For me, what falling in love means is different. It’s a matter of suddenly, globally, ‘knowing’ that another person represents your own access to some vitally

transmissable truth
or radiantly heightened
mode of perception,

and that if you lose the thread of this intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desert-like state of ontological impoverishment. For me the sex comes in, I guess, in an instrumental way, if it does at all. Like, it’s one possible avenue of intimacy—but if you have other good ones, like therapy, then I can never remember why somebody’d bother with sex.