Question

In this post, I am going to follow up Love-1 with a simple definition for love and try to explain some observations with this definition. In hindsight, none of the conclusions of this post seem earth shattering to me -- but it took me some time to arrive at it, and I thought I will log it.
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For any A, such that A has the capacity to think and/or feel; and any X,

The love of A towards X, is the measure of how strongly (or how much) A thinks/feels that X and A are one and the same.

In this sense, it is the measure of how much (or how strongly) A identifies with X.

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Discussion

1. Self Love (Love of A towards A itself):

Of all the thoughts that rise in the mind, the thought 'I' is the first thought. -- Ramana Maharishi, from Nan Yaar? (Who am i?)

Typically people identify with one selves -- For example, a person or an animal A thinks that he/she/it is actually A. Subject to this self identification, the love of an object towards itself is obviously the maximum possible value.

I don't think anybody will disagree with me about the fact that people identify with one selves. It is nature's way of making the person associate with his/her/its body so that he/she/it can take care of it and live. It is also easy to see how the personal/anaimal associates with its body ("here is something which gives me some signals about the world and something which I can control...so it is me").

According to hindu philosophy, an "enlightened person" does not identify with himself. The way I look at it, hindu philosophy argues in the following fashion...that there is no real reason for us to associate with our body, on the contrary disassociating with our body can lead us to eternal happiness.
(To get an intuition as to why there is no real reason for us to identify with our body, recall the scenario in the matrix movie.)

Disassociating with one self, will cause the person to lose his self love, but then this will cause the person to then love all entities in the world, equally and maximally, argues hindu philosophy.


2. Parental (esp. maternal) love

Again, nobody will disagree with me, when I say that maternal love is one of the strongest feelings of love. I think the reason for this strong love, the strong identification of the mother with the child, can be explained in the following way...since the mother knows that the child was a part of her body, it makes it easier for the mother to identify with the child. In other words, since the baby is a part of the mother physically, the mother impulsively thinks (to some extent) the the child is really her. This is the cause of the strong love.

3. Love through sexual relationships:

Sex has been accorded high importance in relationships...to such an extent that relationships often terminate when a person involved in a relationship indulges in sex with a person outside the relationship. In this sense, sex is linked to the loyalty in the relationships.

On the contrary, one can view sex just as yet another pleasurable activity. There are several other pleasurable activities possible, for example two people can derive great pleasure by playing chess together. But relationships seldom end because a person in a relationship plays chess with a person who is not in the relationship...you get the point.

I think the reason for this high importance given to sex, is because it helps in the process of each one identifying with the other -- when two bodies come into such close contact, each body tends to think that the other body is really itself.