I definitely see your point. When I wrote that I was really only thinking about RPGs/games where it would makes sense. I do happen to think it could work in the TES universe, and it would make these games even better than they already are.
and what I am saying, is I think I know what you are after and it just simply isn't feasible to begin with in TES. I said earlier on that there is really only two ways to implement romance into such games what for simplicity sake I will call the Bioware way and the Fable way.
The Bioware way has you interacting with party NPCs a lot, getting to know them over time and developing romantic feelings over time with them. Now if Skyrim were to follow fallout 3 it might be possible to build in triggers for the limited and unique companions that fallout 3 had, however I believe it's already been hinted that it'll be more bland/generic companions in Skyrim... more like Oblivion, there is just no feasible way to write enough verstile, dynamic and solid triggers to accomidate that style. Also add on to this, there are 10 races, each race had two genders, just to fill in all possibilities you'd need at least 20 different possible events to occur at every trigger... even for a party based RPG that's really just pushing the amount of scripting requirements needed to a VERY difficult area, for the solo style of the TES series... it just ain't going to happen and for good reason.
The Fable way is just not worth even talking about, it's horrid and should be avoided at all costs.
But that's the point! You get to make it up, which I feel would actually add to this experience.
HL2 is great, but I guess I've sort of gotten over shooters by this point. I prefer the story to the actual combat in most games now. With exceptions.
It's not the point, the point is, it's unrealistic for what your character is actually going to be doing... you are going dungeon crawling alone for days on end, travelling around the country away from people. It's just not in reality to think that if you spend a few days doing errands for somebody and then you spend 3~4 months away from them that they'd ever fall in love with you or that an adventurer would fall in love like that... also there is the additional point of that it'd actually be hard to write such features in. I don't want to see fable styled relationships after all...
As for most Shooters, most shooters today are junk. They care more about "realism" and "graphics" then they do about gameplay. Half-Life 2 was good because the game itself was actually good to play... it didn't focus on just shooting things in a "realistic graphical enviroment", it had puzzles and a well written story line (despite lack of any real interaction). If a Half-Life 3 comes it, it will probably again make a lot of these non-realistic, realistic war-simulating shooters look crud yet again.