We are living in a time, and within a culture, that often substitutes love for obligation.
Through the influence of romantic literature, among other reasons, we tend to think that love makes the family.
Love may make the family a glorious place to be, but it is keeping the rules—whatever these may be, and they do change from one culture to another, and from one family to another—that creates the family.
Family that is based on a foundation of emotion, however strong and durable that emotion may be, is actually built on fiction.
Romantic love may be an enormous drive; people think and dream about it, sometimes even die for it.
However, a great part of that romantic love is based on cultural clichés and ephemeral chemical reactions.
A love that is triggered, and sometimes sustained, by a certain turn of the nose or a pair of beautiful legs is not real enough to endure.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From Simple Words, p. 183, by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz