Are most people deeply confused about "love", or am I missing a human universal?

Most people aren't confused, because they're not trying to be clear and rational.  They are definitely confusing to people who prefer specificity and operationally useful descriptions of experiences.

It is used to mean a very wide range of positive feelings, and should generally be taken as poetry rather than communication.  Another framing is that the ambiguity makes it very useful for signaling affection and value, without being particularly binding in specific promises.

Which is NOT to say it isn't "real".  Affection, caring, enjoyment, and willingness-to-sacrifice-for someone are all things that many individuals experience for other individuals.  The exact thresholds and mix of qualia that gets described as "love" varies widely, but the underlying feelings seem near-universal.

I can't comment on whether people are confused about what "love" means as I'm not sufficiently deep in love discourse to say. But one thing I'm noticing about your characterizations of love is that they are missing an indexical element to the point of approaching sollipsism.

Romance and sexuality makes for a good example. Consider the following scenarios:

• A woman is on a date with a man, which she enjoys until she sees that his home is a dump.
• A teenager has a crush on a celebrity, with elaborate daydreams about how cool the celebrity is, not realizing how much of this is a facade created for entertainment.
• A man visits a prostitute and feels excited as he causes her to orgasm, not realizing that she fakes it for the business.

In all of these cases, one could say that there is a disconnect between what people think about their object of attraction, versus what that object of attraction really is like.

A Bayesian of parsing this is that their feelings of attraction represents an estimate of how well they fit together, but that this estimate differs from how well they really fit together. The actual fit seems important to think and talk about, and one should probably coin a short word for it - or at least for the coincidence between actual and estimated fit. This could be called "true love".

You are right, most people are confused.

I've spent quite a lot of time on relationship theory. It seems pretty clear that "love" means very different things in different contexts, and that different people interpret it differently. It also seems clear that this causes a lot of problems for people. I'd say that means they are confused. I am neurotypical, to at least a first approximation, and I'm pretty sure that most neurotypical people would benefit by understanding their emotions a good bit better than they do on average.

Yes, context does a lot of work. But when you're trying to talk or think about your relationships, it's useful to understand and communicate what type of love you're talking about with more accuracy than intuition usually provides.

Your breakdown of types of love is a pretty good start. The Greeks had at least their four words for love, but the important subtypes seem more numerous and nuanced than four words account for.

This is also the case with other emotions; it's hard to understand them, there's a lot of variety and nuance, but understanding them is pretty worthwhile.

“Love” is just a broad category of feelings. In English, if you need to be specific, there are specifiers, but most of the time context is enough. For instance, if I say, “I love my nephew,” you’re probably not thinking that I have romantic feelings towards him, but you might think that his presence makes me happy or that I’d be willing to sacrifice more for his benefit than typical for humans in general.

Are you going to have a perfect model of my feelings? No. You can never be specific enough for that. But you’ll likely be 9/10 right. Usually, that’s good enough.

You seem to have arrived at the classical concept of "the four loves", referring to the four Greek words commonly translated as "love" in English:

• στοργή :: natural, familial affinity
• φιλία :: interest/enjoyment as coming from a free & rational agent
• ἔρως :: craving for unity with what is "beloved"
• ἀγάπη :: "to will the good of the other"

Somewhere I have old notes that link them together in a reasonable way, but I would have to dig that up later, if you would be interested.

I like your "giving / craving / euphoria" classification.

I wonder whether the debates about love are often so confused precisely because in human mind the feelings are not clearly separated. We are prone to the halo effect; for example, if someone is sexually attractive, we might instinctively assume that they are probably also good, smart, etc. (Then some people get burned, and sometimes they overcompensate by making the opposite assumptions.)

But sometimes there are genuine effects of different kind happening all at the same time. For example, I may feel good when I have some kind of (non-sexual) interaction with someone... and at the same time, I may find them sexually attractive (but perhaps I have never communicated this aspect to them, and I have no idea whether they feel the same way about me)... and at the same time, I may feel altruistic towards them. These things happening together have a different flavor than if they happened separately.

So maybe "love" points towards the complex outcome when you strongly desire someone, and simultaneously wish them well, and simultaneously feel happy with them. Some people succeed to get the whole package. Some people only get a part of it, and find the experience confusing, asking themselves whether this is or isn't "love"... and maybe try to fix the wrong part, for example by trying harder to be altruistic, when the actually missing part is that the other person's presence doesn't make them happy.

Well, that would be the whole package for romantic love. The whole package for loving your children includes wishing them well and feeling happy with them and feeling optimistic about their future. Etc.

People are kinda right when they refuse to be more specific, because "love" refers to the entire package, not any of its individual parts. But being more specific can be useful for figuring out why someone fails at love (what part exactly is missing from the package).

If you are worried that nobody obsessively overanalyzes the concept of love in a desperate search for something solid at the base of the concept, worry no longer [LW · GW].

Another aspect of Love that's not really addressed here I tend to think of as a sense of 'being on the same team.' When I relate to people I love, I might help them or do something nice for them for the same reasons that Draymond Green passes the ball to Steph Curry - because when Steph makes a 3, the team's score increases and that's what they are trying to do. Draymond doesn't (or at least shouldn't) hold onto the ball and try to score himself unless he has a better shot (he usually doesn't) - points are points.

Whereas when interacting with someone I don't love, I might help them to the extent it advances my own goals, broadly defined (which includes things like 'being well liked', 'getting helped in the future', 'the feeling of doing a good deed').