Romance Character: The Chaotic Figure of Eros

Eros/Cupid is a kind of Puck figure.

Classically, the romance was a tale of high deeds. Spenser's Faerie Queen is a good example.

In Spenser, the character of Cupid is not a cute winsome child. He is a dark and almost pathological deity.

Blindfold he was, and in his cruell fist
  A mortall bow and arrowes keene did hold,
  With which he shot at randon, when him list,
  Some headed with sad lead, some with pure gold.

This characterization makes sense since Eros--the origin of Cupid--is sometimes presented as the son of Aphrodite but also, in some myths, as far older. If Aphrodite is the "civilized" form of love, complete with courtships and adultery and marriage and poetry, Eros is something more primordial, more like the Id. 

Eros is what Freudians like Camille Paglia try to point out: package up love and gender as tidily as you please. Like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, that tidiness will get broken soon enough.