All you need is...
Human beings bond in a number of ways. We have all manner of instinctual drives inherited from our evolutionary past; we have needs (for intimacy, pleasure, friendship, affirmation and a thousand more besides) which we depend on other people to fulfill. We have hidden parts of ourselves which we project on others so that we can, in relationship with those others, work out our inner conflicts by proxy. We have our inner cravings for power or esteem or security which we imagine that others can satisfy for us.
Of course we usually don't, unless we are powerfully self-aware, identify in ourselves these and all the other complicated dynamics by which we are bound to others. Instead we feel that great, overwhelming sense of dependence on and attachment to, which we label "Love." This cocktail of emotions and feelings and, occasionally, thoughts we have for and about the other is concocted according to a variety of recipes, depending on the individuals involved, and although our focus is compulsively on the beloved, actually, it is all about us.
The love which Jesus commands his disciples to have for one another; the love that is the very nature of God; the love which I have written of elsewhere, is a very different thing, although it is not necessarily incompatible with the attachment I have just been speaking of. Scott Peck uses a definition of love which seems accurate to me:
