Mental health paradox: Wuthering Heights on Valentine's, why not Frankenstein on Father's Day?
Valentine's Day keeps selling emotional intensity as romance. So when Wuthering Heights is packaged as love, it exposes a mental-health blind spot about what we normalise. Read this to see how cultural myths about love quietly shape anxiety and unhealthy attachment.
Every February, Valentine’s Day arrives with its usual cultural instructions: love should be intense, consuming, and (nowadays) even dramatic (Gen Z duh!). Roses must wilt dramatically, hearts must ache a little, and longing must feel unbearable... Against this backdrop, the release and renewed celebration of the Wuthering Heights feels almost appropriate. Until you stop and ask what, exactly, are we calling romance?
If, for you, Catherine and Heathcliff are love’s gold standard, or green flags, then emotional dysregulation must be devotion, obsession is intimacy, and personal collapse is nothing but proof of passion.
Which raises a logical and uncomfortable follow-up question: Wuthering Heights belongs near Valentine’s Day, does Frankenstein belong on Father’s Day?
It sounds absurd. And yet, the logic is disturbingly consistent. This is not a literary argument but a mental-health one.
TRAUMA WITH A VALENTINE FILTER?
Wuthering Heights has survived for generations as shorthand for “epic love.” But strip away the gothic moors and poetic anguish, and what remains is a relationship driven by unresolved trauma, identity collapse and emotional volatility.
Catherine and Heathcliff are not star-crossed lovers; they are two emotionally injured people clinging to each other as a survival strategy.
Be it Heathcliff’s early abandonment, humiliation and abuse that leave him rigid, vengeful and emotionally unsafe or the fact that Catherine grows up in a world where volatility is normal and emotional security is conditional. This bond is intense because it is dysregulating.
“I am Heathcliff,” Catherine famously says; a line that has left the readers with a thousand sighs (we mean the awws). In a therapy room, that sentence would stop the session.
“When someone cannot experience themselves as a separate emotional being, that’s not intimacy,” says Neelima Dhankar, a trauma-informed therapist who works with attachment injuries in Mumbai. “That’s identity fusion, often rooted in early deprivation. It feels romantic because it’s intense, but intensity is not the same as good health.”
Dhankar adds, Valentine’s Day amplifies this confusion. It trains us to believe that love should be overwhelming, consuming, slightly painful and calm relationships are boring.
Emotional steadiness is mistaken for lack of spark. Yes, in that climate, Wuthering Heights doesn’t just fit, but it thrives.
FRANKENSTEIN: PARENTING HORROR STORY WE REUSE TO READ THAT WAY
Now consider another film, Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist, creates life and immediately recoils from it. He refuses responsibility, care or emotional presence. The creature is not born monstrous; he becomes so through sustained rejection and isolation.
Seen through a mental-health lens, Frankenstein is not about science gone wrong but a poster for attachment failure.
“Neglect is one of the most under-recognised forms of psychological harm,” says Atul Panigrahi, a clinical psychologist who works with adults raised in emotionally absent homes. “When a caregiver withdraws, the child internalises shame, rage and worthlessness. That pain doesn’t disappear, it gets expressed later.”
If WH shows us what happens when trauma is mistaken for love, Frankenstein shows us what happens when creation is separated from care. The creature’s violence is not inexplicable evil; it is the downstream effect of abandonment.
And yet, culturally, we recoil from calling Victor a bad parent.
THE SHARED PSYCHOLOGICAL THREAD
Read together, or even watched together, both these classics tell the same mental-health story: trauma does not stay contained, but it spills outward into relationships, families and future generations.
In Wuthering Heights, unresolved grief and rage infect children who inherit emotional neglect and cruelty. In Frankenstein, we see how abandonment transforms longing into destruction. Neither of these stories suggests that love, by itself, is healing. In fact, it shows us just the opposite. Without safety, regulation and accountability, love becomes destabilising.
“This is what we now understand as intergenerational trauma,” explains Pulkit Sharma, a Puducherry-based therapist. “Unhealed adults pass emotional patterns forward, through volatility, absence or control. The damage is quiet, but cumulative.” And the irony? We treat one story as romance and the other as horror, when, psychologically, they are chapters of the same book.
WHY IS THIS A MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEM?
Therapists today report a pattern that feels eerily Bront-esque where clients equate anxiety with chemistry, obsession with intimacy, and emotional chaos with love. Many stay in unsafe relationships because the pain feels familiar. Others abandon healthy partnerships because they simply don’t “feel enough.”
What psychiatrists want us to believe is this: what people describe as spark is often nervous-system dysregulation. Your body isn’t responding to love, it’s responding to unpredictability.”
Romanticising stories like Wuthering Heights without psychological context reinforces this confusion because it teaches people to endure suffering as proof of commitment. To mistake longing for connection, and to think that love must hurt before it heals.
This isn’t just about relationships. It shows up as anxiety, emotional dependency, burnout and chronic dissatisfaction. In that sense, Valentine’s Day is not just a commercial festival but an annual mental-health stress test.
So, we are back to our initial question: Should Frankenstein Drop on Father’s Day?
True, the question is satirical, but the discomfort it produces is the point. If obsession can be sold as romance, why not neglect as a parenting story? And that may be the real health paradox.
The danger lies not in reading or watching these stories, but in misunderstanding them. If we mistake trauma for romance and neglect for complexity, we don’t just misread themes, we misread our own emotional lives.
Maybe the question isn’t whether Frankenstein belongs on Father’s Day. Maybe it’s why we’ve been handing out Wuthering Heights as a love story all along.
Every February, Valentine’s Day arrives with its usual cultural instructions: love should be intense, consuming, and (nowadays) even dramatic (Gen Z duh!). Roses must wilt dramatically, hearts must ache a little, and longing must feel unbearable... Against this backdrop, the release and renewed celebration of the Wuthering Heights feels almost appropriate. Until you stop and ask what, exactly, are we calling romance?
If, for you, Catherine and Heathcliff are love’s gold standard, or green flags, then emotional dysregulation must be devotion, obsession is intimacy, and personal collapse is nothing but proof of passion.
Which raises a logical and uncomfortable follow-up question: Wuthering Heights belongs near Valentine’s Day, does Frankenstein belong on Father’s Day?
It sounds absurd. And yet, the logic is disturbingly consistent. This is not a literary argument but a mental-health one.
TRAUMA WITH A VALENTINE FILTER?
Wuthering Heights has survived for generations as shorthand for “epic love.” But strip away the gothic moors and poetic anguish, and what remains is a relationship driven by unresolved trauma, identity collapse and emotional volatility.
Catherine and Heathcliff are not star-crossed lovers; they are two emotionally injured people clinging to each other as a survival strategy.
Be it Heathcliff’s early abandonment, humiliation and abuse that leave him rigid, vengeful and emotionally unsafe or the fact that Catherine grows up in a world where volatility is normal and emotional security is conditional. This bond is intense because it is dysregulating.
“I am Heathcliff,” Catherine famously says; a line that has left the readers with a thousand sighs (we mean the awws). In a therapy room, that sentence would stop the session.
“When someone cannot experience themselves as a separate emotional being, that’s not intimacy,” says Neelima Dhankar, a trauma-informed therapist who works with attachment injuries in Mumbai. “That’s identity fusion, often rooted in early deprivation. It feels romantic because it’s intense, but intensity is not the same as good health.”
Dhankar adds, Valentine’s Day amplifies this confusion. It trains us to believe that love should be overwhelming, consuming, slightly painful and calm relationships are boring.
Emotional steadiness is mistaken for lack of spark. Yes, in that climate, Wuthering Heights doesn’t just fit, but it thrives.
FRANKENSTEIN: PARENTING HORROR STORY WE REUSE TO READ THAT WAY
Now consider another film, Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist, creates life and immediately recoils from it. He refuses responsibility, care or emotional presence. The creature is not born monstrous; he becomes so through sustained rejection and isolation.
Seen through a mental-health lens, Frankenstein is not about science gone wrong but a poster for attachment failure.
“Neglect is one of the most under-recognised forms of psychological harm,” says Atul Panigrahi, a clinical psychologist who works with adults raised in emotionally absent homes. “When a caregiver withdraws, the child internalises shame, rage and worthlessness. That pain doesn’t disappear, it gets expressed later.”
If WH shows us what happens when trauma is mistaken for love, Frankenstein shows us what happens when creation is separated from care. The creature’s violence is not inexplicable evil; it is the downstream effect of abandonment.
And yet, culturally, we recoil from calling Victor a bad parent.
THE SHARED PSYCHOLOGICAL THREAD
Read together, or even watched together, both these classics tell the same mental-health story: trauma does not stay contained, but it spills outward into relationships, families and future generations.
In Wuthering Heights, unresolved grief and rage infect children who inherit emotional neglect and cruelty. In Frankenstein, we see how abandonment transforms longing into destruction. Neither of these stories suggests that love, by itself, is healing. In fact, it shows us just the opposite. Without safety, regulation and accountability, love becomes destabilising.
“This is what we now understand as intergenerational trauma,” explains Pulkit Sharma, a Puducherry-based therapist. “Unhealed adults pass emotional patterns forward, through volatility, absence or control. The damage is quiet, but cumulative.” And the irony? We treat one story as romance and the other as horror, when, psychologically, they are chapters of the same book.
WHY IS THIS A MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEM?
Therapists today report a pattern that feels eerily Bront-esque where clients equate anxiety with chemistry, obsession with intimacy, and emotional chaos with love. Many stay in unsafe relationships because the pain feels familiar. Others abandon healthy partnerships because they simply don’t “feel enough.”
What psychiatrists want us to believe is this: what people describe as spark is often nervous-system dysregulation. Your body isn’t responding to love, it’s responding to unpredictability.”
Romanticising stories like Wuthering Heights without psychological context reinforces this confusion because it teaches people to endure suffering as proof of commitment. To mistake longing for connection, and to think that love must hurt before it heals.
This isn’t just about relationships. It shows up as anxiety, emotional dependency, burnout and chronic dissatisfaction. In that sense, Valentine’s Day is not just a commercial festival but an annual mental-health stress test.
So, we are back to our initial question: Should Frankenstein Drop on Father’s Day?
True, the question is satirical, but the discomfort it produces is the point. If obsession can be sold as romance, why not neglect as a parenting story? And that may be the real health paradox.
The danger lies not in reading or watching these stories, but in misunderstanding them. If we mistake trauma for romance and neglect for complexity, we don’t just misread themes, we misread our own emotional lives.
Maybe the question isn’t whether Frankenstein belongs on Father’s Day. Maybe it’s why we’ve been handing out Wuthering Heights as a love story all along.