Love is not primarily a pleasant sensation one stumbles into but an art that must be learned, in the same way one would learn medicine or carpentry. Mastering it requires theoretical knowledge of its principles and sustained practice, and the widespread failure at love stems from treating it as a matter of finding the right object rather than developing the right capacity.
Most people treat the problem of love as the problem of being loved: how to become lovable or attractive enough to be chosen. This reverses the real task, which is the capacity to love actively; the question is not how to be worthy of another's love but how to develop one's own power to give.
Any mature love, regardless of its object, contains four interdependent components: care (active concern for the other's growth), responsibility (readiness to respond to their needs), respect (seeing the person as they are, not as an instrument of one's own wants), and knowledge (penetrating to the person's core rather than the surface). Care and responsibility without respect and knowledge degrade into domination.
Human self-awareness makes us conscious of our separateness, and this isolation is the source of deep anxiety that drives us to seek union. Mature love is the one form of union that overcomes separateness while preserving the individual's integrity and distinctness, unlike orgiastic states, conformity, or submission, which dissolve or deny the self.
In mature love, giving is not deprivation or sacrifice but the highest expression of one's own aliveness and strength; one gives joy, interest, and understanding, and in giving enhances the other's sense of life. The person who experiences giving as loss has not developed beyond a receptive, hoarding orientation toward the world.
Love is an attitude and a faculty that determines one's relation to the world as a whole, not a relationship tied to a single person. If someone genuinely loves one other person, that capacity extends to others and to humanity; love confined exclusively to one partner reveals not love but an enlarged egotism or symbiotic attachment.