As for the story, I'm not bothered by the love story aspect here. I've agreed when people have complained about sexual content in the past, not because it involved gay sex, but because any sexual content has the risk of alienating, or in my case, boring the audience (if one can respect that different people are into different things, one must likewise admit that therefore, certain people are not into certain other things).
However, there was no sex in this story, it was just a story about love. If one can listen to a love story involving robots, aliens, and/or anthropomorphic animals (sometimes all in the same story) why does a story talking about three people trying to do something that symbolizes their love in the face of great difficulty oog some people out?
The story was far from perfect, however.
[start venting]
I have a peeve about the general tone of post-apoc fiction suggesting that the difference between happy neighbors living side-by-side, and hockey-mask-wearing leatherboy-cannibals searching the countryside for baby stew, is whether or not their flatscreens work.
I do not agree with almost any of his other works, but the American Sociologist Talcott Parsons famously said: "Society is sui generis" (self-creating). Society is not thrust upon us, society is something we all desire and create, inherent to being human.
I believe, with only my decent understanding of anthropology, sociology, and psychology to back me up, that if and when something like the disaster in this story happens, after the initial panic, people will actually pull together. Why? We'd all die out rapidly if we didn't. Man's greatest advantage is not the opposable thumb, it is the division of labor.
A Mad-Max world is the sweaty-palmed dream of people who keep Gun magazines under their mattress. Who, in my experience, are the first to start crying about there being no air-conditioning. [venting done]
Aside from my general peeve about the genre, I'd have to say that the attitudes of the characters were petty and foolish. This is not how people who've survived for over a year act. I've lived without heat, water, and electricity (separately and altogether), and lived around other people who've done the same, they don't act like this.
Also, the Chinese invasion: stupid, logistically impossible, and completely unreasoned. They would have to invade by coming across Europe (can't cross the midwest), and why would they try to take over the US, which is the actual epicenter of the destruction? Russia, Australia, or Africa would be logical and accessable targets.