It's frightening sometimes to get teens to define what "being in love" really means to them. When one gets past the hyperbole, too often one sees some disturbing ideas.

I think teenage love is hard because we're transitioning from a concept of love that is parental to one that is adult -- and the misunderstandings (because we have a lot of different parenting styles) that arise from this transition cause enormous amounts of pain.

Which is to say: The concept of love itself is still, at base, the idealized parental-non-conditional love, and on some level we have to learn to let go of that.