Misrahi, for instance, proposes the following essential condition: Love [...] This relationship is a reciprocal bond in which each affirms the other's value and foundational meaning. True love, he argues, is reciprocal and oblative—focused on the other without seeking to capture or control them (as in captative love). Without this reciprocity, love often devolves into conflict and self-destruction ¹.

Both authors support the idea that love requires specific behaviours and conditions, the violation of which leads to its dissolution and transformation into its opposite—contempt.
Their conception of love differs from mine, however: for them, it denotes a relationship between two individuals, whereas for me, love is a broader notion—one that obtains between a mind and any content of meaning=X.

I would not, for example, consider reciprocity an essential condition of love; we can love nature or art without expecting them to reciprocate. We can equally love a person—granting them value—even if they do not value us in return, as in the love we might feel for a historical figure who has long since passed away.
Conversely, an example of an 'essential condition' applied to a feeling other than love can be found 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 seek to identify for love, as defined above.

It should now be clearer what distinguishes my conception from traditional doctrines on the 'laws of love'. My aim is not to provide a psychological description of the patterns observed in this feeling, nor to establish a discipline of love, but rather to identify the essential conditions that must be met in order to lay claim to the dignity of being a 'lover'—in other words, the fundamental conditions that give love its meaning.

The laws I seek to identify are neither empirical nor moral and appear to lack a specific name. They emerge from the meaning of a concept, enabling it to be constituted as meaningful. For this reason, they might be called 'semantic laws' or, since they regulate our behaviour in accordance with a concept, 'pragmatic laws'. Every concept has such pragmatic or semantic laws; for example, 'To be called a gourmand, one must eat with great appetite'.
We shall, however, refrain from using these terms, given the difficulties involved in introducing new ones. Instead, we shall retain the expression 'laws of love', understood to signify something distinct from a moral imperative or psychological regularity—that is, something neither factual nor legal.

I therefore maintain that there are laws—or essential conditions—of love. If our behaviour violates one of these conditions, it becomes impossible to love what we wish to love. To restate the first 'law of love' I proposed: if we wish to love something yet hold that it has no value, it is impossible for us truly to love it. The feeling we experience towards it will be something quite different—it may be desire or envy, but it will not be what we intended: love.

This principle, if sound, has consequences of the greatest importance, which I shall endeavour to explore in the next part of this reflection.

1. Qu'est-ce que l'éthique ? Armand Colin, Paris, 1997, Glossaire analytique, « Amour », p.232