Medieval "romance" lit is often very much about the mating game for posh people (and the middle classes, when they emerge, aping the same styles - hence Chaucer). The Romantics took the sense of magic and landscape and Nationhood and all the dangerous and supposedly untameable aspects of medieval romance and made Romanticism. The respectable Regency took the hot troubadour poetry and supposedly chivalric gentlemen and domesticated them. Tennyson: what the landscape of medieval romance looks like after several hundred years of increasingly strict moralistic topiary.

What's rly interesting to me is that love of the Grand Passion sort tends to be untameably Romantic, whereas sex of the dull reproductive variety is the stuff of domesticated romance.