The Art of Loving

by Erich Fromm

Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing about grapes.

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love.

Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.

If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting.

This attitude—that nothing is easier than to love—has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

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.

The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice.

Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself he has awareness of himself, of his fellow man, of his past, and of the possibilities of his future.

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality.

love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity.

love is an action, the practice of a human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as the result of a compulsion.

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.

the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous.[3]

Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love.

One loves that for which one labors, and one labors for that which one loves.

But responsibility, in its true sense, is an entirely voluntary act; it is my response to the needs, expressed or unexpressed, of another human being. To be “responsible” means to be able and ready to “respond.”

Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.

If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use.

The further we reach into the depth of our being, or someone else’s being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us. Yet we cannot help desiring to penetrate into the secret of man’s soul,

love. I have to know the other person and myself objectively, in order to be able to see his reality, or rather, to overcome the illusions, the irrationally distorted picture I have of him. Only if I know a human being objectively, can I know him in his ultimate essence, in the act of love.[6]

Infantile love follows the principle: “I love because I am loved.” Mature love follows the principle: “I am loved because I love.” Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”

“deserved” love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is loved only because one pleases, that one is, in the last analysis, not loved at all but used.

God says: “It is good.” Motherly love, in this second step, makes the child feel: it is good to have been born; it instills in the child the love for life, and not only the wish to remain alive.

In order to be able to give honey, a mother must not only be a “good mother,” but a happy person—and this aim is not achieved by many.

Mother’s love for life is as infectious as her anxiety is.

Both attitudes have a deep effect on the child’s whole personality; one can distinguish indeed, among children—and adults—those who got only “m...

she cannot be a loving mother, the test of which is the willingness to bear separation—and even after the separation to go on loving.

Tenderness is by no means, as Freud believed, a sublimation of the sexual instinct; it is the direct outcome of brotherly love, and exists in physical as well as in nonphysical forms of love.

Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being—and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being.

Love should be essentially an act of will, of decision to commit my life completely to that of one other person.

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling—it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.

A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?

Hence the idea of a relationship which can be easily dissolved if one is not successful with it is as erroneous as the idea that under no circumstances must the relationship be dissolved.

Genuine love is an expression of productiveness and implies care, respect, responsibility and knowledge. It is not an “affect” in the sense of being affected by somebody, but an active striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity to love.

is often the one redeeming character trait on which such people pride themselves. The “unselfish” person “does not want anything for himself”; he “lives only for others,” is proud that he does not consider himself important. He is puzzled to find that in spite of his unselfishness he is unhappy, and that his relationships to those closest to him are unsatisfactory.

If one has a chance to study the effect of a mother with genuine self-love, one can see that there is nothing more conducive to giving a child the experience of what love, joy and happiness are than being loved by a mother who loves herself.

a man whose mother is cold and aloof, while his father (partly as a result of his wife’s coldness) concentrates all his affection and interest on the son. He is a “good father,” but at the same time authoritarian. Whenever he is pleased with the son’s conduct he praises him, gives him presents, is affectionate; whenever the son displeases him, he withdraws, or scolds. The son, for whom father’s affection is the only one he has, becomes attached to father in a slavish way. His main aim in life is to please father—and when he succeeds he feels happy, secure and satisfied. But when he makes a mistake, fails, or does not succeed in pleasing father, he feels deflated, unloved, cast out. In later life such a man will try to find a father figure to whom he attaches himself in a similar fashion. His whole life becomes a sequence of ups and downs, depending on whether he has succeeded in winning father’s praise. Such men are often very successful in their social careers. They are conscientious, reliable, eager—provided their chosen father image understands how to handle them. But in their relationships to women they remain aloof and distant. The woman is of no central significance to them; they usually have a slight contempt for her, often masked as the fatherly concern for a little girl. They may have impressed a woman initially by their masculine quality, but they become increasingly disappointing, when the woman they marry discovers that she is destined to play a secondary role ...

remained attached to her father—and thus is happy with a husband who relates to her as to a capricious child.

She is never sure of what the parents feel or think; there is always an element of the unknown, the mysterious, in the atmosphere. As a result the girl withdraws into a world of her own, daydreams, remains remote, and retains the same attitude in her love relationships later on.

A man and a woman who in relation to their spouses are incapable of ever penetrating the wall of separateness, are moved to tears when they participate in the happy or unhappy love story of the couple on the screen. For many couples, seeing these stories on the screen is the only occasion on which they experience love—not for each other, but together, as spectators of other people’s “love.” As long as love is a daydream, they can participate; as soon as it comes down to the reality of the relationship between two real people—they are frozen.

Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence.

Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves.

Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains—except kill it.

Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.

sit in a relaxed position (neither slouching, nor rigid), to close one’s eyes, and to try to see a white screen in front of one’s eyes, and to try to remove all interfering pictures and thoughts, then to try to follow one’s breathing; not to think about it, nor force it, but to follow it—and in doing so to sense it; furthermore to try to have a sense of “I”; I = myself, as the center of my powers, as the creator of my world. One should, at least, do such a concentration exercise every morning for twenty minutes (and if possible longer) and every evening before going to bed.[31]

one must learn to be concentrated in everything one does, in listening to music, in reading a book, in talking to a person, in seeing a view. The activity at this very moment must be the only thing that matters, to which one is fully given.

One is aware, for instance, of a sense of tiredness or depression, and instead of giving in to it and supporting it by depressive thoughts which are always at hand, one asks oneself “what happened?” Why am I depressed? The same is done by noticing when one is irritated or angry, or tending to daydreaming, or other escape activities. In each of these instances the important thing is to be aware of them, and not to rationalize them in the thousand and one ways in which this can be done; furthermore, to be open to our own inner voice, which will tell us—often rather immediately—why we are anxious, depressed, irritated.

The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.