How to Love Better
With the Wisdom of Erich Fromm
In the middle of the 20th century, Erich Fromm made one of the greatest contributions to our understanding of love with The Art of Loving. In his bestselling work, he describes the hurdles and misconceptions surrounding the idea. He then proceeds with flexible guidelines to improve one’s practice of love. This is the second article of a two-part series. The first one illustrated the troubles caused by the fusion of love and capitalism. This one is about how to love better.
“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 […]”
From the beginning, Fromm imparts that love is incorrectly perceived as an object instead of a faculty.
People spend hours, days, weeks and years searching everywhere for somebody to love. Imagine if an artist spent the same amount of time searching for something to paint instead of just painting. Great artists know that any object can be interpreted in a compelling way. It’s how they look not what they look at that matters.
