1. The Differences Between Sex and Love -Opening Remarks from "Three To Get Married"

1. The Differences Between Sex and Love

Love is primarily in the will, not in the emotions or the glands. The 
will is like the voice; the emotions are like the echo. The pleasure 
associated with love, or what is today called "sex," is the frosting 
on the cake; its purpose is to make us love the cake, not ignore it. 
The greatest illusion of lovers is to believe that the intensity of 
their sexual attraction is the guarantee of the perpetuity of their 
love. It is because of this failure to distinguish between the 
glandular and spiritual--or between sex which we have in common 
with animals, and love which we have in common with God--that 
marriages are so full of deception. What some people love is not a 
person, but the experience of being in love. The first is 
irreplaceable; the second is not. As soon as the glands cease to 
react with their pristine force, couples who identified 
emotionalism and love claim they no longer love one another. If 
such is the case they never loved the other person in the first 
place; they only loved being loved, which is the highest form of 
egotism. Marriage founded on sex passion alone lasts only as long 
as the animal passion lasts. Within two years the animal attraction 
for the other may die, and when it does, law comes to its rescue to 
justify the divorce with the meaningless words "incompatibility," 
or "mental torture." Animals never have recourse to law courts, 
because they have no will to love; but man, having reason, feels 
the need of justifying his irrational behavior when he does wrong.