Romance in Science Fiction: Real or Imagined?

Romantic love is many things, but rarely does it get mentioned in the field of science fiction as a major plot device. More often, a focus on love is found in fantasy or adventure books, but romanticism, the practice of depicting things as they should be, not as they are, happens all the time in science fiction and is quite often extrapolated into a ideological plot device, such as "utopian world" stories, where a main character tries to create a new world where he or she is in control of human ideology and controls the human race's thought processes. This often turns into a dystopian reality, but the ideology is romanticized because the main character is trying to make a world in the way that they think it SHOULD be, not as it actually IS. As far as romantic love is concerned, aside from many popular science fiction examples, for example, the love story between Padme Amidala and Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars, or the Machiavellian pseudo-romance between the two dystopian-society architects Light Yagami and Misa Amane in the Japanese anime series Death Note, there isn't much ground covered in classic science fiction literature aside from a few examples, namely H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. In the most recent movie adaptation of the story, the "Time Traveler," a typical Victorian-era aristocrat from London who has little better to do than discuss philosophy, drink brandy, smoke cigars and build fantastic machines all day, is in love with a beautiful young woman who dies in a mugging on the streets of London, and the Time Traveler attempts to go into the past to rescue her, but she dies over and over again, because due to Einstein's theory of relativity, it is impossible to change the past because it has, obviously, already happened, and that particular time stream has already passed, one cannot change the past, as the Time Traveler said, "I could go back 1,000 times and see her die 1,000 ways." Wells also romanticizes the Eloi and the Morlocks, the Eloi, though very primitive and having "devolved" back to a Stone-Age existence in the year 802,000 A.D. because they saw no need to compete with each other anymore, they are a romantic depiction of a human race where the Eloi live in peace, they do not fight, they have the mentality of innocent children and they do nothing but eat fruit all day, a very idyllic, some would argue even utopian existence, which, aside from the subterranean Morlocks preying upon the Eloi, is relatively unfettered, an embodiment of innocence and Voltaire's ideals of the "Noble Savage." The truth is that romanticism is far more common in SF than romantic love, for reasons that are not quite clear to me, anyway.