Love & Passion Quote by Andrew Greeley

Greeley slips a live wire into what often passes for “mature” talk about sex: the insistence that we can treat it as either a moral hazard or a recreational technology. As a clergyman, he could have delivered a sermon. Instead he stages a small ambush with questions, baiting the reader with a statistic-sounding claim (“most frequent… apparently the best”) and then pivoting to the supposedly naive conclusion polite modernity is trained to dismiss: affection. Maybe even love.

The intent is strategic. He’s not arguing from doctrine first; he’s borrowing the language of observation, almost social-scientific in its cadence, to corner a culture that congratulates itself on being unsentimental. “Best” is doing quiet work here: it smuggles in the idea that sex is not only measurable by novelty or freedom, but by quality as experienced over time. The subtext is a critique of the post-sexual-revolution bargain where liberation sometimes meant downgrading attachment to a private eccentricity. Greeley hints that the most dependable pleasure may be relational, not merely hormonal.

Context matters: late-20th-century Catholic discourse often sounded like prohibition. Greeley’s move is softer and, in some ways, more radical. He doesn’t thunder about sin; he wonders aloud about human flourishing. The rhetorical questions feign modesty, but they’re a lever: if you concede the premise, you’re pushed toward a conclusion that re-centers fidelity as an erotic asset, not just a moral duty. In a culture that treats love as the optional add-on, he rebrands it as the missing ingredient hiding in plain sight.