Once Anne McCaffrey's female characters are old enough, romance is not optional, and it annoyed me then and now that her friend had to become her boyfriend.

Yeah, my big beef with McCaffrey's heroines is that they do these great, adventurous, wonderful things... And then get married and stop being interesting. Sometimes they'll show up in the background of later stories as someone's mother, but once they fall in love (and they must), they're not allowed to be cool anymore.