Märta Tikkanen claims that if she had not started writing she and husband Henrik would have lived happily ever after. They had the best of intentions. Still, the utopia of a lover’s paradise, where two authors could live out their life together in a home filled with happiness, intellectual discussions and children, turned into a lifelong struggle. When conflicts started to arise, they turned to writing and through their books a unique dialogue about love, life and the impossible choice between self-realisation and fulfilling the needs of loved ones emerges.  In this thesis I follow the Tikkanens' literary dialogue from the publication of Märta Tikkanen’s first novel in 1970 to 2004, when she published a memoir over Henrik and their relationship as a way to mark the 20th anniversary of his passing. My empirical material mainly consists of books written by either Märta or Henrik Tikkanen about their life together. I focus on something I call the conflict between love and art, which, I argue, is the driving force in the books. This conflict is a result a collision of the discourse of love and the discourse of art, something that becomes apparent when themes and motives in works by the Tikkanens are analysed as part of a wider literary, cultural and social context. I also explore the medialisation of the conflict by analysing the Tikkanens' presence in the press. I build on feministic studies in the literary and cultural fields to discuss the gendered conditions of writing and hegemonical love. My aim is to show that the inequalities in work-life are entangled with the hegemonical heterosexual love system. When love is portrayed as a dichotomy between nurturing and self-sacrificing "female" love and grandiose, ecstatic "male" love, as it is in the Tikkanens' dialogical books, there is a ricochet effect that expands to all aspects of life and society. Through the lens of the Tikkanens these mechanisms are made visible and relatable.