The Art of Loving

by Erich Fromm

In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In

love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two. If we say love is an activity, we

Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a “standing in,” not a “falling for.” In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.

What is giving? Simple as the answer to this question seems to be, it is actually full of ambiguities and complexities. The most widespread misunderstanding is that which assumes that, giving is “giving up” something, being deprived of, sacrificing. The person whose character has not developed beyond the stage of the receptive, exploitative, or hoarding orientation, experiences the act of giving in this way. The marketing character is willing to give, but only in exchange for receiving; giving without receiving for him is being cheated.[2]

In children we often see this path to knowledge quite overtly. The child takes something apart, breaks it up in order to know it; or it takes an animal apart; cruelly tears off the wings of a butterfly in order to know it, to force its secret. The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.

Never, in sooth, does the lover seek without being sought by his beloved. When the lightning of love has shot into this heart, know that there is love in that heart. When love of God waxes in thy heart, beyond any doubt God hath love for thee. No sound of clapping comes from one hand without the other hand. Divine Wisdom is destiny and decree made us lovers of one another. Because of that fore-ordainment every part of the world is paired with its mate.

In the view of the wise, Heaven is man and Earth woman: Earth fosters what Heaven lets fall. When Earth lacks heat, Heaven sends it; when she has lost her freshness and moisture, Heaven restores it. Heaven goes on his rounds, like a husband foraging for the wife’s sake; And Earth is busy with housewiferies: she attends to births and suckling that which she bears. {035} Regard Earth and Heaven as endowed with intelligence, since they do the work of intelligent beings. Unless these twain taste pleasure from one another, why are they creeping together like sweethearts?

Without the Earth, how should flower and tree blossom? What, then, would Heaven’s water and heat produce? As God put desire in man and woman to the end that the world should be preserved by their union, So hath He implanted in every part of existence the desire for another part. Day and Night are enemies outwardly; yet both serve one purpose, Each in love with the other for the sake of perfecting their mutual wo...

Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father. He has, as it were, a motherly and a fatherly conscience. Motherly conscience says: “There is no misdeed, no crime which could deprive you of my love, of my wish for your life and happiness.” Fatherly conscience says: “You did wrong, you cannot avoid accepting certain consequences of your wrongdoing, and most of all you must change your ways if I am to like you.”

If I can say to somebody else, “I love you,” I must be able to say, “I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.”

The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a “loving” mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than

in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.

this experience of sudden intimacy is by its very nature short-lived. After the stranger has become an intimately known person there are no more barriers to be overcome, there is no more sudden closeness to be achieved.

Taking these views into account one may arrive at the position that love is exclusively an act of will and commitment, and that therefore fundamentally it does not matter who the two persons are. Whether the marriage was arranged by others, or the result of individual choice, once the marriage is concluded, the act of will should guarantee the continuation of love. This view seems to neglect the paradoxical character of human nature and of erotic love. We are all One—yet every one of us is a unique, unduplicable entity. In our relationships to others

the same paradox is repeated. Inasmuch as we are all one, we can love everybody in the same way in the sense of brotherly love. But inasmuch as we are all also different, erotic love requires certain specific, highly individual elements which exist between some people but not between all.

Both views then, that of erotic love as completely individual attraction, unique between two specific persons, as well as the other view that erotic love is nothing but an act of will, are true—or, as it may be put more aptly, the truth is neither this nor that. Hence the idea of a relationship which can be easily dissolved if one is not successful with i...

The selfish person does not love himself too much but too little; in fact he hates himself. This lack of fondness and care for himself, which is only one expression of his lack of productiveness, leaves him empty and frustrated. He is necessarily unhappy and anxiously concerned to snatch from life the satisfactions which he blocks himself from attaining. He seems to care too much for himself, but actually he only makes an unsuccessful attempt to cover up and compensate for his failure to care for his real self. Freud

All men are equal, because they all are children of a mother, because they all are children of Mother Earth.

the ultimate reality is the “En Sof,” the Endless One, for the Kabalah.

In the stage of full maturity he has freed himself from the person of mother and of father as protecting and commanding powers; he has established the motherly and fatherly principles in himself. He has become his own father and mother; he is father and mother.

from the beginning of the love for God as the helpless attachment to a mother Goddess, through the obedient attachment to a fatherly God, to a mature stage where God ceases to be an outside power, where man has incorporated the principles of love and justice into himself, where he has become one with God, and eventually, to a point where he speaks of God only in a poetic, symbolic sense.

Man’s happiness today consists in “having fun.” Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and “taking in” commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones. Our character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption.

Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their “personality packages” and hope for a fair bargain.

One of the most significant expressions of love, and especially of

marriage with this alienated structure, is the id...

this kind of relationship amounts to is the well‑oiled relationship between two persons who remain strangers all their lives, who never arrive at a “central relationship,” but who treat each other with courtesy and who attempt to make each other feel better.

In this concept of love and marriage the main emphasis is on finding a refuge from an otherwise unbearable sense of aloneness. In “love” one has found, at last, a haven from aloneness. One forms an alliance of two against the world, and this egoism à deux is mistaken for love and intimacy.

technique leads to sexual happiness and love,

“Intimacy is that type of situation involving two people which permits validation of all components of personal worth. Validation of personal worth requires a type of relationship which I call collaboration, by which I mean clearly formulated adjustments of one’s behavior to the expressed needs of the other person in pursuit of increasingly identical—that is, more and more nearly mutual satisfactions, and in the maintenance of increasingly similar security operations.”

Actually his definition of intimacy is in principle valid for the feeling of any cooperating team, in which everybody “adjusts his behavior to the expressed

needs of the other person in the pursuit of common aims” (it is remarkable that Sullivan speaks here of expressed needs, when the least one could say about love is that it implies a reaction to unexpressed needs between two people).

Love as mutual sexual satisfaction, and love as “teamwork” and as a haven from aloneness, are the two “normal” forms of the disintegration of love in modern Western soci...

But their relationship to the woman (as, in fact, to all other people) remains superficial and irresponsible. Their aim is to be loved, not to love. There is usually a good deal of vanity in this type of man, more or less hidden grandiose ideas. If they have found the right woman, they feel secure, on top of the world, and can display a great deal of affection and charm, and this is the reason why these men are often so deceptive. But when, after a while, the woman does not continue to live up to their phantastic expectations, conflicts and resentment start to develop. If the woman is not always admiring them, if she makes claims for a life of her own, if she wants to be loved and protected herself, and in extreme cases, if she is not willing to condone his love affairs with other women (or even

Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence,

They become nervous and fidgety, and must do something with their mouth or their hands. (Smoking is one of the symptoms of this lack of concentration; it occupies hand, mouth, eye and nose.)

What could the grown—up person achieve if he had the child’s patience and its concentration in the pursuits which are important to him!

many people have never known a person who functions optimally.

the main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism.

while we are asleep we are convinced that the product of our dreams is as real as the reality which we perceive in our waking state.

To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.