Erotic Love

This love, by its very nature, is exclusive and also perhaps the most deceptive form of love. Erotic Love is a snippet of a book called The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm.

It’s Exclusive

If we base our love life on erotic love only, we will never find fulfillment or healthy relationships. Our erotic love shouldn’t be exclusive if you ask an evolutionary psychologist, but don't let me go there.

Back to the topic.

When we fall in love with someone, that person is slowly turning into an intimate person. That is all normal, and it’s a good thing.

There are plenty of signs of erotic love. One example is that you do not feel the need to know the person more deeply, or you are very much attracted to their looks.

You know about their kink but not about their childhood.

Yeah, that’s an erotic love, not a romantic one.

Those relationships usually become less and less intense and end in a wish for a new love — with an illusion that the new love will be different.

And it won't.

However, all these types of closeness tend to become reduced more and more as time goes on. There goes the fire.

Erotic love is an individual attraction, unique between two person

“Sexual desire aims at fusion — and is by no means only a physical appetite, the relief of a painful tension. But sexual desire can be stimulated by the anxiety of aloneness, by the wish to be conquered, by vanity, by the wish to hurt or even to destroy, as much as it can be stimulated by love. 
If erotic love is not also brotherly love, it never leads to union in more than an orgiastic, transitory sense.”

-Erich Fromm

Sure, being attracted to each other in a relationship is important. But sex is not a glue.

Respect and understanding are the keys to a long-lasting relationship.

Fromm mentions brotherly love as a key to the union. Brotherly love is a solid friendship and a good foundation of love.

Thanks for reading!

Let me know what you think.

Are you interested in different kinds of irrational love?

Check out Motherly Love, Fatherly Love, Sentimental Love, or Folie à Deux.