Love is a word I don’t use very often. I don’t like it. Overuse has turned it into something like being nice, generally coupled with softheaded sentimentalism. You can do anything in the name of love and people will accept it. This needs to change.
Goodness is a doctrine of love, where love is defined as wanting for others what is best for them. And what is best for them is always defined qualitatively, as working to help them foster the capacity to be happy on their own, and to take pleasure in the happiness of others; in other words, to want to help other people become good. Love is wanting to help others exist as morally sovereign human beings. It is not being nice, and it is certainly not doing for others what they can and should be doing for themselves.
So often, those who speak of love are talking either of emotional neediness temporarily being satisfied with someone elses generosity (in the case of men), or effective self deception (in the case of women). This, or one is speaking of imposing ones will and power over others, by speaking for them, when they should be speaking for themselves. This, in my view, has been the tragedy of African-Americans in this nation, after losing the genuinely Good leader Martin Luther King, Jr. All that have followed him have been de facto racists, who kept people down for their own selfish political purposes.
Love is not tolerance. Tolerance is merely not antagonizing people. It is not helping them. It is a strictly negative virtue, in which you forego a crime, rather than “perpetrate” a positive act, that of positive connection.