But wouldn't you agree that sexual attraction is a huge part of falling in love ?
No, I would (and do) not agree with that. Not if you are suggesting that sexual attraction is *necessarily* a huge part of falling in love.
If you switched the tacit "necessarily" to "often" or "for many people," then we'd be closer to agreeing.
Can you fall in love with someone (a human, not a cat) you are not attracted to sexually ?
But of course. It happens quite a lot and has throughout recorded history. There are many instances of people experiencing sweeping, emotionally intense attachment to another person (often towards people to whom they are not even sexually oriented! ), feeling as if they never want to be parted from them, feeling bliss at being in their presence...and yet, to put it bluntly, not wanting to #$%@ them.
Granted, this phenomenon-- experiencing the euphoric feelings of "falling in love" only minus an accompanying organic sexual impetus--has only recently been explored from a critical, analytic and scientific standpoint. I suspect this is because the phenomenon appears to be especially common among young women and that this group is not the historical standard for scientific research (that has been young to middle-aged men). But it has always been there; it's a part of humanity.
and maybe it frustrates me a bit to be unable to understand how somebody can see the Lovers and take out the sexual element from it.....
when the reality is that, the idea of attraction and falling in love is largely physical.....(not entirely, of course)
See my answer, above.
The reality is that "falling in love" feelings are controlled by one part of the brain and organic sexual desire by another. What often--but by no means always--happens is that the two circuits become intertwined (there are complex reasons why), resulting in some people feeling both strong emotional impulses and strong sexual desire towards the object of their infatuation.
But we must be careful not to imply--as your quotes above do--that there is a necessary link between the two; the link is not a necessary one. And indeed, there are many people in whom the two circuits don't cross one another--people who can experience 'crushes' or strong emotional attachments to people to whom they do not have sexual urges. Again, we often find case studies within a same-sex context, but by no means always.
Obviously, the Trump card now known as The Lovers came into existence at a time when people did not know much, if anything, about the human brain and neuro-pathways and how they play into human emotion and sexual desire. However, as the Qabalistic and other descriptions above suggest, there are many tarot readers who don't assign a "romantic love and sexual desire" meaning to this card anyway; this doesn't have much to do with scientific rationales, I'd imagine.
I am a long-standing and fairly consistent member of "The Lovers-as-'choice' " camp of interpretation. At one point in my tarot life, I read for rather large numbers of members of the public, and when the Lovers came up, as it often did, I usually interpreted some element of choice, decision-making, Duality (whether as opposition or as integration), etc. Usually, I didn't place a large emphasis on ideas of romantic love (and certainly not sexuality, which in my opinion is both metaphorically/psychologically distinct from Love as well as scientifically).
The Lovers card is just not a card about distilled, straightfoward romantic love to me.
"How does he think of me? The Lovers--he loves me." No, that hasn't been my experience. If we're in a Rider Waite Smith framework, I can point out several cards in the Minor Arcana that would more sooner point to that conclusion than The Lovers.
If you go back and read Thirteen's explanation to the OP in this thread, that is largely along the lines of how I see The Lovers for this particular question. She and I tend to agree about The Lovers. There are other tarot readers--like the one that read for you--that might not, and I'm sure many of them are competent readers, as well.