What is love?

What is love? Have you ever been in love? I mean genuinely in love, as opposed to lusting after some guy at the gym or sighing over a straight friend.

To love someone, in the sense of being "in love", I suppose there's a mixture of admiration, attraction, agreeableness and value:

• If you love someone, you respect him - you look at his character, or his motivations, and you see traits that you wish you had more strongly in yourself.

• If you love someone, you like him - you think he's fun to be around, you enjoy talking to him, and he takes you in directions that you enjoy.

• If you love someone, you're attracted to him - you find that even if he's ugly or fat or under-endowed, there's still something about him that draws you in and makes you crave intimacy with him, physically as well as emotionally.

• If you love someone, you're valued by him - your feelings are in some way reciprocated, even if the reasons behind his feelings differ from yours.

If you don't experience all four of these things, can you really be said to be "in love"? If any one of them is missing, you merely have a good friend, an infatuation, or a fuck buddy.

I've never been in love, and I can't imagine ever saying "I love you" to anyone. While I can imagine that such a person might exist, I haven't met him yet and I doubt I ever will. Experience suggests that no one will ever manage to fill all four criteria, even though the criteria aren't that specific.

It doesn't seem fair. All around me I see people in love, even if something goes wrong and they fall out of love after a time. Why is it that I've never met a man whom I can admire, like, be attracted to and be valued by? It doesn't seem all that remote a possibility, but after 20 years of adulthood I still haven't met anyone who even temporarily fits the bill. Or, to utilise a cliche, it's not that I haven't met Mr Right... I haven't even met Mr Right Now!

One of these days I'm going to quiz my friends on what being "in love" means to them. I'll ask them about their partners past and present, and try to dig through the inevitable gush and platitudes to see what it really looks (or looked) like. Either "being in love" is a very rare thing and they're all deluding themselves, or there's something desperately wrong with me.