There are few moments in life when a desire is so overwhelming that self preservation and prudence are abandoned to pursue it. These are exhilarting moments and each should be feared and embraced. In modern times this desire is most often erotic love.
In the C. S. Lewis Essay "We Have No 'Right to Happiness,'" he writes, "When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, "Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses." I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you're a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is "four bare legs in a bed."
The rest of the essay is here: http://www.sunnipath.com/library/Articles/AR00000268
Lewis argues that erotic love should actually be treated as any other desire and that our obsession with eros is causing a spiritual and moral denigration in our society. If we are allowed to act however we like in the name of love,the laws lose meaning, virtue becomes outdated and moral codes vanish. Few would argue that in the pursuit of erotic love all is permissable, but perhaps against what Lewis assumes, erotic love is better that our other desires and there is more room to bend morality for its sake than for our other desires.
In his essay Lewis compares erotic love to self-preservation, avarice, hunger and the desire for sleep, but what separates love from these other impulses is that erotic love in this sense is a communal act. Our desires tend to focus us inward and cause us to fight for our own personal needs disregarding our empathetic and communal feelings for the sake of the self. Hunger and sleep deprivation cause us to snap at others and often to be cruel. Satisfying those desires is always a selfish act. Self-preservation is obviously only concerned only with the self, but love is consumed with satisfying the self and the other. The act of turning focus outward, and recognizing a being who has the same needs and wants is the beginning of empathy. Compassion for the other follows and, so long as that love lasts, the desires of the self and the other are comingled. What one wants becomes confused with the other. The identity of the self remains itself, but in the act of perceiving being in another it is wrenched out of narcicism and into shared experience.
Without a doubt people have sex for their own satisfaction while disregarding the other person, but in any healthy lasting sexual relationship there is always some witholding of personal sexual pleasure, or even going through some discomfort to please the other. Erotic love begs for us to share it with another and that love is at the basis of the purest and simple form of community, families. To say that the roots of all our communal and shared experiences are in this erotic love may be an exaggeration, but not much of one.
Socrates once said that “the only thing I say I know is the art of eros.” For him pursuing erotic love was the same as pursuing truth and being. Whitman took this eroticism and turned it into something more literal (see song of myself, O me! O life! or many of his other writings). These men both saw that in the soul of a man overcome with erotic love there is a desire more profound and powerful than the baseness that can accompany other desires. The precious few times in my own life when I’ve felt real, erotic passion, I have felt the desire to become a better, kinder person and they have always reignited my need to learn and understand the world and myself better. That’s why I always cling to those times and continue to search for new ones.
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