The Romance Masterplot
Our very definition as human beings is very much bound up with the stories we tell about our own lives and the world in which we live. Life is in many respects narrativized in series and bunches of intersecting stories – never complete until our death, of course, but nonetheless oriented toward the significant chapterization of our existence.
In medieval romance, for instance, romantic love was often seen as a destructive force and was regularly positioned as adulterous: think, for instance, of the deleterious effect that the love of Lancelot and Guinevere has in medieval Arthurian romances
To put this another way: storytelling is fundamental to the human experience.