Hi Josephine,

Well, one answer is this:

Nothing seemed to matter any more,
Didn't care what I was headed for.
Time was standing still,
No one counted till
There came a knocking at the door.

Love walked right in and drove the shadows away ;
Love walked right in and brought my sunniest day.
One magic moment, and my heart seemed to know
That love said "Hello !",
Though not a word was spoken.

One look and I forgot the gloom of the past ;
One look and I had found my future at last.
One look and I had found a world completely new,
When love walked in... with you.
 
The lyrics, written by Gershwin to Love walked in. I wanted to bring a youtube video but couldn't find any good interpretation there.

Perhaps this is a good romantic place to finish as an answer to your question.   
But I'll continue. Are these words more connected to infatuation or to love? You say you have a pretty good idea what love means to women. Does it mean this?
At least for men, yes and no. When love walks in, yes, but later there is the infatuation but there is much more, or at least different. As another song says: love is just a 4 letter word. It is a sort of existence. Being an existence, it is not to be defined as a dictionary term. But then, how do you define something which exists. Let's say you would be asked to define the character of a person, without recourse to their age. That is, what is true about their character from 0 till 99. I, obviously, can't even answer this about myself.

But then, love exists, and we want to say something about it. I would say to look at Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers. That's as close to a definition as I can think of. For men that is.

Hope this helps.

Love, as in romantic love?

I have been in and out of relationships for a considerable amount of time and the best way I have found to express it is this: "love", to me, is the "harmonious fulfillment of mutual needs".

Love needs to be defined to give it precise substance - and looking at it in terms of "needs" has the merit of helping me understand what it is I look for in a "love relationship" (or any relationship for that matter) and what needs to happen for me to be or become happy. What are my needs? What are my partner's needs? Do they match? If yes, then there starts to be a good basis for a meaningful tie to be created. And when that happens, other wonderful things can follow! A feeling of magic, of poetry, of stars shining in the sky. Human relationships can defy the laws of maths because in very real terms, 1 + 1 makes more than 2.

I suppose my own needs are similar to that of many men. For me the key essential ingredient in long term love relationships is communication. This requires a certain amount of intellectual receptiveness, emotional awareness and probably a number of shares values coupled with a common vision.

A common misconception of course is that romantic love is selfless. Quite on the contrary, it is selfish and it is healthy that it be so. We do not go out our start love relationships (of the romantic kind) with others to make them happy - we do this to make ourselves happy - to satisfy our own (selfish) needs. This is not to be confused of course with behaving selfishly inside a relationship.

What is love to me? Feeling whole, feeling understood, feeling accepted and reciprocating with all my heart.

Very interesting discussion. Just a question -- it seems to me that you are both describing a moment of "recognition," though perhaps of a quite different nature: on one hand, a look which opens up a world completely new (never before imagined, the past left behind), and on the other a look which takes one, in some ways, back to a place of total acceptance and understanding (which pierces to the core of one's past) and from this builds a future "wholeness".

First of all -- would you, or anyone else reading this, agree with this characterization? (This is always dangerous...)
Would be interested to hear why or why not, and what this means.