The difference between liking and loving

 As to the contemporary understandings of love, including romantic love, which is understood as an attitude we take towards other persons.

We must be careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we intuitively find love to have. 

We might argue that liking to be a matter of desiring, an attitude that at best involves its object having only instrumental (and not intrinsic) value. 

Does love motivate itself through self-interest rather than through the beloved’s interests; central to love is the possibility that love takes the lover “outside herself”

 in identifying with one’s beloved, one might have a concern for one’s beloved that is analogous to one’s concern for oneself