Sexual/romantic tension is a staple of fiction, and generating it, and maintaining it, is something that is damned hard to do, so no wonder writers get so conservative when they get to it.  You don't see much experimentation in the field, people stick with what has worked before.  Surely you've noticed the setup for, like, every TV show ever - with two people who seem opposites but slowly come to care deeply for each other and struggle to deny the sexual attraction between them for season after season.  I mean, when are Ryan and Esposito going to kiss already, right?

The form gets abused most in serial fiction - whether TV or book series.  The tension between the characters is established, and then the creators panic.  Ridiculous extremes are gone to in order to stave off the Big Kiss, because of a pervasive belief that the Big Kiss is the death of a relationship. 

This approach is predicated on the idea that the woozy, drunken infatuation stage of a romance is the only part worth depicting, the only part the audience will understand.  Once we get past the admission of attraction and move into a real relationship everything falls apart, because what is universally believed to be the interesting part of the romance is now over, and we are to the 'boring' part.

This represents a tremendous disservice to functioning, adult relationships and deliberately infantilizes the idea of love.  The stomach-heaving idiot infatuation is the "real" love, and only young, pretty people have it.  Gross old people do not have love that is real, they are old and boring.

I hate this idea.  Hate it with a flaming passion.

How many real, working adult relationships do we see in fiction?  And how many with a sex life that is not regarded as disgusting?  I'll answer that: pretty close to zero.  In a novel, the pursuit is seen as the interesting part - the back and forth, the admittedly exciting phase of getting to know another person, someone new and fresh.

Establishing that tension is hard to do (Tanith Lee is the master at it, she can have you yearning for two people to get together after a few sentences) and once established, writers are loath to fuck with it in any way.  People keep reading to follow that arc, and once it is over they will lose interest.

In porn we face a different sort of problem with this idea, as we are not in the business of prolonging gratification - we get right down to it, and this distorts and alters the business of building romantic tension.  After all, the Big Kiss is code for SEX.  That's really what it is.  When the hero and heroine kiss and the credits roll, we understand that they are so going to do it, maybe right away, right there in the throne room or wherever.

In porn you can't really delay the kiss like that, you could not get away with having your characters fuck everybody else but each other - or maybe you could, that might be a fun story to write.  But it would be a lot of effort to build the crazy attraction and then make them wait on it for some reason besides stupid ones.  In porn, people fuck, that's what they do.  And thus you have to find other ways to keep the relationship interesting, something besides the perpetual, soap-opera-style back and forth of daddy issues, misunderstandings, lies, and bad timing that is used to delay what we know damned well is inevitable.

Thus, we have to explore a real relationship if we want tension after the fucking is done, we have to think about what issues would come up and how these people would deal with them.  This is another place where cutting out the possibility of sex reduces characters to caricatures.  I mean, after a certain point we just don't buy it - how long have these two known each other?  How many times have they saved each others' lives?  And they can't get over themselves and go for it?  Our suspension of disbelief strains, it groans under the weight of all the "bullshit" sneezed into our hands, it shudders at the sheer weight of eye-rolling.

And every time I see it, I want to kick the writer in the face and tell them to fucking man up already.  Step off the marked path and blaze something new, show us something we never see, show us something real and human and messy.  Don't tell me that it's not what people want - nobody knows that because we never see it, and nobody will until someone has the guts to do it and the skill to do it well, without the cheap tricks, stall tactics, and contrivances we get now in place of real relationships.