means Relating to love and emotional intimacy, or — in its older sense — favoring feeling, imagination, and the sublime over cold reason.

from From Old French romanz, meaning a story told in the vernacular Roman tongue rather than scholarly Latin — and those stories were full of knights, quests, and passionate adventure. So 'romance' first meant a kind of tale, and 'romantic' meant tale-like: fanciful, heroic, larger than life. By the 18th and 19th centuries the Romantic movement seized the word for art that prized emotion and nature, and only later did it narrow to candlelit dinners and roses.