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I thought I knew what love was, what it felt like, then I met my the woman who would become my wife. She opened entirely new vistas on what my definition of love is. The "love" I thought I'd felt before paled in comparison, best described as somewhere between fondness and lust.
Then we had kids. My definition of love was shaken wildly again. I used to think about love similarly to Pyraxis' excellent definition above. It served my purposes because there simply was no difference between my self-interest and my wife's. I would gladly sacrifice myself for her. The kids changed that. When our first, my daughter, was born, I experienced a terrifying new level of love. I realized that while I would sacrifice myself to protect my wife, I would actively sacrifice myself, others, and whatever it took to insure the safety and well-being of that squalling infant.
It is frightening, for me, to realize that there exists something that can so strongly modify my own internal processes. I'm a tightly controlled person emotionally, but I can genuinely say that my children destroy that control, and that I am not being facetious in the slightest in saying that I would kill to protect them.
You always hear how things change when you're married, when you have kids. It's true, and it radically changed my viewpoint of love each time.
As to proof, how can we prove any internal condition exists except by external observation? There is precisely zero way to determine and prove any person's inner thought process in the slightest. I can easily point to many signs and symptoms associated with love, but I challenge anyone to prove it, or any other higher emotional state (lower states such as nervous, anxious, enraged, etc are all biomechanically based and easy to show).
I really think that anyone that does not better understand what love is as a parent must be emotionally defective.
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