We often see the common paradigm of love and reason in literature. But here, we encounter lust and reason. This makes me question the relationship between love and lust. They seem to come in the same package but they can also be broken apart. There exists love without lust, and likewise, desire can also exist without feelings of love. Love without lust comes in the shape of familial relations or compassionate, friendly relations. But can love and lust ever find a point of separation when you love someone in the romantic sense of the word? Shouldn't one want to desire their lover?

Of course, those questions are sort of frivolous in this moment, for we are in the context of the Catholic Church. We face the guidelines and expectations of the Catholic Church: that those who engage in sexual activity must be married to one another. So my questions feel rather outdated because we do have people that love one another and don't engage in a lot of physical activity: asexuality, for example. People of the asexual persuasion must be capable of feeling passionate love, but, they do not find the need to act on such lustful tendencies. Comparing, or rather, contrasting this notion, to our current day's understanding of lust/love, "the hookup culture," we find a culture that celebrates and accepts moments of lust between two unmarried partners. In the Inferno, Lustful people are not even given the capacity to rest and they've cursed so badly against the force of the divine that they've given themselves over to a persuasion that they must forever act out. Really intense.