Learning to Love

I have been thinking about love the past couple of days.  Where does the ability to love someone come from?  Is love *just* an emotion? A feeling? An action?  I believe that we all are born with the capacity to love.  So I guess the first thing I believe about love is that it is a verb.  So, how do we learn to love?
I was never sure what love felt like.  I didn't know that anyone really loved me.  I didn't hear the words, I love you from my parents or anyone else in my life.  What I saw around me being done in the name of love, just wasn't appealing to me either.  I did see my mother and sister together sharing special times that I didn't experience.  I called it love and it probably was.  The affection between them was not something that I had with anyone.
I think we each develop our own sense of what love is to us.  We see children all the time parroting back an adults love.  It is shown in words and actions.  Is that how we learn it?  When we are loved, our capacity, to love, grows?  I think this is one of the keys.  We learn to love others and love our selves when we are first loved.  When we grasp our worth in the eyes of another.  I believe that this opens us up to accepting and giving love.  I think that when someone else shows us the things they cherish in us, it helps us to love ourselves which hopefully leads to us expanding that love by doing the same with others.