Robosexuals

Writing a romance novel involving a robot is slightly more difficult than I thought.  Not really for the romantic side, as much as the explanation of said story without sounding ridiculous.
On the plus side, there have been attempts to make romantic movies involving robots/A.I. (Bicentennial Man, Mr. Right, Demon Seed), usually with comedic or sinister results.  The negative side of these in my opinion was how it made me go from "robots could be treated as humans" to "If this is what sentient robots are like kill em all".  Yes, even Bicentennial man (especially in the novel.  "He" was annoying).
What I'm also wrestling with is the convention of love stripped of scientific skepticism; love can often be boiled down to a reaction of pheromones, a chemical reaction in the brain, or hysterically portrayed as a virus in Red Dwarf.  With the involvement of characters that do not "suffer" from these human foibles, I am sparring with cliched romanticism such as love at first sight.
Love at first sight could be possible in an artificial sentient being, almost more so than a biological being.  For instance, there is no imperative for reproduction, so the resulting sexual union or baser instincts couldn't be later rationalized as love, or equally dismissed as love.  Aside from polymers or motor oil, scent is a mitigated factor.  All the things that cause a human to feel that they are in love physically is stripped away, and a more emotional, cerebral love is created.
In this way the story that I'm proposing could be a more "real" idea of romantic love than what we see on film.  Or a rationalization of the love story we've seen, placed into an extra-ordinary circumstance to make it more believable.
Then there falls the idea of a being stripped of physical sensory input may not be even capable of love.  We know this is not the case for humans, since sociopaths cannot feel love but they can feel physical pain, can smell, etc.
Love must be something else.  Hopefully I explore and exemplify the virtue of love in the new novel I'm working on.