One of my favorite places that I remember from my home country is a little square.

You look around and there are couples everywhere holding hands, hugging, walking. There is a little man-made lake with two cement white swans together with their necks forming a heart shape. In the middle of the little lake there is an island you can get to through a bridge. There, there is a sculpture of an open book that reads !"ove is all around# like the song by $et wet wet. %nd in that place you can really say love is all around us. "ove has been a recurrent theme for poems, songs, paintings and any form of art and e&pression through history. 'ut what is so special about love( $hat are its essential attributes that makes it so captivating( )ow can we define this abstract concept of love( To start with, there are different kinds of love. "et see two definitions from the dictionary. The *erriam-$ebster dictionary defines love as !strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties#. This affection can be based on se&ual desire or on admiration, benevolence or common interests. It is also define as !warm attachment, enthusiasm or devotion# to somebody or something like !the love of the sea# for e&ample. +rom these definitions we can say that love can be impersonal or inter personal. It can be impersonal, as the love for one,s country, an ideal, or a principle. %nd it is interpersonal when it is between people, being these people family members, friends or a couple. Tonight I would like to address the definition of reciprocal love in couples. To define anything we have to first determine the family of things to which it belongs to and then something specific to word we want to define. I find that love belongs to the family of feelings. "ove is a feeling, an emotion -.ust like hate or anger or surprise/. 0ow what are the most distinguished qualities of love, which make it unique and different among other feelings( I have come to infer that there are 1 essential characteristics of love. The first one is Trust. "ove in couples needs to be based on trust, a belief that makes you feel safe with your partner. % mutual belief that the whole world could collapse and you would still be safe together. $hen you trust your lover, you e&pose yourself to that person, confident that he or she will not take advantage of your openness. You have to be able to trust your partner in order to live and share true love. You have to find confidence in your lover to be and show the person you are. %s 2erman writer said !$e3re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone - but parado&ically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or .oy#. 4o, to love you must first trust. If the person we love prefers to go away from us, we should let that person go because love is not attachment to one person5 it is not wanting to posses and keep somebody as if he or she was an ob.ect that belongs to me. %ccording to 'uddhism they have a word !maitri# that refers to unattached, unconditional love. %nd they contrast this kind of love with ordinary love which is about attachment and se&. 6nattached love does not mean that you do no t have a connection or bond to the person you love, it means that you have an unselfish interest for your loved one, that you would be ready to let that person go -if he or she prefers to look for love somewhere else/. 'ecause we want that person to be happy. 4o we cannot want to keep somebody with us in the name of love because love is detachment. $e have said that love is a feeling that needs trust and that love also means capability of detachment of the loved one. 4o far I have been describing friendship, but love needs these elements. )owever, the ne&t element separates love from friendship. It is passion,

se&ual attraction. "ove between couple is passionate. 7sychologist 8obert 4ternberg made a triangular theory of love which included 9 elements -intimacy, commitment and passion. %lso, %nthropologist and e&pert on romantic love, )elen +isher -author of the book why we love, among others/ recogni:es passion as one important element of love. %s we can see different theories about love converge in passion. The element of passion is not everything in love between couples, but is always present. $hen the couple has love that brings happiness, that is detached in favor of the loved one, and that is passionate, then they only need the last element in order to keep these 9 together for a longer time. %nd that is unity. The couple should live and feel as if they are one -with their love/. That is what ensures the continuity of love. 6nity refers to the ability of each person in the couple to work together in harmony in order to make the other 9 elements of love to grow and stay in the love relationship. To conclude with, when ; people want to bring happiness to each other, are capable of detachment, they both share passion, and they both can work together in unity to increase the intensity of their love, and then we can say that those two people are in love. <ohn =onne, in his poem !>alediction % forbidding mourning# describes a couple as a geometric compass, each being one leg, and even when they have to be apart -as when making a circle/ they are still together. 4he is the leg that stayed in the center and he is the other leg. 0ow when you make a circle like this, then there must be something wrong with that compass. 0ow this is a perfect circle. 4o .ohn =onne says to his lover !your firmness makes my circle .ust, and makes me end where I begun#. That is the circle that represents unity, a perfect circle made by two people in love that helps happiness, detachment and passion to grow for the perpetual continuity of love.