Mdthbs

The kinds of criticisms you are encountering are not aimed against the concept of the hero having a love interest. They are aimed against female characters that that exist only as a motivation for the hero, and that are, as a consequence, generic, cliched, stereotyped, unrealistic, and unsatisfying as characters, particularly for female readers. At one time it was incredibly common for female love interests to be as absolutely interchangeable as the MacGuffin in a mystery story --see practically any older mainstream movie or genre fiction book for proof. And yes, many people are still writing those books and movies. But they're starting to experience a lot of critical pushback --which is what you're witnessing.

If you want to write a love interest for your main character, that's great. But the modern critical audience is unlikely to embrace a love interest that seems only like your own personal fantasy girl. They are going to want to see someone in that role who has her own hopes, dreams, storylines, history, flaws, strengths and so forth.

But let's say you're not writing a romance between characters of equal importance in the story --you want to focus on your male protagonist and his adventures, but you still want him to have a love interest. Is that kind of story just hopelessly out of date? Maybe, but I'd argue that you can still treat your female characters with respect. The fantasy classic Master of the 5 Magics (Lyndon Hardy) is a great example. In format and structure, it's your basic wish-fulfillment sword-and-sorcery action thriller, about a despised young man who goes on a quest, gains magical powers, saves a kingdom, and ends up with a beautiful girl at the end. So cliched, right? But there's a twist. Throughout the story, the hero is working towards earning the love of the beautiful-but-disdainful queen. But at the end, he realizes he's actually in love with her advisor, a tough, intelligent woman who has been doing as much (offstage) work to save the kingdom as he has. Although she doesn't have an equal role as a character in the story, their relationship is definitely presented as a marriage of equals. She isn't just a damsel in distress waiting to be saved.

A love interest is not the only reason to risk life and limb. IRL there are many stories of people risking life and limb to save children, sometimes losing their life. In psychology there is a real phenomenon, primarily involving young adults in their teens or twenties, of taking insane risks to save a child they don't even know. Daniel Goleman documents some of this as "Amygdala Hijack", e.g. IRL a soldier in his early twenties visited (for entertainment) a tall bridge over a flooding river, while watching the river below with trees and debris rushing past at high speed, he saw a five year old in the water, and without realizing he was doing it vaulted the rail and dove about thirty feet into that churn, fully clothed, found the child and brought her safely to shore. After the fact he said he couldn't remember making any decision, one instant he saw the child, the next thing he remembers is hitting the water.

A young teen girl, waiting for a bus, ran into traffic moving at speed to snatch a three year old (that wandered off the opposite sidewalk) out of the way of a truck. She also couldn't remember making a decision, she saw the child and the next thing she remembered was holding the kid in the air in the middle of traffic.

There is nothing wrong with giving your hero a love interest, the issue is whether the love interest could just be replaced by something else, like a kid in danger.

The best love interests (and kids in danger) are actually critical to the hero's success, they aren't just there to be rescued, and the hero would not succeed without them. Otherwise, they truly are not important to the plot, they could be replaced by something else the hero would devote their life to, like art, or "the truth", or "democracy" or their Religion, all real-life things people have taken risks to preserve. The Founding Fathers literally risked their lives to realize the USA, not out of a particular love interest, but to escape subjugation. Many slaves risked and lost their lives for freedom, not just for a girl back home.

True Love is complementary and synergistic; the two lovers are emotionally better together than the sum of what they would be alone.

If you have a love interest, this is what you need to portray, that the love is not one-sided, and the hero will lose an important part of himself if he fails, his life will be diminished NOT just because he lost her, or she couldn't please him any more, but because of the ways in which she provided the strength where he was weak, the intelligence where he was dumb, the understanding when he was confused, the humor when he was dour. She has to be a real person with her own strengths and weaknesses, complementary to his weaknesses and strengths. They need to mate in more than a physical sense.

Then it won't be a cliché, he isn't losing just a pretty sperm receptacle he can replace with a phone call and a few hundred dollars.

Here's an easy test: if for all intents and purposes the woman in your story could be replaced with a golden chalice, you're in trouble. Someone stole the guy's chalice, he wants to get it back. Someone crashed the guy's chalice, he wants revenge. Worst offenders are the "if you save the princess, you can marry her" stories - there the woman is literally a reward.

What makes a character different from a nice cup? The woman has agency.

In @Amadeus's example of the child in the river, the child has no agency, but that is a very brief situation. If your hero is going on presumably a novel-spanning quest to save his love-interest from a dragon, what is the love-interest doing all this time? Presumably more than sitting on a shelf in the dragon's fridge and doing nothing? It might be that the lady can't escape the dragon on her own. A war prisoner often can't escape either. But the war prisoner is doing something, right?

Another related trope you want to avoid is the woman's agency always landing her in trouble. If every time the woman exercises her will instead of doing what the man tells her, she then needs saving from the consequences of her actions, that's problematic. That's saying "men know better, women should obey" and "women are incapable of taking care of themselves or making good decisions".

A lady gets kidnapped by a dragon. Why? Because she went out to pick flowers all alone, when she was told not to go out of the palace? Or was it that she was championing a dragon-hunting coalition, getting the villages armed against dragons, actually pushing dragons back so they felt genuinely threatened? See the difference?

Neither does the hero need to do the saving all on his own. Surely his beloved can be useful in some way? Surely, he's not all-powerful, all-knowing, made-of-steel, one-man powerhouse who needs no assistance ever? Human heroes are more compelling.

And finally, don't forget about other female characters in your story. Every problematic trope discussed by me and by others is exacerbated if every female character in your story is flat and useless or worse than useless, or if there are no other female characters in the story at all.

The key is to write a person, not a pet dog in the form of a female companion / love interest.

A person is a complex, with aspirations, motivations, interests, and a personality. And now you have this complex character, should she still be with the hero? As a writer, you need to write that.

And writing a love interest is not easy, not even for good writers, male or female.

JK Rowling, wrote a rather generic destiny hero (Harry Potter), and his love interests were even flatter than him! Cho Chang was only memorable for being Asian (not given much to do). Ronald Weasley's sister, whatever her name was, had 0 personality (and had nothing to do).

Hermione and Ron were two major characters that ultimately fell in love, in a relationship that pretty much made no sense to the readers. Because JKR just forced them together, because that's how she envisioned it. (The problem was she just told it, without showing it). Hermione and Ron could have worked if JKR devoted some pages to making it happen.

In addition to the excellent answers here already, this might be an opportunity for you to do some further reading, to examine in detail how some of the most popular high-quality novels pursue a strong romance arc.

You can start with an internet search for "romance in [genre]", using your own favourite genre. I tried this for "romance in science fiction" and immediately found the following page which offers a great start: 12 Sci-Fi Romance Books That Will Make You Swoon. Or try "crime", "adventure novels", "vampire novels", etc.

There's also a bit of snobbery in literature about "romance" novels. Sure there's a lot of pulp romance, but that's true in the other genres as well. Don't be put off by the "romance" tag! The reality is that

(a) some of the greatest works in literature are romances. To name just a few: Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, the Pulitzer-winning Gone with the Wind, Forster's A Room With A View, Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, arguably even Joyce's Ulysses. And more recent favourites: Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.

(b) most major publishing houses would go out of business if it wasn't for their romance book sales, and most romance writers make far more money than writers of "literary fiction". Why? Because romances are popular, and good romance novels sell.