"LOVE," Havelock Ellis wrote, "is a synthesis of sex and friendship."

Can’t there be love without sex? Every love relationship possesses the physical element. Even Herbert Spencer placed it first in what is a classic point-by-point dissection of love — ahead of affection, admiration, respect, beauty and sympathy.

Love is civilisation’s gift to mankind. The sexual act, being a creative function, has a worth and dignity in itself yet it attains emotional fullness only when it is accompanied by a sheltering warmth and caring for another person.

Yet, there is such a thing as love at first sight. Out of it, passion may rise and love may grow.

We often believe that we alone can love. No one has ever loved so before us. No one will love the way we have. It is human nature to nurture such illusions.

A man falls in love with a woman because she is one of the three things: idealised image of his mother, a replica of himself, or a fantasy he has nursed from childhood.

Andre Maurois opines that a man may marry any woman. But after the first night is over, he finds he has married another woman!

Lord Byron, after marriage, told his wife: "Now that you are my wife, it’s enough for me to hate you."

Love at first sight, did you say?

Love requires patience, the art of pleasing and understanding another’s personality, and the ability to give and take.

Even the most rapturous honeymoon comes to an end. It ends when the vision becomes a sight!

Yet love can happen anywhere, at any time, to anyone. Lovable is one of the most meaningful words. The greatest pleasure of life is love. Love does not demand that self-respect, integrity or individuality be sacrificed. It makes no demands beyond the consideration of genuine friendship.

The couple that ties the knot to do each other over, the woman who asserts her superiority by nagging, has not entered into a relationship but into a neurotic struggle for power. Quarrels arise out of many things. They may result, and frequently do, from sexual incompatibility, but they may also take place due to frayed nerves, resulting from a hard day at the office or a bad day at home with a nasty relative or guest.

Love, once given and received, is not easily destroyed. It can survive strains and shocks since, if it is love, it will be based on reality, on the knowledge that no one is perfect.

In love, there is always a degree of possessiveness and some amount of jealousy but there is also consideration. A basic rule of good manners is not to make one another uncomfortable.

A woman who loves her husband will not go out of her way to attract other men, nor will a loving husband boast of his romantic conquests. Love looks through a telescope, jealousy through a microscope. Jealousy, which gets unbearably offensive, does not reflect love but neurotic behaviour.

Yet, the eye does wander. The casual affair does occur even in otherwise happy marriages, out of proximity, temporary separation, loneliness, a passing need to bolster the ego or sheer adventurousness.

A stable marriage need not be permanently damaged unless one or the other is obsessed with guilt or with the desire to inflict punishment. But where there is a pattern of repeated straying, love lacks maturity.

Poets make much of the agonies of love. But love is the most joyous of all experiences, filled with laughter and the sunny sense of well-being.

It is easy to single out of a crowd a woman who is in love or is loved. It is difficult to decide whether women love more than men but it is certain that they love better.