This was primarily intended as a piece of poetry, so I don't mind if it strays from reality at points. Like I have already said, I took some poetic license.

Fine, but why should a reader of InsightfulQuestions assume you mean your post to be taken in any other way than at face value?

Self-love is a word that already has a standard use: one found in dictionaries. What you wrote is probably very close to this definition. However, if this was meant to be an insightful question, then I think it deserves a more insightful answer

I think my answer was quite insightful. I didn't study psychology academically and I didn't get that definition from a dictionary. It came from my understanding. If your objection to my type of answer hinges on the idea that it came from by rote from some authority, that's simply not true.

I would rather narrow in on one aspect of love and explain it with my whole effort

You didn't describe fantasy in a way that sounded particularly insightful or useful, frankly, until your Buddhism comment later on.

than cast a wide net and settle for whatever can be found in the shallows.

I don't see what's shallow about giving concrete examples of the forms that self-love can take and uniting their variety with a couple of succinct and relatable principles.

For me, the ability to imagine good outcomes for the object of one's love is one of these essential aspects.

Right, but you weren't describing active imagination and envisioning the future, you were describing escaping into soothing impossibilities because it's "unobtainable" otherwise.

I think work requires a great deal of imagination to even remain meaningful. If one is unable to envision the end of one's efforts, to imagine a future when one's efforts are met with success, then one is merely toiling from one task to the next.

I don't know why you see my comment as being in conflict with this idea. At no point do I describe work and imagination as mutually exclusive; I only used work to help pinpoint love.

This is very unkind. Surely, not every one of our fantasies can become a reality if only we act virtuously. I will never meet my grandmother again, regardless of how good I am.

But you can transform the pain of her loss into something good and satisfying. You can be grateful, you can tell people stories about her and keep her alive, you can perform little rituals in her memory. Grieve, by all means, but escaping into into a world where she's still alive and neglecting the world in which you're still alive doesn't benefit anybody.

Death, unrequited love, failures in the past: these things can not be fixed by trying harder

You speak of them as though they're inherently bad. There's nothing to fix about them. What requires trying is making meaning of them, making use of them, making gifts of them. That can be done by trying harder.

In my memories, I can close the distance between myself and departed loved ones, despite the fact that these events can never occur again.

I don't know how spiritually inclined you are, but you can literally meet with them in your heart. Just feel their presence. Believe they are in the room with you and they will be. You will feel them. Ignore this if you don't believe in that stuff.

Then don't. I wasn't referring to neurotic fantasy. Surely, there is a healthy degree of fantasy. You aren't even trying to be charitable here. You just want to be pedantic to pick a fight.

There is a bit of that, but it's about 5% pedantry, 95% "this really isn't a good answer."

And again, I don't think you said it was poetry in the original comment, and it didn't look like poetry, and one wouldn't expect to find poetry as an answer to an InsightfulQuestion, so I took it at face value.