Love doesn't need to be returned to be fulfilling. I love nature, but nature will kill me if I'm not careful. Nor do I have any idea if that beautiful, healthy blue pine over there thinks of me the same way. I still love it.
Inherent to "loving" is the ability to balance your connection to a thing with the limits of your boundaries and trajectories. It's that old saying, "if you love something, then let it go". If you love something, you also have the understanding that it lives its own "life", that you cannot control it and that it cannot control you. So, in loving, you'll have to accept that the thing which is loved is not you but is itself. You cannot encapsulate it.