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“… Sexual desire can be stimulated by the anxiety of aloneness, by the wish to conquer or be conquered by vanity, by the wish to hurt and even to destroy, as much as it can be stimulated by love. … In erotic love there is an exclusiveness which is lacking in brotherly love and motherly love. This exclusive character of erotic love warrants some further discussion.
One often finds two people ‘in love’ with each other who feel no love for anybody else … an egotism à deux; they are two people who identify themselves with each other, and who solve the problem of separateness by enlarging the single individual into two. They have the experience of overcoming loneliness, yet, since they are separated from the rest of mankind, they remain separated from each other and alienated from themselves; their experience of union is an illusion.”

Fromm. [Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956)].

“In a certain measure her sleep brought about the possibility of love. When she slept, I no longer had to talk, I knew I was no longer being looked at by her, and that I no longer needed to live on the surface.” Marcel Proust.