If You Fail at Love

Consolation for our learned brokenness on the path to healing.

“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,” the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his timeless treatise on learning love as a skill. We fail at it largely because, given how profoundly shaped we are by our formative attachments, those of us who grew up with instability and violence from our ...