I’m just coming to the end of writing a book on love in the context of Buddhist partnership and practice. In the three years I’ve been working on it, I’ve read several dozen books as background material. Which one has touched me most deeply? Without doubt, it’s Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, which I first read as a nineteen-year-old, recovering from an unhappy love affair. I can say without a doubt that it changed my life.
On the first page I read that my attempts at love were bound to fail unless I tried to develop my total personality. I wasn’t going to find satisfaction in individual love without the capacity to love my neighbour, and without humility, courage, faith and self-discipline. I felt hopeful for the first time in months. Maybe there was something to be done with my life, after all.
I had believed that love was a matter of feeling something special for a special someone. I had romanticized this experience as a form of idealism. Fromm pointed out that these were very common beliefs: that nothing is easier than to love, and that there is nothing to be learned about love. The truth, he claimed, is that love is an art, which requires knowledge and effort. It’s not a pleasant sensation that we experience by chance.
Most people see the problem of love as one of being loved rather than the capacity to love. They put effort into being lovable, by being popular, or having sex appeal. According to Fromm, this misses the point: love is not about an object but a faculty. It’s not primarily a relationship to a specific person. It is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relationship of a person to the world as a whole.
He gave the comparison of a person who wants to paint pictures, but refuses to learn the art, claiming if they just wait for the right object to come along they will paint beautifully!
Falling in love, he argued, is a temporary state which is very exciting and satisfying at the time. When it comes to an end, it is taken as failure. Could we examine the reasons for this and study the meaning of love? Love is an art, and mastery of this art involves theory and practice. Like any art worthy of the name, achieving mastery must be a matter of ultimate concern.
I’d believed that the capacity to love was something that we were born with. In my case, it clearly wasn’t. So it was reassuring to hear that it was an art, a skill that I could learn. I didn’t feel so bad after all. If it was learnable, then I could learn it. It could give me meaning. I might even be of use to the people around me. Yes, that would be a way to give meaning to my life. So I took my life back, on the basis that I might learn how to be of use to the people around me. It seemed fair enough, and I might even enjoy it along the way.
Fromm’s insights remain relevant today. His call for love as an active, universal practice serves as a reminder of the importance of empathy, compassion, and connection. True love, as Fromm understood it, is not a passive feeling but a conscious choice – a way of being that shapes how we relate to the world and to each other.
Shantigarbha’s book, A Thousand Kisses Deep: Love in Buddhist Partnership and Practice, is due out in 2025. Shantigarbha and Gesine offer an online course for couples, called ‘The Languages of Love: NVC in Intimate Relationships’. Look out for the next dates on our Full Programme.