Well, call me old-fashioned but that guy wouldn't even be a "friend" after that stunt.

As for romantic love being a modern American construct -- I don't think so. It was actually a subversive European construct -- subversive because women writers started writing love stories about women who actually managed to bring men to their knees in the name of romantic love. Romance at that time was the horrifying idea that young girls and women who were supposed to be bartered off to the highest monetary and political advantage to the father would instead find a way to use "love" to subvert the system.

Ah, the power.