Since this was reposted from another thread, let me also say here why I see it as rather flawed and problematic perspective on love.
One reason is that it labels what one partner is feeling/experiencing in part based on what the other partner is feeling/experiencing. One can do that, of course...labels are inherently arbitrary, but it is not how we deal with or describe other emotions. For example, I can be sad or excited or afraid or disgusted or surprised or impressed all by myself, without requiring that anyone else feel the same way (or differently). However, according to this odd (imo) view, I can't feel real/genuine love unless I have a partner who feels the same way about me. To me, this makes very little sense; if my internal emotional feelings are the same in two cases, one in which my love is returned and one in which it is not, why give these two identical emotions different names?
As a further illustration of how muddy this gets, consider a romantic couple, A and B, in which A loves B and B equally and similarly loves A. Imagine their love to be as deep and committed and wonderful as you wish. By
@roots reggae 's preferred definition we can say that A and B genuinely love each other.
But now, suppose something changes for one of them, let's say for B. B stops loving A for some reason...maybe due to a long separation, to falling in love with someone else, to a dramatic change in the couple's circumstances, maybe to a dramatic change in something about A, perhaps to dementia or a brain injury or even death. Maybe A isn't even aware that B is no longer sharing their love for some period of time. So, now according to this odd definition, A no longer loves B...at least not in a real/genuine way...even though nothing at all has changed in A's feelings! (Btw, I have never heard, and can scarcely imagine hearing, someone say that they stopped loving a romantic partner because he/she died or became too sick to return their love. That would seem surpassingly bizarre, wouldn't it?)
-Ww