Desire (as opposed to need) is an intellectual appetite for things that you perceive to be good, but that you have no physical, instinctual basis for wanting – and that’s true whether those things are actually good or not.

Eroticism, then, is about gravity, not about gratification, the pull toward something that reorients the self. And this gravity manifests not only in romantic or sexual relationships, but in every domain where desire dares to disrupt duty.