Introduction

Abstract

Love and sex are moral issues. Together, they probably contribute more drama and more joy to our lives than any other human pursuit. Love and sex feed into and underpin many of our relationships, though sometimes quite disparately. They may be mutually exclusive: the love of a parent for a child is commonly nurturing and sexless; sexual encounters or relationships may be loveless. And yet love and sex are mutually reinforcing. Adult intimate relationships in Western society often are underpinned by love, and yet, like sexual relationships based purely on physical desire, romantic love relationships may be sustained chastely. One only need view a few films or television programmes depicting human relationships to perceive the vast variety of ideologies surrounding the two concepts, and how precarious is our human understanding of how love and sex work -so much so, that we often feel we “get it wrong”, that we can’t understand how we keep making bad choices. Both traditional and contemporary discourses around love and sex tend to be contradictory or dissonant, at least some of the time, leading to distortions that may or may not be recognized as such. This book is an exploration of the morality of love and sex, and how distortions of these sometimes develop into abuse. I argue that there are strong similarities between different kinds of abusive relationships, and that these similarities arise out of the common narratives surrounding romantic love and the logic of intimate relationships.