Wit & Attitude Quote by Peter Porter

There is a soldierly bluntness to this line: it wastes no time on romance and goes straight for logistics. Calling sexless love "the most efficient form of hell" turns heartbreak into a system, not a mood. "Efficient" is the key barb. Hell, in the classic sense, is sprawling and theatrical. Porter imagines a tighter machine: love that keeps its emotional hooks but denies the body any release. It is punishment with excellent throughput, a self-sustaining loop where desire has nowhere to go except back into the mind.

The subtext is less "sex is everything" than "denial is an accelerant". Love already carries dependence, imagination, and vulnerability; remove consummation and you get an intimacy that can't resolve. The line also smuggles in a quiet accusation: if the relationship is "without sex", someone is either withholding, unreachable, or dead - and the beloved becomes both idol and torturer. That duality is what makes it hellish: you cannot simply hate your way out.

As a soldier, Porter would have known long stretches of enforced abstinence, separations, and the emotional purgatory of longing with no agency. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, duty and decorum routinely overruled private appetite; marriages could be strategic, courtship could be protracted, and distance could be permanent. The quote compresses that social reality into a dark punchline: the body is not an optional accessory to love, but the pressure valve that keeps affection from turning punitive.