Say you’re on a desert island with a beautiful companion who offers you days of emotional rapture or nights of erotic delight, but never the twain: which would you opt for? Would men go for more sex, and women more love? Would your mind say love, and your body say sex? Either way, the choice is delicious, not unlike being asked if you want your winnings in cash or as a cheque.

Except your money will eventually run out, whereas both love and sex are potentially inexhaustible.

We like to think sex and love are mutually enhancing. An emotional charge can make sex sublime; a sexual aspect to love grounds it in the exquisitely real, the spirit made flesh. Yet the truth is, sex without love is still sex; and love without sex is still love. You could even say they’re more, not less, intense on their own.

Say you had to choose between them. Compared with love, which if real is meant to last, sex is a short-term affair. After all, it’s about immediate gratification. On those grounds, love wins. Yet through its connection with reproduction, sex has the more direct link with the future. True, most sex doesn’t result in progeny, but without sex there’s no life. It’s for this reason the philosopher Bert Hellinger says: “Sex is greater than love.” Counterintuitive as it sounds, love comes after sex. But maybe I say that because I’m a man.

Robert Rowland Smith is a former prize fellow of All Souls, Oxford. Do you have a conundrum for him? Email: rrsmith@sunday-times.co.uk