(from the SC1101E Making Sense of Society lecture notes at NUS) Peter Berger shows how our idea of romantic love can be demystified:  (Social condition predisposes one to fall in love in the first place)

“We assume “that men and women marry because they are in love. There is a broadly based popular mythology about the character of love as a violent, irresistible emotion that strikes where it will, a mystery that is the goal of most young people … As soon as one investigates, however, which people actually marry each other, one finds that the lightning-shaft of Cupid seems to be guided rather strongly within very definite channels of class, income, education, racial and religious background. If one then investigates a little further into the behaviour that that is engaged in prior to marriage …., one finds channels of interaction that are often rigid to the point of ritual. The suspicion begins to dawn on one that, most of the time, it is not so much the emotion of love that creates a certain kind of relationship, but that carefully predefined and often planned relationships eventually generate the desired emotion. In other words, when certain conditions are met or have been constructed, one allows oneself ‘to fall in love’.”  (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966))

Very apt.