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A Valentine’s Day Guide To “The Art Of Loving”

By February 14, 2017Uncategorized

With the commercial frenzy of Valentine’s Day comes the pressure to be “in love” so if you’re single, it can feel like the whole world is attending a party you weren’t invited to.

But what if I told you that according to renowned psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, love is not something you must wait to find but something you can actively do?

In fact according to his book, The Art Of Loving, lasting romantic love is attained and sustained when we develop, like an art, an ability to love.

Fromm says that rather than “a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one “falls into” if one is lucky,” love is actually an art and therefore requires knowledge and effort.

This means if you don’t happen to have anyone special in your life right now, Fromm’s teachings can seriously help calm your V-day FOMO by reminding you that love is not an object the universe is taking forever to deliver, but an ability you can develop starting right now.

By putting the same skills we use to create art into the act of loving, skills like focus, endurance, and being in tune with ourselves and the world, we become capable of love. The following is a list of these major points. And with that, I wish you a Valentine’s Day that’s a total masterpiece!

  • Anyone who aspires to become a master in any art must begin by practicing discipline, concentration, and patience throughout every phase of his life.
  • 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.
  • The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakens, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life.
  • The ability to love depends on one’s capacity to emerge from narcissism, and from fixation with clan; it depends on our capacity to grow, to develop a productive orientation in our relationship to the world and ourselves.
  • If to love is a character trait, it must necessarily exist in one’s relationship not only with one’s family and friends, but toward those with whom one is in contact.