This is contradicted by the romantic ideal already evident in the Old Testament, Homer, the fairy tales, and other ancient stories.

Some people never achieved that, and they are to be pitied, but it was always considered a wonderful, desirable thing. Humans have always fallen in love, and romantic love was always what good parents wished for their children because it lessens the burdens of life. The main difference, was that the ancients knew that romantic love can grow _within_ a marriage, rather than merely _before_ one.

What the romantic era did was raise it to a higher level of abstraction, by showing it as an interplay between the feminine and the masculine, rather than merely between two particular people.