“Loving without knowing how to love hurts the person we love,” said Zen Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh. His perspective on love can cause some perplexity, especially in a world where love is something that happens to us passively and almost by chance. A world in which love is a supreme and indisputable value, always surrounded by a positive halo.
However, for Erich Fromm, loving is a skill that is learned, although it is not exactly one of the ones we have developed the most because it requires a big effort and a great deal of introspection. As a result, an immature person does not know how to love, so he can hurt himself a lot when he “loves” and cause harm proportional to the object of his love.
The biggest mistake we make when looking for love
In his book “The Art of Loving”, Fromm wrote: “love is not a feeling that anyone can easily indulge in, regardless of the level of maturity reached […] All your attempts at love are destined to fail, unless you develop more actively your total personality.”
“For most people, the problem of love consists fundamentally in being loved, and not in loving, not in one’s own capacity to love. Hence for them the problem is how to get loved, how to be worthy of love.”
This mentality leads us to transfer love outside of ourselves, instead of developing the capacity to love fully. Loving is not simply about finding the right object and being reciprocated, but about developing a mature “self” capable of feeling and expressing those feelings fully and authentically.
“People believe that loving is simple and how difficult it is to find an appropriate object to love – or to be loved by,” wrote Fromm. This conception was fundamentally developed in the last century, when marriages stopped being an agreement between families and people began to aspire to find their “better half.” At that time, love began to be seen more as luck and a crush than as a skill that is developed.
Imbued with the current consumer culture that prioritizes material success, Fromm believed that this pattern has been transferred to relationships, so that love has also become an object of exchange, as if it were a commodity.
If “I want to do a good business, the object must be desirable from the point of view of its social value and, at the same time, I must be desirable, taking into account my manifest and hidden values and potentialities. Thus, two people fall in love when they feel that they have found the best object available on the market, within the limits imposed by their own exchange values,” Fromm wrote.
Often, this conception of love leads us to chain one relationship after another, which end as soon as love fades or the first major obstacle appears. In this way, we fail to establish truly meaningful and developing bonds, simply because we do not know how to love and we are fundamentally concerned with developing the qualities that we believe will make us worthy of being loved.
Mature love as a way of personal growth
“The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art,” wrote Fromm. Therefore, it requires four basic actions: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. Since these qualities are rare in modern society, it also means that “the ability to love remains a rare achievement.”
Fromm proposes developing a “mature love,” which consists of “a union on condition of preserving one’s own integrity, one’s own individuality.” Love is an indivisible principle that connects people with their own being, so if we want to be loved, we must first worry about developing the capacity to love – and that begins by loving ourselves.
It is not a selfish love since an immature person does not know how to love, but rather an active power that gives us strength and enables us to be ourselves. In fact, Fromm warns that “the fundamental condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s own narcissism.”
Therefore, to fully develop the capacity to love we must get rid of that ego that weighs us down and begin to experience love as a feeling that allows us to discover and grow – whether alone or accompanied.
While immature and possessive love is based on the principle: “I love you because I need you”, mature love is “I need you because I love you”. The difference is not merely terminological, but implies a change in attitude. We no longer look for the other to complete ourselves but, feeling complete, we look for the other to share that path of growth.
“Loving someone is the realization and concentration of the power of loving,” wrote Fromm. Therefore, we should worry less about finding someone who loves us and focus more on developing our capacity to love in 360 degrees. This way we will ensure that we bring true value to that relationship, instead of absorbing value with immature and demanding attitudes.
Source:
Fromm, E. (2016) El arte de amar. Ediciones Paidós: Barcelona.
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