Golden Romance Rules of Serials

[Greatatlantic]

Be it a TV series, webcomic, or whatever, I'm noticing with peculiar frequency that serials of whatever form find it necessary to make romance and central and re-occuring theme. Hence, THE RULES:

1) The gender ratio of characters in the serial should fluctuate around 1:1. This allows for every character to have their romantic opposite. In the case of a gay/lesbian serial, then the ration will approach infinity/zero depending on how you're measuring.

2) Should two characters exist for whom a relationship is appropriate (no old men dating teenage girls), they will at some point date, even if it was never considered before hand and their personalities are totally wrong for each other.

3) Should the serial have a character with no appropriate opposite, then he or she will either be marganalized or outright written out of the script, or a new character will be introduced to serve as his or her romantic opposite.

4) To make things interesting, long running romanced MUST be challenged with the addition of temporary cast members to act as alternative romantic interests. Once the original couple is re-established, the temps are written out of the script.

Obviously there is some hyperbole going on, but I'm surprised at how often I've seen these rules play out in just about everything I've watched/read that counts on you to watch/read the next installment. Heck, it seems now that Numbers has used up Impossible Math schtick, its running on nothing but romances.

I'm not going to claim this is a bad thing, but it is bad that its so over done!

Thoughts?