From King Horn through to The Wife of Bath’s Tale, resisting mésalliance is consistently used for moral and didactic purposes, often warning against socially mismatched relationships even while permitting them in exceptional cases. Other forms of resistance to love also engage with appropriate models of behaviour, but resistance to mésalliance repeatedly evokes a more pointed didactic message, perhaps suggesting the immediacy of concerns about social status for the middle- and upper-class readers of romances. These romances’ cautious approach to relationships between partners of differing status can also be seen as a response to the relatively common representation of such relationships as desirable elsewhere in romance literature, taking seriously a problem that other works gloss over. They thus reveal the complexity of the genre’s engagement with social advancement, and the ways in which it might reflect on the real-life medieval marriage market and its opportunities for social mobility. Presenting relationships between people of a different class as undesirable and dangerous, these romances indicate the ways in which resistance to love in medieval romance does not just mandate desire but mandates particular kinds of desire, shaping its readers’ sense of what they ought to look for in romantic and marital relationships. The next chapter turns to racially motivated resistance to love to further consider the active construction of who is and is not considered desirable in medieval romance, revealing race as another vector along which coercion and desire are shown to operate, and demonstrating romance’s political shaping of desire in the service of upholding contemporary social boundaries and structures of power.