It's sometimes said that romantic love can come in many forms.

It is a common (even cliché) view that there exists a passionate, emotionally charged kind of love associated with the early stages of a romantic attraction, and a different, less passionate, but more stable and consistent, kind of love associated with long-term relationships.

In 'Love's Bond', a chapter of The Examined Life, Robert Nozick appears to follow the cliché in assuming that love relationships in general pass through an intense "infatuation" stage which is temporary. But there is some evidence which suggests this may not be everybody's experience.

Be that as it may, let's imagine for the sake of this post that there are different kinds of romantic love (whatever exactly the different kinds amount to, and whether or not it is true that all love metamorphoses from one kind to another at some point). If there are different kinds of love, what does it mean to say "I love you"?

One possibility is that the sentence is ambiguous: it might mean I love you with love of kind K1, or it might mean I love you with love of kind K2 ... and so on for however many kinds of love there are.

A different possibility is that the sentence is semantically general: it means I love you with some kind of love or other, but doesn't specify which. (This is a bit like saying that your shirt has a colour, without saying which colour it has.)

These two views about how the language of love works are not in themselves metaphysical views, but keeping the difference between ambiguity and semantic generality to hand can be very useful for addressing metaphysical questions with clarity and precision.