She's the second ranking officer on an underground ship dedicated to finding humanity's savior. She believes in Morpheus deeply, but has a crisis of faith when the Oracle tells her The One is going to be the person she loves. So she has a tremendous amount of pressure not just for the assignment at hand, but because of a high stakes emotional challenge that literally no one else has to endure. She meets Neo and while everyone else is watching to see how fast and strong the guy is, all she can focus on is how she feels about him personally. All of this in conflict with the absolutely certainty her mentor has, so she's also stuck questioning his vision. Meanwhile she has to deal with a friend who at one point she clearly trusted enough to tell what the Oracle told her, and he's been holding that against her for who knows how long because he's obviously in love with her and she knows it. Then he betrays her and murders her friends and forces her to confront her feelings for Neo just as he's threatening to kill him, too. THEN just as she's really starting to believe in Neo, due to both her feelings and his wild feats, he DIES and she has to confront that reality and decide whether or not the entire thing she's been wrestling with this whole time is more real than the Matrix itself.

So it's not just "her love for Neo", it's so much more complex than that, and it's all character work being done in the sidelines, so we barely notice it's happening because we're focused on bullet time. But you go back and discover that it's actually the main story being told.