In this paper, we investigate the electronic and optical properties of an electron in both symmetric and asymmetric double quantum wells that consist of a harmonic potential with an internal Gaussian barrier under a nonresonant intense laser field. The electronic structure was obtained by using the two-dimensional diagonalization method. To calculate the linear and nonlinear absorption, and refractive index coefficients, a combination of the standard density matrix formalism and the perturbation expansion method was used. The obtained results show that the electronic and thereby optical properties of the considered parabolic-Gaussian double quantum wells could be adjusted to obtain a suitable response to specific aims with parameter alterations such as well and barrier width, well depth, barrier height, and interwell coupling, in addition to the applied nonresonant intense laser field.