Romantic love is given inflated importance within capitalism. Dating apps generate revenue and surveil users. Public dates put money in the local economy. Couples instilled with ideologies of jealousy separate from their community into little manipulable units rather than band together. Nuclear families fuel the labor pool without accruing power as large families once did in ages past.

That's not to say romantic love is useless. Romantic love taught me to love in general. But I think if we view a person we love only in romantic terms, it reduces them to a single dimension. And for a lot of people that's the ability to sate lust.

I personally don't see romantic love as love, per se. I see it as a possible expression of love among the many other possible expressions of love. After all, many of the things we call romance are able to be removed entirely from love. Some people even sell those experiences for cash.

What makes romantic and sexual feelings special is expressing them with someone one considers a friend or even family (in the sense of coming together to form family, not blood relatives). It's an added layer on top of a platonic relationship. And in that line of thought, things like aromantic and asexual identities start to make more sense. They don't need romance or sex to feel love, so why do alloromantic and allosexual people need those things to feel love? Do allo people not feel love for parents or siblings? What's actually happening here is that allo people have expressions of love reserved for people who fit certain criteria within their communities. That doesn't make the love of family or community any less valid or valuable, it just makes them different.