Love is separate from sexual desire

The argument

Many cultures spurn sexual desire as part of love, believing it to cheapen or dirty the experience of authentic, pure love. For instance, in some South Asian or Chinese cultures, sex is considered to actively have negative health effects. Sex is often depicted as "polluting, repellant and risky... surrounded by multiple taboos and restrictions". This is often due to a societal prioritisation of chastity. Perhaps best illustrating how this rejection of sexual desire can influence cultural attitudes to love is Manus Island, where reportedly sexual desire is considered unrelated to love so wholly that an illicit love affair may consist only of sitting, talking and laughing with someone.

Premises

Counter-arguments

A handful of cultures separating sex from love does not show that love itself is culturally constructed. It may show only that norms *surrounding* a universal emotion vary, while the underlying experience is shared. The distinction between affectionate and erotic love is not exotic: Western thought has long drawn it too, in the ancient contrast between eros and agape. If very different cultures independently mark the same divide, that points toward a common human structure of love, not toward radical relativism in which love means something incommensurable in each place.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Variation in cultural norms about sex is consistent with a universal emotion of love expressed differently, not proof that the concept of love is culture-specific.