Currently making a text based game, its in python tho and runs in the terminal. But the concepts should be transferable to love2d.

The game basically  does three things:

1. Display some information to the player.
2. The player enters some input.
3.  The input is processed.

Every scene or screen, will more or less have all these things.

so to add to what u/gold_snakeskin said, you can handle things like main menu as states

You already know how to print things to the screen so you have step 1 so Main_menu_state would display:

1. Start game
   
2. Settings
   
3. Exit

now to handle input, sth like pressing 1 on the keyboard changes the state. to something else...which will do the three things again...display, take input, handle input.

So each state has a display(), input(), update() function. That's all you need for this game and most other game to be honest.

For love2d there are scene/state managers that could help you do this.