If you want a lasting symbol of your love this Valentine's Day, attaching a "love lock" to a Melbourne footbridge won't be it.
Thousands of couples attached padlocks to the Evan Walker Bridge as a romantic gesture before the city council removed the locks in 2015.
In recent weeks, padlocks had begun to reappear on the busy pedestrian bridge, which connects Southbank to Flinders Street Station.
Several locks could be seen hanging off the Yarra River bridge's wire railings in the week before Valentine's Day.
But by yesterday the bridge was once again lockless, if not loveless.
And the newly attached locks will not have quite the same romantic end as those that came before.
Love weighs heavily
Between 2010 and 2015 a global trend saw lovers attaching padlocks to bridges around the world — from Paris's Pont des Arts to Toowoomba's Picnic Point.
But the extra weight from the locks proved too much for many of the bridges.
In 2014, a section of the Paris bridge collapsed under the weight of the locks, and local authorities began to remove the locks in June the following year.
Likewise, Melbourne City Council removed 20,000 locks from the Evan Walker Bridge in May 2015 because of concerns for the safety of the structure.
The Melbourne padlocks were handed to six artists, who used them as raw material to create love-themed artworks.
The artworks were exhibited at Melbourne Town Hall in 2016 before being raffled for charity.
A City of Melbourne spokesperson said the Love Locks Project, as it was known, was "a one-off artistic initiative created as a solution for the extraordinary number locks removed at the time".
Since then, they said, the council has removed any locks attached to the bridge, and the recently removed locks were unlikely to become a part of a romantic artwork.
"Small numbers of locks are routinely removed and disposed of by City of Melbourne officers," the spokesperson said, adding that they did so "to preserve the structural integrity of the bridge".
Lovers looking to express their eternal bond should perhaps heed what Paris city official Bruno Julliard said when the locks were removed from the Pont des Arts.
"Couples should carry on declaring their love, proposing marriage … just not by using a love lock," he said in 2015.
