Iranians view themselves as a romantic people and others seem to concur. In the early 1880s, an American diplomat in Iran fondly recalled that peasants “have a decided taste for poetry, and often fly the heat of midday and find shelter under the great chenars [sycamore trees] in the center of the village, where they listen to recitations from the Odes of Hafiz or the Shah Nameh of Firdoüsee” (Benjamin 1887, 173). Classical Persian poetry, with its passionate references, is even now on the lips of both intellectuals and ordinary people alike. Sexual pleasure is a common topic of discussion. Lawful heterosexual union is viewed as a form of “pious obligation,” and a sacrament approved by the Qur'an (Bouhdiba [1975] 1985, 13), while jokes about the phallus in both sex-segregated spaces and mixed company are routine.

What of marital love? This and the next chapter focus on heterosexual unions in late nineteenth-century Iran in an attempt to explore this question. How many legal forms of intimacy existed in Iran? How did Iranian society perceive marriage? Were marriages stable or rocky? Was romantic love essential to a secure marriage? If not, how did couples cope with the disparity, and where did they turn their attention? I focus on heterosexual unions in Shiʿi middle- and upper-class urban communities of Tehran and several other major cities, though Sunni Muslim and non-Muslim urban communities also shared some of these practices.