  The interactions between holes in the Hubbard model, in the low density,
intermediate to strong coupling limit, are investigated. Dressed spin polarons
in neighboring sites have an increased kinetic energy and an enhanced hopping
rate. Both effects are of the order of the hopping integral and lead to an
effective attraction at intermediate couplings. Our results are derived by
systematically improving mean field calculations. The method can also be used
to derive known properties of isolated spin polarons.
