All I really care about with in-game romances are that they are low-keyed flirting stuff, and not a time sink. "Hey Sailor, come with me!" - fade to black - restore hp - is just about right for me.
I think that's too much. I don't think male/female romantic relationships or sex should be in RPGs either. It's just not well done most of the time and the romances seem extremely hackneyed, especially when two characters go from barely knowing each other to being soulmates in a couple of weeks of in-game time. While there's no problem with having a romance in an adventure game like Monkey Island or the upcoming Advent Rising (First of the Advent Trilogy) where the romance is allowed to build up in each episode, or is 'prefabricated' before the player interacts with the game, it just doesn't work that way in a PC game without ruining depth of immersion.
The player should always start off in a clean slate or tabula rasa instead of having his 'past' forced on him. Planescape Torment handled it very well with the Nameless One's memory loss, and whatever romances there were in the game were extremely subdued, rather than shoved into your face.
And crpgnut, you know, it's one thing to be straight and not like to be hit on gays, but if a homosexual were to come up to me or any other sane person all we'd have to do is say, 'Hey, I don't swing that way' and they'd get the idea and leave you alone, that's guaranteed. Is it really necessary to beat the shit out of them, or heck, kill them? That, if anything, is a sign of some serious insecurity.
I once read this confession on GroupHug.us where some guy talked about how his best friend for many years came up to him one day and told him that he was gay and asked if he was, too, because he was interested in a relationship, and the guy who was at the time raking his yard turned the rake on the homosexual former best friend and beat the shit out of him. Spat on him, too. Left him for dead, but it turns out he only broke a few ribs and then some, if the confession is to be believed. The guy confessed that years after he'd done that, he'd been thinking about it and realized he too was secretly homosexual and was very regretful of what he did. So not only did he lose his best friend, he beat the shit out of him and probably lost his only soulmate, if you believe in that sort of thing. He seemed pretty torn up about it. Are you sure you aren't gay?
Even if you aren't secretly gay (Homophobes usually are. Straight people are relatively secure in their sexuality. They don't need to beat gays up to prove it), how would you feel if you thought a girl was flirting with you and you tried to ask her out and she ended up pulling a gun or a baseball bat and seriously hurting you with it? That's psychotic! Take my advice man, if a gay hits on you, just treat him like you would an ugly girl and tell him you don't swing that way. It's not that hard.