This is a very easy essay to write. There is no relationship between love and sex.  Zilch.

There will be those of you who cry out, ‘haven’t you heard of Eros?’

Eros has to do with an all-consuming appetite to sexually possess another. It has to do with beauty, longing, hunger. It’s visceral, powerful.  Eros has to do with self and what the self passionately needs.

But it has nothing to do with another real human being, with a real interior life.  In fact, interior lives actually interfere with Eros. Imagine what a passion-killer it would be to confess to one’s partner during a romantic Valentine’s supper how miserable you were at work, how you had lost your faith in God and were finding life meaningless, if you feared death or were desperately grieving your grandmother.  Eros would be severely dented.

My mother taught me about Eros.  Eros is about play, repartee, flirting, teasing, dancing, mystery, one step forward, one step back.  One does it in the same vein as a good game of tig.  Hiding in one place only is less fun than forever changing places, calling out, ‘Cooee, where are you? Come and get me!’ only to disappear behind the curtain of another room entirely.  ‘Men so love to chase,’ she would tell me, ‘so never let yourself be caught!  Even in marriage, go on playing the game.’

Over two millennia previously Aristotle had given the sexual appetite such short shrift that he relegated it to his Zoology.

It so happened my mother played it extremely well.  At her funeral wake, ancient titans of industry would totter up to me and confess how in thrall they had been to my mother’s beauty, how totally in love with her they had been.  I was impressed.  The Fane Technique of Erotic Love had been tried and tested and given 5 stars. But it was only a couple of years ago that I discovered it wasn’t my mother’s technique at all, but rather that promoted by Marie Stopes in her bestseller Married Love, first published in 1918.  My grandmother would have read it hot off the press – it was a huge best seller and ran into countless editions.  And then, of course, she would have told my mother all about it, and then my mother had told me.

Stopes’ thesis is that domestic life kills erotic love – because men so love ‘the chase’ - but there are measures one can take to keep sexual passion alive.  Her ideal was that a married couple might live in separate houses; failing that, separate bedrooms.  If money was really tight, a big thick curtain might be hung between the two lovers in the marital bedroom.  On no account must your husband ever see you naked except as an object of desire – apart from, she conceded, in the bath.  And in any particular year, she advised, live entirely separate calendars, you visiting your friends, while your husband visits his.  And then, she insists, when you see each other again, you will be aflame for each other once more.