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Sure! But love is very rarely 'at first sight' and even more rarely 'at first sight' in a way that is totally requited. You have to have a base of initial attraction, interest, and liking for love to blossom. Seeing romance as something that just falls out of the sky and immediately demands passion from both sides is actually a big part of the problem -- it usually doesn't!
I'm as big an advocate for romantic love as can possibly be conceived, but I'm also a realist. Young people aren't falling in love not because they're "lecherous, materialistic creeps," but because they learn to silence the impulse based on frequent rejection or messaging that, as you do, tells them that "the worst thing she can say" isn't "no thanks," but "you're a creep!" As it turns out, people are responsive to operant conditioning and social messaging.
If I understand him correctly, @RandomRanger is talking about people not even getting to the stage where love can develop. That's the problem.
I never said anything about it being requited or demanding passion from both sides! What I'm talking about is one person (typically, the boy) developing an infatuation, and being motivated thereby to ask out the other one (typically, the girl). Hopefully, in the course of dating, the askee comes to reciprocate. Hopefully, if she doesn't, it's because the two of them don't really click in a romantic context, and this causes the initial crush to fade. Perhaps using the L-word confused things; I'm not speaking about the full bells and whistles, necessarily. Just about its precursor. A crush. An infatuation. Whatever you want to call it.
Of course, falling-in-love with/developing-a-crush-on someone necessitates already knowing them and hanging out with them frequently for non-dating-related reasons. Luckily, we have a social institution for locking largeish numbers of boys and girls together in a room for months on end until they are forced to get to know each other; it is called "school". By the end of any given year of middle school or high school I'd spoken to most of my opposite-sex classmates a few times, worked on class projects with several, and befriended a few platonically. Even without direct interactions, I'd seen enough of literally all of them to have a working sense of their vibe and personality. That's quite enough to develop a romantic infatuation that goes beyond the carnal (as it did yearly for me) and might motivate you to eventually ask one of these girls out on a date (as it did a few times).
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That brings up part of the oddity of the story about the homeschool prom. Do the teens not know each other? Are they strangers?
I don't remember ever dancing as a homeschooled teen. There was an evangelical youth group event where we were playing games like musical winks, where the girls were in a circle, and then the boys were around them in a larger circle, and when the music stopped we had to make eye contact and wink. Something like that. I didn't like it at all, but maybe they had a point. Several of the youth group members did in fact get married to each other.
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