Can love require sacrifice?
No. Love does not require sacrifice. Love can require effort, cost, patience, inconvenience, courage, and difficult tradeoffs, but those are not sacrifices when they are made for a person who is a real value to you.
The key distinction is whether the action serves a genuine value or destroys one. Taking care of a sick spouse, adjusting your schedule for a child, or supporting a friend through grief can be deeply self-interested in the rational sense: Their wellbeing matters to your life. You are not giving up a higher value for a lower one. You are acting for the sake of something you love.
Actual sacrifice undermines love. If you surrender your judgment, health, self-respect, boundaries, or central life values to keep someone attached, appeased, or dependent, the result is not nobler love. It is resentment, distortion, and self-erasure. It is bad for the person doing the alleged loving, because it teaches them to betray their own life. It is bad for the person allegedly loved, because it turns them into a beneficiary of unearned surrender rather than a partner in mutual value.
This is why "unconditional love" is often a dangerous phrase when applied to adult relationships. Real love is not indiscriminate approval, pity, or duty detached from character. Love is a response to value: to who someone is, what they mean to your life, and the relationship you build together.
A useful test is this: Am I choosing this because the person and relationship are genuinely important to me or because I believe love requires self-betrayal? Love may ask you to act with devotion. It does not ask you to disappear.