the general seriousness that many concubine dramas put in depicting marriage as an economic-political arrangement where a woman's husband replaces her parents as source of overwhelming authority + the depiction of harem infighting for favour also tend to clarify, while not always addressing it directly, one of the great mysoginistic misunderstandings leveled at women to this day, which is the supposed frivolousness of their interest in romance and, within this, the often unilateral focus on receiving proof of emotional engagement. this is banal to me and to many, i'm sure, but evidently not enough since this line of criticism is still rampant. it's not only that, in a situation of limited autonomy, compatibility with one's spouse becomes one of the few deciding variables offering venues for personal fulfillment (though this is also part of the picture): it's that, if your husband has absolute power over you, that he may like you is your only hope for mercy. establishing a sentimental hold over him is, often, the only controllable factor allowing for an (even partial or temporary) rebalancing of the power differential baked into the relationship. while, on the contrary, 1) a husband does not need his wife to like him to extract anything out of her; 2) for a woman, her own emotional engagement may add a further layer of perilous dependence to an already asymmetrical situation. over recent turns of history, most places have reconstructed marriage into a more (or less) egalitarian structure, so that certain "romantic" expectations may look anachronistic and unjustified to some extent, but they still represent a practical reaction to the perception of a power imbalance that hasn't been fully tilted. the idea that women spring into existence biologically equipped with a desire to receive flowers is puzzling.
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