My introduction to courtly love was reading a Diana Wynne Jones novella (The True State of Affairs) that made no sense unless you know what courtly love is. After crawling confusedly through ancient Livejournal reviews to piece together what the story had been about, I took away that it was a weird medieval knight thing where you talk a lot of guff to a (married) woman without ever expecting it to turn into more than what it is.
Update in 2025: I endorse this 75% as much as I used to. Some reasons: I wrote it when I was 26, right before I started becoming more psychologically normal and developing a more typical (?) female sexuality I dated a guy who was similar to many of the guys I’d dated so far, yet this went terribly.