"And that reductionist view of love is one reason why you will never make any headway with society, because anyone who has any experience with it can tell you that it's just not that simple."

Its not reductionist. Its just another perfectly fine subjective view of love. Because regardless of what some think, there is no one objective way to view love.

OTOH, I am inclined to reject the angry person beating someone else out of jealousy as someone who is both feeling love and expressing love. They may say, "I do this because I love you," but their actions and their anger say something entirely different.

Right now in the news there are those saying that love is so complex that whipping a child until he bleeds cannot be deemed child abuse.

I say that actions speak louder than words. And that love is what you practice, not some theory you think about.

I've been inside marriage and inside child-rearing. And I can tell you that what you deem "reductionist" is the only thing that makes emotional sense to me from within. We are all flawed in the practice of love. And sometimes you must react to others from another emotion. But that doesn't mean that in the moment you can't tell what you feel or what you're doing.

The arguing with the spouse doesn't invalidate the love. But it sure doesn't feel like love from within. And I'll just have to assume that anyone criticizing it as reductionist hasn't experienced it that way for themself. I have.

Even more complicated is the fact that there is no such thing as "the relationship." You cannot experience your spouses relationship with you from within. You can only experience your relationship with her from within. The two overlap, but they are not identical. And any attempt to wrestle with "the relationship" which doesn't acknowledge that there are two relationships is doomed to be rather narrow.

But that's one of those things its harder to see from outside and easier to experience when you're there.

Theorizing about emotions as though they exist objective of people is a very silly thing to do. Very common in those who wish to treat everything as though it can reduce to logic and numbers. But not very productive when it comes to how feelings work.

Dante