Paradise is framed as a romantic love story, but disrupts this narrative form by attacking the idealized, cinematic assumption held by its 1960's audience that romance was compatible with realism. Further, O'Brien makes explicit how the subjugation of women is encoded in these benign and idyllic stories. O'Brien gives no proper names to her two characters; rather, they are referred to in the abstract, as "he" and "she," alienated from any specific identity. The diction employed from her point of view paints her romantic world as "insubstantial" and "collapsible."

Moreover, she quickly learns that whatever identity she might have had before the spell of love and desire is now contingent on the opinions of the social apparatus that comes attached to her partner: his friends, his expectations, his environment, and all of their opinions. The cumulative effect is that she loses free will, unable even to reject her new conditions. Ultimately, she is only able to escape after she attempts suicide, freeing herself by making herself undesirable to him.