Then Misrahi, who proposes this essential condition: Love [...] This relationship is a reciprocal bond through which each affirms the value of the other and its founding meaning. True love is thus reciprocal. It is oblative, concerned with the other without capturing or enslaving him or her (captative love). Without this reciprocity, love often leads to conflict and self-destruction ¹.

These two authors support the idea that love requires certain behaviours, certain conditions, the violation of which means its loss, its metamorphosis into its opposite, contempt.
However, by love they do not mean the same thing as we do; for them it is the relationship between two human beings, whereas for us love designates something much more general, as we have shown, between a spirit and any content of meaning=X.

So, for example, I would not say that reciprocity is an essential condition of love; we can love nature, or painting, without them having the same feeling towards us (!), and we can even love a human being, that is to say, give him a value, without him giving us one (this is the case, for example, of the love we would have for a disappeared historical figure).
On the other hand, we find a fine example of an "essential condition" applied to a feeling other than love, in Aristotle's reflections on friendship: He who has many friends has no friend, he remarks. It is precisely this kind of condition that I would like to identify for love, as defined above.

It is now perhaps clearer what separates our concept from the traditional doctrines on the "laws of love". Our aim is not to propose a psychological description of the regularities to be found in this feeling, nor a discipline of love, but to identify the essential behaviours to be adopted in order to be able to claim the dignity of 'lover', in other words, the essential conditions that give love its meaning.

The laws we are seeking to identify are neither empirical nor moral, but they do not, it seems to us, have a name: they are the laws that flow from the meaning of a concept so that it can be constituted precisely as having meaning. For this reason, we could call them "semantic laws"; or again, since they regulate our behaviour so that we can avail ourselves of a concept, "pragmatic laws". Every concept has pragmatic laws or semantic laws: for example, "to be called a gourmand, you have to eat with great appetite".
In fact, we will not use these terms, given the difficulties involved in forging neologisms, but we will content ourselves with using the term sanctified by usage, and we will say that we are looking for "laws of love", it being understood that this term designates something quite different from a moral imperative or a psychological regularity, i.e. something that is neither factual nor legal.

So I support the idea that there are laws (or essential conditions) of love. If our behaviour violates one of these conditions, then it is impossible for us to love what we want to love. To repeat the first "law of love" we proposed: if we want to love something, but maintain that it has no value, it is impossible for us to love it. The feeling we will have towards it will be quite different: it may be desire, or envy, but in no way the feeling we were aiming for towards it, namely love.

This principle, if it has any truth, has consequences of fundamental importance, which I will now try to identify in the next part of this reflection.

1. Qu'est-ce que l'éthique ? p.232