For those agreeing that love is felt, and is not the feeling:
you are creating a subject/object divide that separates ‘you’/from the love and the feeling.
If love is “felt”, it is the object of which the subject is - you. You are the one who “felt” the love. This creates, or comes from, the mindset that one is somehow different from their emotions and drives - and the chemicals that appear at the same time as all this.
This is where all the bullshit about souls/distinct from the body originates. People developed a fetish with their memories, preferring to capture a sensory image to be remembered before it is paid any heed to. Compared to immediate perception, memory feels far off - it is limited, blurred, broken up. Memories don’t feel that dangerous. This kind of fetishism would have developed the more safe societies became - allowing the luxury of extended contemplation of memories. With the feeling of distance between an immediate perception, and the recollection of a memory, hindsight feels like one is distanced from their memories of perceptions and feelings. The lack of immediacy allowed one to think of oneself as the observer of one’s memories… from afar, as though separate to them.
Only then could one think of feelings as felt BY the self, separate from, the self. With this distance, love and other “things that are felt” feel like drives - things that cause one to move/act. An outside force. Without this fetish, one feels love immediately, love is the feeling in the present (with no need of the past participle “felt”). One is one with the love, it doesn’t occur to one to “acknowledge it”, recognise or note it, it is the feeling it is the action it is all one.
Love is the feeling to anyone who really loves, and does not merely look back on love - or upon it from afar - to feel a kind of fond voyeuristic nostalgia and lame gratefulness towards it. This is the weak love that is - contained - which can occur to one as something nice to hold onto, that one becomes nicely devoted to maintaining. It is not the creating and destroying love that grabs you by the heart, overtakes and IS you.
Both these types undeniably exist, but it is obvious I prefer the real, immediate, strong, overtaking-one-with-love love.