Well, since you’ve read A Road Less Traveled, perhaps it’s a bit unfortunate that I used M. Scott Peck as a reference point, because, except for that one observation (“need is not love”), many of the other things he said about love were bogus. For example, he said “love is not a feeling”, which is an idea he used to re-categorize love as an ethical principle, reducing love, in essence, to an intellectual construct of good.
To a spiritual person, this is a very poor understanding of love, where he attempts to make love formulaic to the workings of the mind and obedient to our sense of “reason”. The heart knows no such constraints and is diminished by our mental overrides of its ways and flows. All confusions of the heart are really confusions of our mind in understanding what our heart seeks and wants for us, versus what our ego (fear) driven mind thinks our heart wants. Often, our heart has little or nothing to do with it.
As has been pointed out here (thanks Narayan), Bhakti is about the heart, but the heart in relation to spirit, God, the Absolute, the ineffable experience and realization of oneness with all and everything. If approached (or realized) this excludes our illusion of separateness, that which distorts or divides an experience of unity and wholeness and connection. This is love, but love on such a plane that ordinary love, with its insecurities and needs and ebbs and flows is of little consequence. The effort you feel may be in loving in a way that seeks a sense of love as more steady and unchanging then the love felt in ordinary relationships can provide. Since you pose a question that includes an awareness of love as more “than one relationship can hold” (if I’ve paraphrased that clearly), perhaps there is something within you that seeks a greater and broader understanding of it. I cannot tell you what path or teaching or teacher will best help you discover that. Bhakti is only one path, a path that is a bit love-centric (in an eastern sort of way), but it is up to you to find your own way, if you are moved to do so. Namaste

It's only sad until you start to take things for what they are. A temporary phenomenon cannot provide everlasting bliss. Nothing against temporary bliss, by the way! It is what it is. In Czech there's a nice word for it: "sladkobol", which means "sweet pain".

For me, Bhakti is what gives the spiritual path "soul" or "juice". Without it (her, actually - Bhakti is female), spirituality seems barren and dry. It's difficult to get fired up about intellectual constructs, you know?