Love

I would admit I have never understood love. I have understood and lived hate, the morbid energy of it shaking each one of my cells. I have also had the feel good feeling of the opposite of hate which qualifies as love in colloquial language, when I was pleased by something or someone. But when used in a male female context, I have no idea of what people are talking about when they say they love each other. Does it mean the presence of the gives on pleasure and therefore they won't hurt each other as opposed to what they would do if they hated each other. And what happens once the ability to please ends. Does love die with pleasure or turn into the ghost of an obsession. The obsession being one of trying to possess the other to fulfill oneself and being yet another form of pleasure.
So from what I understand of it, love is not that. It doesn't have that attribute of selfishness.
Then what is it? Are there multiple variants of it, like the male female love, the parent child love, the love of an animal or a thing or an idea? If there is no selfishness, the self must not be there. And if the self is absent all ideas and conditioning of the mind are gone with it. With the labeling of the conditioning gone, male, female, parent, child, things and  ideas and the body lose their labels. So is love all that is left there? Love is  then life itself. Life in it's vital continuity. The alternative is of course that there is no such thing as love and it's just life. But it's just a choice of English words after all.