Wow, some of you guys are a bit vitrolic yourselves about your dislike of romance in games, yeah? Personally, so long as the characters have a personality and a presence in the story, I don't have a particular preference as to what their relationship with you is -- although, admittedly, I would like some option for some them to stick around with you or you with them after the game. It did always feel strange that, even in supposedly the most tight-knit groups, most characters would go off their own ways at the end with very little in the way of farewells.
However, since I do so enjoy playing the devil's advocate, I would like to try to refute or at least provide some counterpoints to the arguments against romance.
1. Unrealistic or not working as a system - This is certainly a valid point that there must be a certain level of abstraction to implement romance into any game. However, if we rely on this argument to disallow romance, we must also disallow most other relationships, as everything will have subleties that can't necessarily be adapted into a game. For example, in Endrosz's section on influence gain on page 11, the example given about why a romantic relationship should break could also be applied to a friendship or a more friendly rivalry, a mercenary relationship if the mercenary has a code of conduct, any relationship with any idealistic character, and so forth. The same would apply to the gifting system and any other relationship system I can think of at the moment.
2. Romance on a pillar? - Bioware seemed to get brough up quite a bit in respect to poorly written romances; however, I haven't read any complaints about any other relationships with party members in the game even though they are just as shallow. For as hard as Mass Effect pushes the "Sheppard and Garrus best friend forever" idea, in the first game most of your interaction with him was broken down into "Shepard, I want to do this morally questionable thing. Do you agree? Y/N," and the second game barely had anything with him if you weren't going on his romance path. This raises the implication that some people are putting different standards on romantic relationships than on others, which in turn raises the question of why this happens. The idea that jumps to my mind is that they percieve romantic relationships are more permanent or intrinsically stronger than other relationships, which doesn't seem to even hold up in the games themselves. Going back to the Mass Effect example, you don't need to be romancing Liara or your squadmate for them to be torn up about your supposed death in the beginning of ME2. Although this point does seem to be uneccesarily exarcerbated by the fact that most of the time in games (or movies, or literature, or anything with a limited runtime not focused on romance), when there is a romance subplot, it is usually presented very qucikly as true love as opposed to the myriad of ways a romantic relationship could start out and develop.
3. Wish fulfillment - It is hard to argue against that even the best written romance is still wish fulfillment in games where the protagonist's character is defined by the player's choices. However, in the same vein as the differing standards point above, why is this type of wish fulfillment disliked while the multitude of other things that should also qualify get a free pass? At the very least, in a game where you shape the player character so much, all other significant relationships to NPCs (even antagonistic ones) should also fall into the same complaint -- instead of "Wow, I'm in a relationship with this really loving person" it could be "Wow, I'm best friends with this awesome wizard," or "Wow, I just beat this person channeling the power of a god and proved I was stronger/right."
Well, that's about it. Sorry guys, I tried to keep that relatively condensed but I wanted to attempt to explain my views a little. And because I feel like this post was maybe getting a bit too...passive-aggressive on calling people out, I'd like to end it with a concilatory note.
Remember how amazing PS:T was? It barely had romances (mild flirts and Deinorra doesn't count because it wasn't really your romance) and it wasn't any worse off for it. So, despite my arguments for romance , I'm absolutely sure an amazing game can be made without it as well.
P.S. I keep reading "promancers" as "pyromancers" and becoming confused and excited each time.