David Bowie has a wonderful line about love, tucked away in the second track of Ziggy Stardust. I will not quote it here, but the substance of it is this.
If you are busy crowning the perfect, correct love — the one that stars in your amorphous internal fantasies — you are forgetting to do the most important thing.
To love.
A love that exists only in your head as a concept is worth nothing. It comes to life only when it is part of a live interaction between people: asking, embracing, taking an interest, listening, touching. In words and with hands.
The distinction sounds like wordplay and it is not, because the two versions behave completely differently under pressure.
Love as a noun is a thing you either have or do not have. It can therefore be lost, discovered to have been absent all along, or found to be the wrong kind — and every difficulty becomes evidence about its quality. There is nothing to do with love-as-a-noun except assess it, which is why people holding this version spend so much time taking its temperature.
Love as a verb cannot be assessed, only performed or not performed. It has no quality independent of what was done this week. Which is an intimidating thought, and also a liberating one, because it means the question is never is this real but only what did I do, and the second question has answers available to you today.
And to finish with something you could print on a shirt:
Love is a verb. Not a noun.
Do not forget it.