I think that love is choice more than a particular feeling. It is a conscious choice, even sometimes despite your feelings, to place someone else's needs above your own. In turn, you make yourself reliant on them to do the same, though you do nothing to enforce that they follow through. You simply hope and trust.
I completely agree with this. Assuming that "place someone else's needs above your own" means that the other person's higher-priority needs are placed above my lower-priority needs (not that any their need is automatically placed above any my need). Sometimes we even do it explicitly with my girlfriend; when we want different things, we ask each other to express how strongly we care about this issue on a scale from 1 to 10; and then we usually follow the choice with the higher number. Of course this system also requires trust.
And you need some mechanism to avoid skewing only because someone has only slightly stronger priorities.
This is the earlier promised post about Dealing with a Major Personal Crisis. Please continue reading there but comment here.
The reasons for posting it this way are explained at the end of the link. I hope this approach does what I want it to.