What is (erotic) love? I recently saw, perhaps on SouthPark, a scene where a kid asks a grownup what is love. The grownup answers that love is when a man inserts his penis into a woman’s vagina.  I was surprised by that answer, but what is partially shocking in it is that there’s something to that. Why is sex so connected with love?

It’s a bit strange. We associate love with an emotion and sex with an activity. We know sex exists without love, and that love exists without sex. Yet we also know that these two emotions-activities, at least in so far as concerning erotic love, are intertwined. Can erotic love persist without sex? Can sex persist without erotic love? The answer to both of these questions is an obvious yes, and yet there is still an uneasy feeling to a yes answer. Maybe because love is a word but that word can mean a lot different things and different intensities. Similarly with sex.

Why then is sex so intertwined with love?

Some related discussions:
Love, to a man 
Perhaps what one could say is Love, to a woman (though obviously sex is still crucial).
What's the point of sex 
Is sex personal

And while people constantly mention and even describe love, as Linda complains in post , they rarely seriously talk about sex.