This paper is about a historical configuration of gender and (hetero)sexuality during the rise of a Malay language domestic genre in the early twentieth century. Engaging two texts—a Sino-Malay marriage manual Satoe Istri Jang Doenia Impiken (1912) written by Chinese entrepreneur Ang Siauw Kan and Batak-Angkola writer Merari Siregar’s second less-known novel, Tjinta dan Hawa Nafsoe (1924)—I argue that this domestic genre written by male writers created a specific figure of sentimental man: an individual man who sheds tears for others’ misery, fights for truth, and longs for love. In showing how both writers used men-women sexual, romantic, and marital relationships as a source to identify and solve social problems, I suggest a reading that examines domesticity less as an exclusively women’s site or feminized realm and more as a project of compiling fantasies about heterosexual arrangements within which both “masculinity” and “femininity” make and reinforce each other.