What is love?

Think of someone you love, or once did, and try to say what that was. Maybe it came over you the way weather does. Maybe you'd say you kept choosing it, on mornings when it would have been easier not to. Both can feel true, and they can't both be the whole story. The fever is the oldest version. Around 600 BC the poet Sappho described what happened to her body as she watched the woman she wanted: her tongue failing, a thin fire running under her skin, her eyes going dark, her ears roaring, her whole body trembling. Plato's Symposium gives the fever a story. Aristophanes, a guest at the dinner, says humans were once double creatures that Zeus split in two, and that love is the lifelong hunt for the missing half. In that telling, love isn't something you do. It's something missing from you. Erich Fromm thought that was the trouble. In The Art of Loving (1956) he argued that falling in love is the easy part, and that love proper is a practice you get better at, an act of will as much as a feeling. Feelings come and go, he pointed out, so a love that rests on one alone has nothing to stand on. For Fromm, love is a decision and a promise. Attention may be the strangest answer, and the hardest. Simone Weil thought full attention was the scarcest and least selfish gift one person can give another. Iris Murdoch went further: for her, love is a hard-won way of seeing, in which you come to grasp that something outside yourself, another person above all, is as real as you are. On that view, love's enemy is less hatred than fantasy: seeing someone only as a character in your own story. In the love you actually know, which of the three did the real work: the fever, the decision or the attention?