Sexual love

Although quite authentic, this form of love is founded on the short-lived passion of physical attraction. It is experienced as the urge to possess the other sexually. At its peak, sexual passion is an almost insatiable bodily appetite centred exclusively, as an erotic fixation, on the other person. The lover can become obsessed with breaking through the barrier of otherness, although more with the object of knowing the other's sexual self, rather than the subjective self (as is the case in passionate love). When such carnal love is experienced in the absence of passionate love it eventually becomes self-limiting, especially as the sense of total carnal knowledge of the other is realized.