You do get that we don't see those activities as mutually exclusive.
We're an old church, with habits and diction perhaps best understood with reference to Troubadours, Medieval poetry and customs, and things of that kind. You might get SOME notion of the affect (if you know Tolkien) when you consider Gimli's fierce devotion to Galadriel. That's "courtly love" of a kind. A knight could be devoted to his lady, but that had nothing to do with marital love (Except in Parzival -- his "lady" is his wife! Astonishing!) The "lady" might be the queen or his lord's wife, and at least in the ideal, the lover's joy would be only to receive her smile and the privilege of bearing a token of hers - a veil or a bit of sleeve which she had once worn. There really was an ideal of a passionate love which either had nothing to do with sex or with VERY sublimated sex, and it was a love that dared and endured great things, either of courage or of asceticism.
And that lies behind the language, excessive to our ears, of some of the Western songs to Our Lady.
And MY Lady would never return my love if I betrayed my utter allegiance to my Lord and hers. The matrix within which my love arises is that my Lord loves her, and she and I love Him.
Again, it's a matter of flavor and of experience. My mother was English, as she said "A British subject, not an American object." She had quite ambivalent feelings about the aristocracy, of which she was by no means a member, but she LOVED the Queen. I was bowled over when I realized this about her, and it shed a new light on pre-Republican governments and why regicide was considered especially foul.
Then I was involved with a really neat candidate for our state assembly, a self-made man and a man of principle and faith. And I remember seeing him march in our little community's 4th of July parade (in which George Allen usually rides a horse, since he's from around here.) And as he passed I smiled and whistled and pointed at him, as if to say, "You da MAN!" and he saw me and smiled and pointed back, as if to say, "No, YOU da Man!" And it just felt good. Now if I were to write a song about that, somebody could say it sounded blasphemous or plausibly homosexual. But it would be no more blasphemous than the Four Tops song, "I'll be there," which I always thought with a little tweaking would make a great hymn.
Lewis says, in another comparison, that some art is like through difference, and the more like, the more unlike. A good painted portrait is more like the subject than all but the very best photographs. But photographs are in some sense "exact" representations.
So the Theotokos is, as are we all, in God's image. But my devotion to her is very unlike my devotion to God.
One last inadequate appeal. I am very devoted to my wife. I am also very devoted to my child. Those devotions do not conflict with one another or with my devotion to God. If anything, they all reinforce one another.
Again, I am not really trying to persuade. Maybe I'm suggesting that there is a range and subtlety to religious affect and affiliation which might be more nuanced than folks at first appreciate.
Bears repeating. My goal is to first, make the Catholic faith clear to the outsiders and secondly, explain why we do what we do. The rest is up to the reader. Marian and other devotions of the Catholic Church are private expressions of the faith. While certain truths about the Blessed Virgin are taught dogmatically, various dedications and devotions to her are not required in order to be Catholic or in order to be saved. Typically, the faithful develop them each in his own personal way, in what a Protestant might somewhat heretically call "relationship with God".
What is taught dogmatically? Her perpetural virginity; her desire to participate in the divine plan of salvation; her mothership and her queenship, and the mystical eschatological connection that exists between her and Christ's Church. The Catechism devotes two chapters to the Blessed Mother:
ARTICLE 3 "HE WAS CONCEIVED BY THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, AND BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY"
ARTICLE 9 "I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH"