Google Ngram Viewer: Why is "love" on the rise?
ngrams.googlelabs.com
ngrams.googlelabs.com
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+makes&ye... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+with&yea... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+me&year_... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+you&year... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=you+love&year...
etc.
If anything, though, I feel like this may be due to a changing in the makeup of the corpus in recent years. Many queries with common words seem to exhibit the same spike after around 2000 (try "hate", "fly", "ten", "blue", etc.) perhaps the size of the average vocabulary is smaller in the newer corpus documents, in which case the overall proportion of common words would be expected to increase.
For older content, they focus on what's available in libraries so perhaps old content that's survived in libraries typically has a richer vocabulary.
Or maybe we just love more.