Love as the Expansion of Agency

This paper develops a structural account of love as a relational operator rather than an emotion, preference, or moral category. The operator is defined as the expansion of another agent’s capacity to act while maintaining the coherence of one’s own agency. This framing identifies love as a substrate‑neutral transformation in relational space, applicable to persons, collectives, and artificial systems. The analysis specifies the minimal conditions under which such expansion is possible—recognition, constraint modeling, non‑destructive intervention, and self‑coherence—and shows that the smallest actionable form of the operator is help. From this base, the paper derives an operational ladder of relational expansion (help, support, care, commitment, love) and characterizes the distinct breakdown modes associated with each rung. By grounding love in agency expansion rather than sentiment, the account provides a unified framework for understanding stable, non‑coercive forms of relational action across domains.