the physical sex-appeal or anything else of the kind awakening the emotions of the heart. If that does not happen, then the physical need is all and that is sheer lust, nothing more. But physical love is possible.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume IV - Part 3
Fragment ID: 14826
Abnormal is a word which you can stick on anything that is not quite common, cheap and ordinary. In that way genius is abnormal, so is spirituality, so is the attempt to live by high ideals. The tendency to physical chastity in women is not abnormal, it is fairly common and includes a very high feminine type.
The mind is the seat of thought and perception, the heart is the seat of love, the vital of desire – but how does that prevent the existence of mental love? As the mind can be invaded by the feelings of the emotional or the vital, so the heart too can be dominated by the mind and moved by mental forces.
There is a vital love, a physical love. It is possible for the vital to desire a woman for various vital reasons without love – in order to satisfy the instinct of domination or possession, in order to draw in the vital forces of a woman so as to feed one’s own vital or for the exchange of vital forces, to satisfy vanity, the hunter’s instinct of the chase etc. etc.1 This is often called love, but it is only vital desire, a kind of lust. If however the emotions of the heart are awakened, then it becomes vital love, a mixed affair with any or all of these vital motives strong, but still vital love.
There may too be a physical love, the attraction of beauty, the physical sex-appeal or anything else of the kind awakening the emotions of the heart. If that does not happen, then the physical need is all and that is sheer lust, nothing more. But physical love is possible.
In the same way there can be a mental love. It arises from the attempt to find one’s ideal in another or from some strong mental passion of admiration and wonder or from the mind’s seeking for a comrade, a complement and fulfiller of one’s nature, a sahadharmī, a guide and helper, a leader and master or from a hundred other mental motives. By itself that does not amount to love, though often it is so ardent as to be hardly distinguishable from it and may even push to sacrifice of life, entire self-giving etc. etc. But when it awakes the emotions of the heart, then it may lead to a very powerful love which is yet mental in its root and dominant character. Ordinarily, however, it is the mind and vital together which combine; but this combination can exist along with a disinclination or positive dislike for the physical act and its accompaniments. No doubt if the man presses, the woman is likely to yield, but it is à contre-coeur, as they say, against her feelings and her deepest instincts.
It is an ignorant psychology that reduces everything to the sex-motive and the sex-impulse.
1 This is from the man’s viewpoint – but the woman also has her vital motives.