The Art of Loving: Part 1

Why Most Relationships Fail

"Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence."
- Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving)

We are alone. What’s terrifying about it is that we realize that we are alone. That’s the human condition. It’s the price we pay for being an aware, self-conscious animal.

And no one wants to be alone. No one wants to die alone.

Sure, some try to alleviate this human loneliness by striving for great achievements in the hopes that they will leave their mark in history and be remembered and loved by everyone. Some join a religious group or a social movement.

But the most universal way of dealing with human loneliness is by trying to find someone to love and be loved by.

This is why, according to Erich Fromm, love is the answer to the problem of human existence. And when compared to other answers that people have come up with, I believe most would agree that it is in fact the most sane and satisfactory answer.

If this is the case, if we want love so much and try so hard to find it, why does love fail so often? I want to explore this with you by looking at Erich Fromm’s book, "The Art of Loving."

Maybe we fail at love so often because of the way we look at it and how we approach it.

How do I "find" love? Today, for most people, the answer seems to be: make myself rank higher on "the market" so that I have higher chances of being loved by someone.

You will go to the gym, dress nice, become well educated, and earn as much money as you can. All so that you increase your stock on what Fromm calls the "personality market." Without being aware of it, you turn yourself into a product to be consumed by another person. And of course, you expect to receive the same: "love" turns into expecting to get a product of similar value as you on the personality market.

You look around the market for different options, and you choose the best one you can get with your current value. You two enter a relationship, or should we say a mutually beneficial business transaction? Either way, you are finally in love. At least you think you are. Love is something that happens to you. The only active part of this type of love is you making yourself as "lovable" as possible, that is, increasing your value on the market. But the rest of it is passive. Once you make yourself lovable, love finds you and happens to you.

This is what Erich Fromm called "pseudo-love." It is an immature, transactional love. Although, of course, it is not really love. It is a widespread mistake to confuse possessiveness and dependence with love. This twisted view of love, Fromm argues, leads to unhappiness, disappointment, and ultimately failure in relationships.

Fromm believes that we engage in this mutually beneficial transaction with another person to try to escape the feeling of being alone. The solution seems counterintuitive at first. To be able to truly love someone and experience real mutual love, we must first learn to be alone.

The way Fromm defines love can help us understand this idea better.

Love, he says,

"… is an act of striving and interrelatedness, the aim of which is happiness, growth, and freedom of its object."

Notice the difference. In this conception of love, love is an act. In pseudo-love, the only act is the act of increasing your value on the market. But once you are satisfied with your value and the options available, the rest of the process is passive. There is nothing that you need to do. If we rank high enough on the market and are satisfied with our options, it doesn’t occur to us that we need to learn how to love and keep learning every day.

This brings us back to why learning to be alone is important for being able to love. It is only when you are able to be alone that you can love people for who they truly are rather than for their value on the personality market. It is only when you are not coming from a place of neediness and dependence that you can aim for other people’s happiness, growth, and freedom.

Once we learn to be alone, we can approach love as interrelatedness rather than a transaction. But even more interesting than "act" and "interrelatedness" is Fromm’s conception of love as art.

"The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering."

Why, of all things, say that love is art? And what is this "way" we must proceed if we want to learn this art? The answer is far from glamorous. And it’s unexpected, especially if we hold to the idea that love is something that happens to us effortlessly.

Love requires effort, dedication, and discipline.

And, I know, at first this may sound like robbing love of its mystery and magic.

But think again. What sounds more like true love to you? Something that resembles a business transaction, or something that requires you to dedicate yourself to it fully and put effort into it?

When one wants to learn and master an art, that art must be "a matter of ultimate concern." That’s why Fromm compares love to other arts and says we must approach it in the same way.

And that’s why most people fail at love. Because everything seems to be more important than love.

People focus so much on those things that will make them more "loveable," that is, increase their value on the personality market, that they forget to learn how to love.

"…success, prestige, money, power—almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving."

But it is not really love that people aim to achieve when striving for those things. Because there is no place for real love in the lives of those who look at themselves and other people as products on the market.

"Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which ‘only’ profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend much energy on?"

I leave you with this question just as I, after reading it, decided to put the book down and spend some time thinking about it.

Next week, in the part 2 of this essay series, we will go look deeper and more closely into what “learning how to love” really means and how does one go about it.

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this one.

You can read part 2 here.

If you are interested in a free ebook that I wrote for you, “The Lost Art of Reading,” you can download it here.

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