Yes, we tried different approaches above:
Poetically (but it turns out too abstract and sometimes contradictory)
Apophatically (through affirming what it is not) – it worked out well, but the list turned out too long.
Phenomenologically. This is where the most interesting part came out (so far).
Can you describe how love comes to you personally before any experience? And try to name it?
Just to keep throwing more fuel on this fiery question…
What do you think about these clarifications:
I would change the term “feeling of” in the above to “capacity to”. The capacity to love and receive love is boundless. It almost seems that by loving, by expending your love, your capacity to love increases. By burning your gas, your gas tank fills up, and increases in size. You gain more love to give, by giving love.
So I would also change the notion that one “cannot be completely filled”. I would say a person as a receptacle for love, can be overfilled, which can grow the person in capacity and volume at once.
This all certainly contradicts the first law of thermodynamics.
This seems to relate to the above. With love, it seems self-sustaining and self-increasing - truly procreative. Procreativity seems essential to love.
[quote=“Astorre, post:60, topic:577”]
Love is sacrificial. Moreover, sacrifice is unjustified by gain. Consequently, love is unnatural to the thirst for life and can easily exceed this thirst. [/quote]
Sacrifice involves destruction - something must be lost for there to be a sacrifice. So this would seem to contradict the procreativity of love. This is where the absurdity of love comes in. Like the absurdity of seeking knowledge, only to learn we are utterly cut-off from the thing in itself and incapable of knowing anything with certainty besides the fact of our isolation. Love transcends this isolation, but requires sacrifice where there may seem to be nothing left to give.
I have to think about this more. I’ve never really addressed love head on. I’ve always left that to the poets and the novelists and playwriters. And the preachers like Paul. But as a philosophic topic, as addressed by Plato and many others, I always found the reduction drained love of the color and depth of the experience in the first place. Philosophy tends to empty things as it reduces them, leaving them unrecognizable. Like God. Or Love. Or Good. Or Truth. To keep sight of love as we distill its essence seems better addressed by a poet. Or, as philosophers, we need to accept an analogic, metaphorical method.
In your statements, you have related the characteristics related to love to support your description of love. If you change the word love to hate in your statements, do they not also apply to characteristics of hate?
My defense of love as a desire is this question. What does the lover desire in the beloved but the beautiful and good?
@MCogito Some are of the opinion that love is undefinable. I don’t share that view and your definition, based on “defective egg”, somewhat vindicates my, some would say, pigheadedness.
In an earlier thread on the same topic, I drew a comparison between love and gravity. In a Newtonian world, gravity is F = G \frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}. A simple equation, although G and /r^2 are a computational burden. I didn’t know this but it seems we can see black holes with it (keep decreasing r). I couldn’t get to Einstein’s theory of relativity, missed that boat a coupla decades ago. 
go buy a chicken, cuddle with it and see the difference: Love is not universal, it’s mammal.
I suggest you spend a little of your time on some social media apps. Very entertaining! 
this is my first reply on this website! please be patient with me 
side note: i’m off-topic, erratic, and verbose. please forgive me. i have no technical or formal answer to this, which i understand is your question. i believe my contribution is still worth writing, so please be gentle.
tl;dr: love is the feeling of one’s soul poking its fingers between ribs, reaching for.
that being said: as a pantheist, love is everywhere. to me, love is an atmosphere created by a collective attitude among an individual, a pair, a group, or a population. it is felt in the air. perhaps i am too intuitive, but i feel it in my bones observing two or more people. ironically, i am unskilled interpersonally and have a difficult time with nonverbal cues. however, i feel a difference, somatically, observing. i don’t mean watching others embrace one another or anything.
to me, it is a mutually-contributed-to atmosphere, as i said before. what i mean is not that it must be reciprocated. love, like a liquid changing its shape depending on its glass, morphs depending on circumstance. i have seen it radiate. i have seen it bend away from non-reciprocates like oil with water or two south-pole magnets. in c.s. lewis’ the four loves, he discusses the medieval “religion of love,” which essentially puts aside all else for the lover. in the same room as those truly in love (familially, romantically, with themselves or otherwise), it is felt. sometimes it radiates from the chest, other times it moves like smoke.
i have a strong belief that most people are self-motivated. in high school, something i noticed in relationships between the “deeper” people (who had the same relationship problems as popular, superficial people) was that self-sacrifice and martyrdom, almost christlike, was a show of love. not sacrifice for the lover themselves, but in a sense “martyring themselves” by staying in a relationship that fell apart every other week at best. suffering on purpose whether the hope of recovery was present or not. knowing, deep down, that one must leave and staying anyway. this self-sacrifice, especially in youth, i have found to be much more for curating a specific self-image (“look at how kind i am, how much i’m suffering, how deep i am, how much better i am than the people who leave their relationship) than real sacrifices. to think of oneself as a martyr is for, if not likening oneself to one’s christ, supporting the false belief that if one suffers, one is incapable of error. this feeds the mind a perfect image of the self as well as the message that love means to suffer.
i am losing track of myself.
loving a person
love is, to a degree, doing for someone what you believe they should do for themselves (assuming you care about them). it can sometimes be suffering, but that is not the focus. to love someone is to bandage their wounds, to throw them in a 12-step when they have an issue, to nourish with good cooking, to see them as an artistic muse, to study like an organism alien to you, to create in their name, to bestow upon the world what it had gone without before you. it is harsh, sharp, tender, scathing, suffocating, overwhelming, omnipresent, omnipotent, and heavy. when love for someone is rejected, you must carry it around — they will not hold it. it grows heavy. i believe though, that those who exert this love onto the world around them instead of the desired individual, live much more lightly. it is important to do this, even if it seems often impossible or performative.
it is generalized into a disgusting, unwashed mass by the global economy. it is commercialized. from birth, we are primed by media and other people to think what love is. it is an overused word for a feeling many never truly understand intellectually (though many feel it or mistake other things for it). it is impossible to put words to, and no one will ever agree. it is a foolish endeavor to try, but i am about as bound to logic as a lemming running off a cliff. we are primed to know that it is between one man and one woman. it is shown through money, sex, and material things. it is the manufactured tenderness between hollywood actors and it has clean edges where it begins and ends. you only use the word love for close friends and family and lovers. no one else. if you choose to be generous, it quickly slips from your lips often for things that cannot love you back. this brings me to a love of objects and ideas.
a love of objects, ideas, concepts, activities, what have you
as i said before, love has an atmospheric effect. it cannot come from something inanimate. you cannot undress your soul from its skin before an object with any intimate acceptance in return. to love an idea is separate. i believe the intellectual and emotional stimulation for something one is passionate about is enough to be considered love. in a way, i believe the way passion seems to push your blood, keep it moving, more than your heart, is reciprocation. it is unspoken, but it needs no words. it will push you for a lifetime, as my passions have done for me. they seem to retreat when all hope and will to live dies, but they truly only lie dormant. they never leave.
we can define things by understanding their opposites. the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.
thank you for reading!
p.s., i have much more to write. i am by no means finished. however, i happen to be a student ignoring her work. so, this bespectacled lover must cease her frantic, incessant typing in the name of finishing an essay.
The guys above and you yourselves have done a great job on this. By the way, welcome to the forum!
I noticed that all my attempts at description or formalization also describe hatred. This is a very worthy clarification that shouldn’t be overlooked.
But here’s what’s important. Is it possible to isolate some common quality from all our texts that we would all recognize?
Let’s try.
Firstly, love (like most likely any feeling) eludes description. It is understood by everyone who wrote above, but no one has expressed it in a way that excludes anything else.
Phenomenologically, @FireOlogist came very close to the concept. This impressed me greatly. But here’s the thing and the important point:
Secondly, even understanding the feeling of love doesn’t diminish it. Here I’d like to turn to Baumgarten and his idea of conceptualizing sensory experience: “The more we break down an emotion into its components, the more the emotion itself evaporates, leaving only logical constructs” (I think he wrote something similar in his “Aesthetics”). But, miraculously, this doesn’t happen with love, which means either we don’t grasp its details, or it truly is a special kind of experience!
I don’t know what else to add to all this, and I don’t yet know of any approaches to studying this phenomenon. Perhaps we should stop here?
So, I’ll write down what I came up with. Here is my definition:
“Other” is experienced as absolutely significant.
This is probably not an exhaustive answer, but I hope it works for my child (who started this discussion).
This is fantastic! If you want my opinion, I recommend continuing. This is a wonderful forum, primarily for the diversity of its members and the variety of approaches. And during the discussions, subtleties emerge that are impossible to conceive of on your own, even if you think you already have a method.