some have told me that love is a capacity. others that it is a delusion.

i, knowing very little about this matter, am inclined to integrate the two suggestions:  love is perhaps the capacity to delude oneself.

like its children--art, music, poetry--love is a dream. and like dreams, it is one of those things necessary for the survival of the all-too-human--even, or rather especially, in its nonexistence.  for, as oscar wilde said, "truths lose all their value when they become facts", so too do dreams lose all their value when they become reality, and the only true love is that which remains unrequited.