It seems to me you have been sold the idea that only the first kind is acceptable, when most people, in my view, are stuck in the second or the third.
All right, that is not a way to begin. I understand that first line landed on you. No pressure. In a few paragraphs it will be clear. Let us start in order.
Love is a significant component of our sense of happiness. So far banal, and innovating nothing. People very much want to be in a state of loving a partner, and very much want to receive love from that same partner, and that sentence too stinks of banality.
But here is the twist.
When I look back over the last twenty years at the women and men who poured their romantic tears onto my fragile shoulder — whether they were already inside an established relationship, or whether their tongues were hanging out from thirst for a romantic partner — I noticed again and again that when people say I love, they mean, broadly, one of three states of love.
So here are the three kinds of romantic love.
One. "I love you" — the correct romantic ideal.
Without too much honey and violins: the first kind means that in the relationship, the partner usually represents the summit of your desires and is the motive behind most of your efforts. The partner has a unique standing in your life and it does not enter your mind to replace them with another. You feel good most of the time simply because of who is beside you, and not for other reasons.
Note carefully, do not confuse this state with the passion-filled infatuation that envelops you in the initial period of a relationship. In such a state almost everybody feels a strong and unique connection exclusively to the specific person they are with.
The question is whether the feeling of unique connection remains in you once the hormone levels have come back down.
Two. "I love what you do for me."
This is a relationship organised around function. He is reliable, she runs the household, the arrangement works. There is real affection here, and there is real gratitude, and it is not nothing. But the person is somewhat interchangeable, and both parties usually know it, and neither says so.
Three. "I love not being alone."
The most common of all, and the one people are most ashamed of. The partner is the answer to a fear rather than the object of a desire.
Now, here is the part that will irritate you: none of these is a fraud. The second and third kinds hold up households, raise children, and see people decently through decades.
The damage is not in being in the second or the third. The damage is in believing you are in the first when you are not — because then every ordinary disappointment reads as evidence that something sacred has broken, when in fact nothing broke at all.