LOVE

Someone recently gave me this definition of love:  fearless and relentless commitment to availability when growth and development are needed.   Something like that.  A Buddhist definition 

 

It seems to me that there is a caesura between two notions of love - love as providing value (feeding a capacity for growth) and love as attention (allowing someone to 'feel felt').   These two can go together, but don't need to necessarily.   There's also a third idea of love:  love as sacrifice of one's own interest, against the grain of economic calculation, for the sake of the beloved.   Some would say this last is the pinnacle of freedom and virtue. 

Isn't there something that all these accounts are lacking though?  Love also seems to be a kind of transcendental substance.   By engaging in the acts described above, one comes to participate in a sort of fluid that makes everything dignified, peaceful and vigorous. 

There is an intersubjective, viscous, palpable and affective component to love that I don't think is reducible