Is love an art? In that case, it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, whose experience is a matter of chance, something that one "stumbles" if one is lucky?
Everyone is thirsty for love; they watch countless movies based on happy and unfortunate love stories, listen to hundreds of trivial songs that talk about love, and yet, hardly anyone thinks there is anything to learn about love.
This peculiar attitude is due to several factors that, individually or in combination, tend to support it. For most people, the problem of love is fundamentally in being loved, and not in love, not in one's capacity to love. Hence the problem for them is how to get them to love them, how to be worthy of love.
To achieve that goal, follow several paths. One of them, used especially by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of the position itself allows. Another, particularly used by women, is to be attractive through body care, clothing, etc. There are other ways of becoming attractive, which both men and women use, depending on what the social environment values more at that time and place. Many of the ways to make oneself loved are the same as those used to achieve success, to "win friends and influence people."
In reality, what for most people in our culture is worthy of being loved is, in essence, a mixture of popularity and sex appeal.
The second premise that supports the attitude that there is nothing to learn about love is the assumption that the problem of love is that of an object and not of a faculty. People believe that loving is simple and it is difficult to find an appropriate object to love - or to be loved by him. In recent generations the concept of romantic love has become almost universal in the western world. In the United States of America, although conventional considerations are not lacking, most people aspire to find a "romantic love", to have a personal experience of love that leads to marriage. This new concept of freedom in love must have greatly increased the importance of the object over that of the function.
There is another characteristic feature in contemporary culture, closely linked to that factor. Our entire culture is based on the desire to buy, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. The happiness of the modern man consists in the excitement of contemplating the windows of the businesses, and in buying everything that he can, either in cash or in installments. The man (or woman) considers people in a similar way. An attractive woman or man are the prizes you want to get. "Attractive" usually means a good set of qualities that are popular and for which there is demand in the personality market. The specific characteristics that make a person attractive depend on the fashion of the time, both physically and mentally.
In any case, the feeling of falling in love only develops with respect to human goods that are within our possibilities of exchange. I want to do a good business; the object must be desirable from the point of view of its social value and at the same time, I must be desirable, taking into account my values and manifest and hidden potentialities. That way, two people fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available in the market, within the limits imposed by their own exchange values. In a culture in which commercial orientation prevails and in which material success constitutes the predominant value - there is really no reason to be surprised that human love relationships follow the same exchange scheme that governs the market for goods and labor. .
The third mistake that leads us to suppose that there is nothing to learn about love, lies in the confusion between the initial experience of "falling in love" and the permanent situation of being in love or, rather, of "remaining" in love. If two people who are unknown to each other, as we all are, suddenly drop the barrier that separates them and feel close, they feel one, that moment of unity is one of the most stimulating and exciting of life . And it is even more wonderful and miraculous for those who have lived locked up, isolated, without love. That miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined or initiated with sexual attraction and its consummation. However, such love is, by its very nature, not very durable. The two people get to know each other well, their intimacy increasingly loses its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom, end up killing what may be left of the initial excitement. However, at the beginning they don't know all this; in reality, they consider the intensity of passion, that being "crazy" for each other, as proof of the intensity of their love, when it only shows the degree of their previous loneliness.
That attitude - that there is nothing easier than love - remains the prevailing idea about love, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is practically no other activity or company that starts with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet fails as often as love. If this happens with any other activity, people would be anxious to know the reasons for the failure and to correct their mistakes or give up the activity. Since the latter is impossible in the case of love, there seems only to be an adequate way to overcome the failure of love, and to examine the causes of such failure and study the meaning of love.
The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art as living art is. If we want to learn to love we must proceed in the same way we would if we wanted to learn any other art, music, painting, carpentry or the art of medicine or engineering.
What are the steps required to learn any art? The process of learning an art can be conveniently divided into two parts: one, the domain of theory; the other, the domain of practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body and the various diseases. Once I have acquired all that theoretical knowledge, I am not yet in any way competent in the art of medicine. I will only master it after much practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and those of my practice are based on one, my intuition, which is the essence of mastery of any art. But apart from learning theory and practice, a third factor is necessary in order to master any art. Mastery of that art must be a matter of fundamental importance, nothing in the world should be more important than art. This is valid for music, medicine, carpentry and love. And perhaps there is the reason that the people of our culture, in spite of their obvious failures, only so rarely try to learn that art. Despite the deep desire for love, almost everything else is more important than love: success, prestige, money, power; We dedicate almost all our energy to discover how to achieve those goals, and very little to learn the art of love.
Does it happen that only things that can provide us with money or prestige are considered worthy of being learned, and that love, which "only" benefits the soul, but that does not provide advantages in the modern sense, is a luxury for which no Do we have the right to spend a lot of energy?
Excerpted from Fromm, E. "The Art of Amar"
