To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I'.

Ayn Rand:

"Love is a response to values. It is with a person's sense of life that one falls in love - with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person's character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul - the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one's own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one's own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony" (Romantic Manifesto, S. 32).

"The actual emotion would be experienced precisely as an extreme awareness of the other person, which is the essence of falling in love. The conclusion conveys just that: 'and the sight was its own meaning and purpose, with no further end to reach.' This is the extreme state of being in love, where the issue is not sex, or any purpose, but (to put it colloquially) only the awareness that the loved one exists - which then fills the whole world" (The Art of Fiction, S. 97).