For a comedy about marriage A Doll's House doesn't have much love in it. All the characters claim to love each other, but in reality they hide other emotions. Society's expectations have forced them into a love they don't feel. This false love is what ultimately causes them to fall apart. The play is full of marriages made out of convenience or expectation rather than love. Each character only loves in the way that is expected and continues to love only for convenience. There is no love in A Doll's House. Torvald treats Nora like a child, not an equal; he's not really in love with her. The most egregious examples of this are his nicknames for her. He likes to think of her as a small, delicate creature who needs to be saved and protected. While this may seem like a normal gesture for a love marriage, he goes too far. Nora is not the type of woman who appreciates this type of treatment, so it goes from affectionate to humiliating. He thinks that humiliating his wife is not only acceptable, but normal for a relationship by saying, “I wouldn't be a man if your feminine vulnerability didn't make you doubly attractive to me” (82). This is not a good foundation for their relationship, as it prevents him from giving Nora the kind of attention she needs. She doesn't need the kind of affectionate attention he gives her, she wants to talk as an equal. She wants to be "bothered...by all kinds of problems that [she] couldn't possibly help [him] deal with" (84) since that would allow her to help her with her life and give them the kind of relationship that Nora he needs to survive. He doesn't love her, he loves treating her this way. Nora, in fact, describes her relationship with the best people, when she says... middle of paper... "[she will] be able to find a way to redeem herself in people's eyes" (69). He doesn't love her, he needs social support. They have found each other again after being lost for many years, but it is not a romantic reunion. It is a calculation on the part of both parties for their greater individual happiness. A doll's house contains many relationships, but all of them are bad. From convenience to infatuation, Ibsen's work seems to be a primer on bad reasons for loving someone. Every single character has a personalized version of love and none of them seem to resemble true love. Whether they find it convenient to love out of respect or because love was their only choice at the time, none of them know true love. It's as if Ibsen wanted to show how some of the many reasons for love back then were wrong and would lead to problems later in life.