The lowest, physical love is sex, the finest love is compassion. Sex is more than love, compassion is higher than love, love is exactly in the middle.
What love is, few people know. Ninety-nine per cent of people think love is sexuality - it's not. Sexuality is very animal; It certainly hides the potential to grow in love, but it is not real love, only potential.
When you become conscious and vigilant, meditative, sex can be transformed into love. If your meditativeness is total, absolute, love can be turned into compassion. Sex is seed, love flower, compassion of scent.
Buddha defined sympathy as "love plus meditation". If your love is not just a desire for another, when your love is not only a need, when your love is shared, when your love is not begging, royal, when your love does not ask for anything and just wants to give - just for giving pleasure - Meditation and a clean scent.
That's compassion. And compassion is the supreme phenomenon.
By love we call in reality the whole spectrum of relations between heaven and earth. At the most terrestrial level, love is sexual attraction. Here many of us are stuck, because our conditionality has burdened our sexuality with all sorts of expectation and suppression. In fact, the biggest "problem" of our sexual love is that it does not last long. It is only when we are able to accept this fact that we can truly celebrate it as it is - to greet her when she is here, and gratefully to say goodbye to her when she leaves.
As we mature, we can begin to taste love that is sexuality and that respects the uniqueness of the other. We begin to understand that our partner often serves us as a mirror, reflecting the unnoticed aspects of our deeper self, and thus helps us to become whole. Such love is based on freedom - not on the expectation or the need. Her wings carry us higher and higher, to a universal love that perceives everything as the only one. 

OSHO