What is love?

I have struggled for a long time with the concept of love. Not romantic love just plain old straight up love for all others. I have written about this before on this blog, most notably here: http://aragtaghooligan.blogspot.ca/2013/02/what-is-love-anyways-how-at-21-i-am.html.  What is it, I wonder, and why or how do we do it? I realised this summer that I used to think it was an emotion. I talk about that in the other blog, how I believed that we love people when we see something good in them that we enjoy which inspires us to want to care for these people. I talked about how God loved us by dying for us when we were still His enemies and how I wanted to be able to love other people even when they didn't deserve it. To be honest I don't struggle to love people very often. It isn't because I have a good perspective of love or because I am awesome or anything. It is actually because I still cling to the view that love is a reaction to the good in people. I always try to see the good in others, this helps me to forgive the bed in them. I have difficulty accepting love from others because I don't see anything good in myself. I figure that people don't actually love me but acting like it is something they do out of a sense of duty. I have always thought this most about Christians because, like I talk about in my other blog a little bit, the Bible encourages us to love like Christ did. However I was talking with a friend today and I think I finally figured it out. Love isn't a reaction to the good in others and it isn't something you just do out of duty. It clicked when my friend talked about the baby my sister is pregnant with right now. "Are you going to love your nephew?" he asked me. "Yes," I answered. "Why?" He asked. "Because he is my family," I said and then he said the obvious "In Jesus we are all family." I have heard this a lot but it never really clicked. I still don't really understand how people can love me when I don't deserve it, but I have decided to let them. I have decided to believe them instead of feeling guilty about it, worrying that they are soon going to stop loving me when they find out what I'm really like, or thinking that they are just pretending to love me because they have to because if they really can love an unlovable person like me that isn't a sad or robotic thing, it is a beautiful thing that the world needs more of and maybe I should even encourage it.