For one to answer this question they would have to be objective about reality. For most people, if not all, the search for love is at the core of their existence. Whether love comes from children, a lover, family or friends is irrelevant. The key part here is for one to recognize that whenever the concept of love is involved, sex will soon dominate either directly or indirectly.
I don't mean to be a cynic or a provocateur. There is something cruel but also profound when it comes to this basic realization about sex. We acknowledge our design, our flawed organs that are subject to disease and decay, but neglect to take into full account how the whole process of sex unravels meaning in our lives.
Any hopeless romantic will simply switch off at the thought of their lover's not having sexual organs. No matter how society has imprinted us with specific narratives, at heart, we are still bound by the same instinctive mechanisms. Let us not forget that love and romance was a rather recent invention. Before the era of Romanticism (where love flourished as a meme) choosing a partner based on romantic feelings was considered foolish and in most cases damaging.
Marriage, the pinnacle of today's love narrative, was valued to be up and foremost a business deal and nothing more. Romance was considered to be at best a delusion that was caused by physiological imbalances that lasted as much as a prolonged infection. Fast forward a couple of centuries and into the evolution of neurobiology and we realize that pre-romance societies had the right idea.
If one examines sex as a standalone act they will soon find out that it defines everything around them. Men compete with their counterparts about who has the biggest and strongest car — which functions more or less like an extension of one's dick. A wise old woman once told me "Women don't dress for men, they dress for other women" — which again demonstrates how individuals compete for sexual attention. Even the modest of all family men, bound by tradition and perhaps religion, will want to reproduce his genes as much as possible. They will just use a different narrative.
Whether ones motivations revolve around money, religion, power, fame, family, career or even friends, sex at the core of it all. Everyone has noticed how dear long life friends seem to disappear once they have found their special someone. The reason this occurs is simply because friendship circles are nothing more than the tier 1 phase for finding a potential partner. Once the task is complete then the group loses its meaning. Even if those friends who do choose to remain in the circle, they soon find out that they have rather interesting sexual drama with one another.
Philosophers and religious leaders alike always tried to explain the nature of sex through stories of symbolism and higher meaning. Whether nature takes the role of "mother" or a given God has sex with himself, every single story revolves around this very act of reproduction. Even sociologists and psychologists, socially glorified for taking the concept a bit further, soon find out that a society revolves around copulation and competition and nothing else. This is how societies are created and preserved after all and there is not much romanticism to add to this.
There are winners and there are losers in sex. Always. Eventually you either fuck or get fucked and this notion can be taken both allegorically and pragmatically.
Even the most humble of us never adopt one of the 16,000 children that die every day from hunger. We rather prefer to raise the random genetic conglomerate that will result from a given person that happened to be in proximity in our life. This is how and why we made up the narrative of love. Love is selfish and conditional for one's genetic preservation. If I ask you to love everybody the same would be identical to asking you to fuck everybody the same. The concept would have lost its meaning.
Rationality is immune to sex. This is how mother nature has us at her fingertips and we always seem to be helpless on the matter. We are here for a specific purpose; to preserve our genes. Even those who believe that they have escaped the biological game, will make sure to stay in the "gene code" somehow by striving to put their name on a book's spine or something similar. A meta-fuck if you like.
Whatever choices we think we make, whatever toys we invent, at the core of it all is sex. When life is examined from such a profound perspective, everything else seems to be shallow and pointless. In many societies sex is kept private and often treated as inappropriate for this very reason. We hide its true nature because its bitch-slapping realism scares us. We want to believe that we are something more than petty animals humping each other in an elaborate park of hamster wheels. But are we?