We live in a hyper-sexualized society. We congratulate ourselves on our lack of inhibitions, looking down on earlier generations as repressed.
Sex is pushed everywhere.
But we are not our sex drives. By equating sex and love, we have severely diminished both. One of things that we have heedlessly thrown out the window is friendship. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, wrote that friendship is one of the highest goods of human life. Writing in the pagan world of fifth-century Athens, centuries before Christ, he called friendship good for its own sake.