People, we need to love one another. But what is love? There’s love, and then there’s higher-ordered forms of love. Think of love as coming in layers, with each layer having its own new meaning and reflecting a new reality.
“To love is to will the good of another.” All other affections have their source in this first movement of the human heart toward the good. Only the good can be loved. Passions “are evil if love is evil and good if it is good.”
However, the part that can be difficult to understand, I think, is the “good of another”. I think the best way to understand what that “good” is, is to better understand our faith and using prudence to properly apply it to our daily lives.
And here is something from Abbot Gerard McGinley, O.C.S.O.:
"Love is a word so misused and misapplied, that when we speak of real love, we must denominate it charity. Love is often used to denote inclinations, sentimentalism, natural instincts. This is a besmirching of that noble sentiment implied by the word love.
According to St. Thomas, to love is to aspire to unite oneself with the object loved; it is a movement towards good in order to possess it. The truer and higher this good is, the nobler is the aspiring love. Bossuet says, ‘The character of love is to tend to the closest and most intimate union that can exist - the union of two wills.’ So love, then, is a sovereign power, a superior force which draws us out of ourselves to unite us to another."
From *A Trappist Writes Home; Letters of Abbot Gerard McGinley *(which I happen to be reading now).
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