I tend to think that all sex is emotional, and pretending there are emotionless drones out there having sex with absolutely zero feelings is a bit disingenuous. That said, the piece surely mischaracterizes love as a feeling, and love is, in my view, a behavior, an activity that’s carried out over a long period of time, much like Fromm describes in The Art of Loving and Helen Fisher follows up in The Anatomy of Love, which is basically the scientific consensus of love, as far as I can tell, at this point. The social sciences have advanced greatly in the past 20-or-so years and the views of the 1950’s are just now finally starting to take root as we embrace science. Yes!
The downfall to viewing love as an emotion is that it underscores our responsibilities in love and similarly diminishes our level of control. When love is an emotion, it’s something that happens to us, rather than something we continually choose to do that changes form over a series of years, changes triggered by chemical changes in the brain, and thus dynamics changing as time goes on. Love is a behavior. Love is sitting with someone over coffee just to hear them complain about their day yesterday, patiently giving them the luxury of doing so that we wouldn’t afford anyone else, as love is also cupping someone’s hand at their bedside as they die from a vicious disease.
Love isn’t an abstraction and personally I think the abstracted model of an emotional endeavor is a bit selfish, though unintentionally. I’ve actually covered these concepts all quite at length, here.
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