A few answers that have lasted:
Plato’s Symposium argued that love — eros — is the pursuit of the beautiful and the good. We’re not just attracted to a person; we’re attracted to what that person represents: beauty, goodness, truth. This is why love can feel cosmic. It’s pointing at something beyond the beloved.
Buddhist tradition centers metta: loving-kindness extended to all beings, beginning with yourself. This isn’t romantic love — it’s something closer to the ground beneath romantic love. The idea is that you can’t love another person well if you haven’t learned to extend care toward yourself first.
Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving (1956), pushed back against the idea that love is primarily something that happens to you. His argument: love is a skill. Like playing an instrument or learning a language, it requires study, practice, and discipline. Most people fail at love not because they’re unlovable but because they’ve never treated love as something to be practiced and improved.
Each answer illuminates something the others miss. Plato gives love its transcendence. Buddhism gives it its scope. Fromm gives it its responsibility.