A loved one is someone whose vantage on the world is indispensable to you. Someone you feel compelled to protect. Someone you cannot help but want to witness and assist as they grow and change and evolve as an individual. Someone whose goals or aspirations match your own in intensity and meaning.  Someone you cannot hurt or lie to without hurting or deceiving yourself. Someone in whom you put your trust. Someone you will never tire of experiencing.

Someone who feels the same about you. Love is reflexive–all types of love, romantic or not. I mean that, not in the medical sense, but the linguistic. It is something that does not exist without two people experiencing it simultaneously and saying so. You do not actually love a person, unless you’ve told them that you love it. You can protect them, you can admire them, you can delight at their existence, but you cannot ever truly experience the other without being allowed in, and the only way in is the admission. Love cannot happen unless both parties participate. 

People talk about the selfishness of love (By people, I mean idiots and disgusting pseudophilosophical dollards like Ayn Rand). Many say love is illusory and is a word that merely signifies the desire to have better or more resources, dwindling the emotions of love down to physicality or biological necessity. I disagree with this. Perhaps it is true that there are biological or evolutionary reasons to have a loved one, but too many times, I have seen evidence that it is purely psychological. It is purely the higher mind finding stimulation, conceiving of something more profound than its own needs. Real love is pure, in that it is of the higher mind, though aspects of that love may bleed into or encompass more physical feelings like lust.

I do not think love is biological. It’s too unnecessary to be natural. It’s merely an emergent property of sentience, perhaps even the first emergent property.

It simply happens, once complexity of a specific magnitude is achieved in a creature. It obeys no rules. It can even lead to the death of the carrier. It is not a replicating phenomenon in the scientific sense and so, it isn’t of evolution.

You asked for poetry. I gave you science, but to me they are often one and the same.