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Love

How is love between sexual partners different from the love between friends?
Accepted:
February 28, 2007

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Oliver Leaman
March 1, 2007 (changed March 1, 2007) Permalink

A contrast has often been drawn between these two kinds of love, and also between them and love for God. It would normally be said that love that takes a sexual form brings in all sorts of issues that are absent in love between friends that does not, such as the nature of physical passion, issues dealing with how people treat the bodies of others, and how a relationship might change over time physically as well as emotionally. Many writers take the contrast to lie very much in the strength of the relationship, with a sexual relationship being generally stronger than just that between friends, and also the former might involve more arational features. That is, one falls in love and makes love to people who are often quite unsuitable, and that is the staple of cheap fiction, whereas who we choose to be our friends tends to be better considered and the result of a cooler ratiocination.

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