Up to Episode 6 on Toradora. I think I've figured out its perspective on love.

Spoilers

Thus far, we've seen a bunch of crushes/ advances that, with hindsight, we know don't work out.

Taiga's on Kitamura

Kitamura's on Taiga (past)

Ryuuji's on Minori

Ami's on Ryuuji

There are more, but I can't speak to them directly yet. But there's a common thread that binds these four aforementioned crushes together. It's that they each have a crush not on the person but on what they or their confession represent to the person with the crush.

Kitamura liked Taiga because he admired that she speaks up for herself. They didn't exactly interact much and there wasn't any real basis for the crush. Taiga liked Kitamura because he provided for her validation that she's effectively a lovable person. Ami comes after Ryuuji because she observes that he genuinely enjoys being around a diva like Ami, and she wants that for herself. Ryuuji likes Minori because she's always positive and she brights up his day, but of course he doesn't really know her real self (yet).

It's a very clean distinction between "infatuation" and "love" (the latter of which we only see demonstrated through Ryuuji and Taiga). This isn't a revolutionary message or anything close to that, but it's something that I think is fundamentally true about relationships, and also something that a lot of romance fiction tends to miss.

I haven't watched Toradora in years, so I'm glad to see it really holds up.