" The older Hero got, the less she got along with romantics: people who liked courtship and courtly love, people who had big ideas about how men and women should behave in their relationships with each other—since typically these people thought only of men and women when they thought of romance. She found, oddly, that those people were often the least suited to sexual or romantic relationships, were staggeringly selfish and borderline abusive both in bed and in life, and treated their partners and friends more like protagonists and side characters, props in the love story they were constructing, in which they played the starring role, full of grand gestures and pronouncements "

― Elaine Castillo , America Is Not the Heart