ABSTRACT
According to Erich Fromm, sex has a role in love because it involves knowledge that surpasses linguistic communication. He explicitly connects this search with a form of mysticism. I acknowledge this turn to mysticism as one strand in thinking about the significance of expressive behaviour; however, the author seeks to show that Fromm’s insight can be captured in terms ultimately less mysterious than the appeal to the mystical. In place of the argument derived from Fromm, and which the author calls Mysticism about Sexual Relations, an alternative is proposed by the author that he calls Romanticism about Sexual Relations: it sees sexual behaviour as a set of expressive gestures symbolising the salient features of a situation on the model of a Romantic view of artworks.
