire. Even the most intimate relationships were meant to align with the expectations of a larger collective framework. Marriage was not a canvas for self-expression; it was a system for taming and channeling the unpredictable nature of human desire.

Ancient China: Love as a Threat to Familial Order

In ancient Chinese society, strong emotional attachment between husband and wife was considered a potential danger to filial piety and familial stability. The primary loyalty of a man was expected to lie with his parents, not his spouse. If a man’s affection for his wife overshadowed his obligations to his family of origin, it was cause for intervention—sometimes resulting in divorce or forced separation.

The very word "love" in classical Chinese often referred to secret, forbidden, or socially disruptive liaisons. It wasn’t until the 11th century that Chinese intellectuals coined a term for legitimate spousal affection. Until then, the emotional bond we now call "love" was considered linguistically and socially irrelevant within the boundaries of marriage.

Ancient Greece: Love as Psychological Disorder

In ancient Greece, especially under the framework of Eros, love was seen not as a virtue but as a psychophysical condition—a kind of madness. Greek medical texts described symptoms of love in clinical terms: insomnia, loss of appetite, obsessive thoughts. It was a state to be managed or cured, not encouraged.

Philosophers like Plato gave a more metaphysical spin to love, referring to it as a form of "divine madness" in dialogues like Phaedrus. Yet even this view emphasized its volatility. Love might lead to wisdom, but it could just as easily lead to ruin. As such, it was considered ill-suited to serve as the foundation of long-term relational stability.

Medieval Europe: Love Outside Marriage

By the 12th and 13th centuries, a novel attitude toward romantic love began to emerge in Europe—but it was sharply separated from the institution of marriage. Courtly love, with its longing, secrecy, and pain, became a cultural ideal among the aristocracy. Yet it was celebrated precisely because it occurred outside the bounds of wedlock.

Writers like Andreas Capellanus even declared that "marriage is no excuse for love." Passion was considered more noble when it defied social constraints. Folk songs and popular tales often ridiculed the idea of emotional closeness within marriage, portraying it as dutiful but unromantic. Marriage was where obligation lived; love was where imagination thrived.

France and the Romanticization of Infidelity

In medieval France, especially among the nobility, marriage was often a strategic alliance governed by considerations of power, property, and lineage. Within that rigid framework, emotional and sexual fulfillment was sought outside the marriage contract. Royal mistresses were not just tolerated; they were institutionalized.

Countess of Champagne famously stated, "True love cannot exist within marriage." For her, and many like her, the structure of marriage was too constrained, too transactional, to allow for the flourishing of authentic emotional intimacy. Passion was preserved through rebellion against the norm, not conformity to it.

What History Reminds Us

Across civilizations and centuries, love was often seen as a force that needed to be subdued, not exalted. It threatened systems that relied on predictability, hierarchy, and loyalty. The regulation of love was therefore not merely a cultural quirk—it was a structural imperative.

Only in recent centuries, with the rise of individualism and the cultural reach of mass media, has love transitioned from the margins to the center of relational legitimacy. In modern Iran, for instance, where family oversight and cultural compatibility once determined marital viability, we now witness a growing dominance of emotion-based selection: attraction, chemistry, and personal choice.

Yet this shift raises a pressing question: How can we expect a relationship grounded in something as volatile as emotion to produce something as durable as partnership?

A Quiet Reckoning

Maybe the issue isn’t that love has diminished, or that people have grown superficial. Maybe the problem is that love, no matter how sincere or intense, cannot sustain what once was upheld by structure. And if the older systems have collapsed without anything substantial to replace them, then love must now carry a burden it was never designed to bear.

Key Questions to Reflect On

Where did my personal definition of love come from: family, media, personal experience?
Did my family system encourage emotional honesty or structural loyalty?
How often have I confused emotional intensity with actual compatibility?
Has love in my life acted as a stabilizer or as a source of instability?
If I had only pursued relationships that were structurally sound, how many of my past connections would have happened at all?

Closing Thought

Love can be beautiful. But it isn’t always wise. It isn’t always stable. And it certainly isn’t always enough. Enduring relationships rarely last because of the force of emotion alone. They endure because they exist within a framework that holds them.

If we want love to last, we must give it a structure that honors both freedom and form.

Farshid Rashidifar, MSW, RSW

Psychotherapist & Relational Psychology Analyst

Website: FarshidRashidifar.com

Podcast: The GuardianMind Podcast