We know so much about love that we don’t realise how much we don’t know about it. We know it matters. We know we can’t live without it. This is so intuitive we don’t stop to think about why it is so obviously the case. It just is.
Whatever our worldview or politics or belief system or cultural background, we all know that life is, in some sense, about love. It is what makes life work. We sense that without love, everything else loses much of its point and purpose.
And most of what we think about sex is based on the assumption that it is all about love. When there are discussions in our culture over issues like the definition of marriage or Christian beliefs about who we sleep with, arguments tend to revolve around lines like ‘You can’t regulate love’, or hashtags like #Loveislove and #Equallove. Love is the bottom line in all this. If you look like you’re against love, you’ve already lost the argument. And because (on this understanding) sex is love, anything that seems to curtail sexual freedom is accused of being unloving.