There are certain things we can be pretty sure about whilst discussing, and there are .....other things....and these other things, we can be less sure of.
Discussing subjects such as this aren't all that useful if looking for any definitive lock-down on what's going on but I suppose they give us an idea of how people think.
The early Greek philosophers realised the problems when trying to define such elusive concepts as beauty and love and hate etc ..... and basically you can't .... it's an impossible task.
The problem with trying to describe love is, firstly, it's an emotion for God's sake and therefore entirely subjective.
There is as much point in asking 'what is love' as there is in asking, 'what is up'.
Love, being an emotion, gets its ass categorized alongside hate, jealousy and so on.
Contemporary research and writings are for the most part, a bunch of horse-sh!te and unless you got a brain scanner being used to accompany any research, it really is all academic bullsh!te.
The most accurate thing we can possibly say about any emotion, not just love, is, it is a state of mind and as such can be viewed as a combination of electrical and chemical changes to the brain.
Mind you, we can say that about any experience affecting the brain and therefore human experience, but the problem with emotion seems to be, that it's hard to tie down to any specific area of the brain and seems more likely to be a combination of brain events giving rise to the experience of love.
Whenever we taste anything, it is an emergent property of experiencing a combination of about 5 base flavours and the emotion of love could well be a combination of base experiences; and this also applies to all other emotions.
And so, love is ....whatever you feel it is ... all you can do is describe how you feel and that's as accurate as it's gonna get guys; it could well be said that 'an explanation of love is as diverse as people's dna' because everybody is different and therefore so will all their experiences .... not really a scientific answer I know but then again, psychology [human behaviour] never really was a science anyway.