For all the movies and songs about love, most of us fail to love well. Social philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980) argues that, since love is a basic human need and we cannot remove the longing for it even if we wished to, we would do well to discover the damaging assumptions beneath our failures to love, learn what love really involves, and begin to practice the art of loving. Love is an evergreen subject, and though originally published in 1956, Fromm’s essay retains its incisiveness.

Everyone knows love matters. We all hunger for it. But few think there is anything new to learn about it—nothing that the songs, shows, and movies have not already disclosed to us about what does or does not lead to love. There are a number of factors that blind us to our need to learn about love and to our habitual failures in our relationships.

One factor is that when people think about love and how to find it, they think more in terms of being loved than their own capacity to love. They begin with the assumption that making oneself lovable is the best path to love. Men and women in their own ways try to prove that they are lovable, whether that’s through competence in one’s profession, becoming fit, dressing a certain way, adopting certain mannerisms or hobbies, becoming a better conversationalist, and so on. In Western culture, quintessential lovability is a blend of popularity and sex appeal. Advice on how to be lovable and how to be successful cover the same ground, more or less.

Another cultural feature that dampens our curiosity about love is the assumption that the real work is in selecting the object of love, as opposed to cultivating the capacity to love. We think that love is easy once we have found “the one,” the object of our love. It is a thought process as flawed as it is common.

In the Victorian era, where love was a more contractual strategic arrangement brokered by third parties, love grew after the wedding—not before. Romantic love has become increasingly common in the West, and as such, has put an unprecedented weight on the object, and the selection thereof. We ask, “Who is the one I will fall in love with?” Not “Am I capable of loving well?”

A culture of consumerism also feeds into the emphasis on objects. We want someone who is “the whole package”: attractive, with positive qualities x, y, and z. We talk of love interests in much the same way we talk about any other commodity on the market. He or she is a competing good that we assess and measure against others in the same niche. In a market-obsessed culture, it should not surprise us that we sell ourselves and strategize about which person presents the best value to match what we ourselves bring to the table. The influence of consumerism is deep enough that we don’t feel its influence at all, but it is present and influences our beliefs about love.

Yet another mistaken assumption that makes us less curious about love is the conflation of falling in love and being in love. When two people who had been strangers begin to let down their barriers and feel they have still been received and accepted by the other, it is a euphoric experience. Especially if it’s a new experience, or if the moment is coupled with a sexual experience. Unfortunately, these euphoric episodes tend to be short-lived. The spark fades and disappointments, annoyances, and complacency set in. The couple started as strangers and now they move back to feeling like strangers again. Oftentimes, the intensity of the initial enchantment does not reflect a depth of love in the relationship as much as a depth of loneliness leading up to the ill-conceived relationship.

In any other endeavor where we have experienced so much failure we would have  given up a long time ago. But it is impossible with love. We instinctually know we need it and will continue to hunt for it. If we want some result other than continued failure, we would do well to examine what goes wrong and explore what love truly is about. 

Most people believe love is a happy accident one falls into, but love is more like an art, and like any art, love takes understanding and practice to master.

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden represents an era of instinctual animal innocence and unknowing, an era that was ruined when they rebelled against authority. The rupture introduced reason and true freedom with the ability to judge between right and wrong, but what was lost was a perfect harmony between people and their animal instincts. Some of those instincts remain, but humanity is blocked from returning to that harmoniously instinctual state of nature ever again.

Human reason brings with it the ability for man to become aware of himself and who he is, but the brute facts of existence into which man is thrown are grim. Because he is no longer one with nature as he was in the garden of instinct, man must confront his separateness to which reason has awakened him. He is an individual, unique from any other, and his life is finite. He will leave loved ones when he dies or loved ones will leave him behind. His helplessness against the forces of nature, society, and ultimately death is an experience of separateness. To be separate is to be helpless. It is the root of all our anxiety.

Thus, man seeks union to resolve the distressing experience of separation and reaches out for others to realize that union. We see the quest in romantic love, in the bond between mother and infant, and in our herd instinct. Separation is at the heart of our problem of human existence. To find union is the deepest hunger we have.

In the primitive chapters of human history, union in a group was usually achieved through communal orgiastic rituals that often involved drug-induced trances and sex-saturated group bonding. These orgiastic unions were intense, even violently so, and they temporarily alleviated the pain of separation for members of a tribe, as they blurred the lines between each other and the world around them—at least until the next ceremony.

Modern society is far more individualized and has done away with rituals expressly aimed at achieving union, but we still have to confront our separation and the anxiety that separation stirs up in us.

In the absence of those ancient rituals, alcoholism, drug abuse, and compulsive sex have become the most common modern attempts to bridge the chasm of separateness we all feel. But of course sex without love leaves us with only a momentary rush of union before we return to our condition of separateness. A drug can make us feel “one with the universe,” but that unity, too, will fade into separateness.

Another strategy society has developed to cope with our separateness is conformity.

In both democratic and dictatorial systems, there are high degrees of conformity, even if the instruments used to keep the herd together vary from place to place. Democracies prize independence, but we naturally form herds and find a kind of salvation in being exactly like everyone else. From birth to death, we are integrated in social and economic machinery, comfortable daily routines, and a socially acceptable range of activities. If we are like everyone else, we do not have to confront the disorientation caused by separateness. Whatever shape a society takes, the hunt for union is ongoing. We would want to conform even if we were not ordered or tricked into conforming.

People in the West fiercely maintain the thought that they are independent-thinking individuals, but their most strident expressions of uniqueness usually take place in the shallow pool of consumer preferences: this sweater over that jacket, this car or that one, this political party over that one. These differences give us the illusion of difference, but we are all more or less conformed already.

Unlike orgiastic rituals in tribal environments, which were communal, intense, and intermittent, the union through conformity is tame. It lacks the shock and novelty to keep the anxiety of separation at bay. Compulsive sex, addictions to drugs and alcohol, and rising suicide rates in Western society all attest to the general failure of herd conformity.

Society’s use of conformity, pleasure, and work routine to alleviate anxiety are partial (or even false) solutions to the problem of separateness. The full solution is only found in the achievement of love between two people. There is no deeper yearning at work in a person than the desire for interpersonal union.

When we talk about the need for interpersonal union, it is important to clarify what kind of union we are truly after. We must distinguish mature love from the mere symbiotic unions, which characterize most relationships.

Symbiotic unions can be passive or active. Passive symbiosis is an arrangement in which a person attempts to escape his feelings of isolation and separateness by attaching himself to the life of another person, and by looking to that person for direction and protection. The implicit belief here is, “I exist to the extent that I am connected to this person. Apart from this person, I am nothing.” The clinical term for this is masochism. A masochist outsources decisions, takes no risks, has no sense of self.

Active symbiosis is the other side of the coin, the complement to the symbiotic union. To flee from his crippling feelings of isolation, he finds someone he can attach to himself, someone who will admire him, bow to him, even when treated cruelly. The clinical term for this is sadism.

Masochists and sadists might sound worlds away from each other, but they are fruit from the same tree. Neither has a sense of integrity and wholeness; neither knows what to do with isolation; both rely on someone else to feel themselves.

Mature love, by contrast, flourishes when both people can hang on to their individuality and integrity. Paradoxically, the union, that sense of oneness, is deeper in mature love even as they are able to remain two complete individuals. When we talk about love, we need to speak of it less as an emotion or an experience, and more as action.

Central to the action of love is giving. The most profound kind of giving is not material and certainly not for the sake of a return on investment; the deepest gift one can give is the gift of one’s self, of one’s life. This does not necessarily mean death for the sake of another but to share with others that which makes one alive.

To act in love assumes a level of personal integrity or at least an orientation toward cultivating it. To the extent that those compulsions rule him, he will fearfully hold himself back, unable to act in love. The extent to which a person has conquered his dependency, his narcissistic will to be all-powerful and all-knowing, to dominate or exploit, is the extent to which he will have the courage to give himself—in other words, to love.

Mature love is dependent on four components coming together and working in concert: care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. If any one of these pieces is missing, people are not practicing mature love.

Care is manifested in action, not in sentiment or mere words. If a mother says she loves her baby, but does not feed him or clean him, we conclude she does not really care. If someone says he loves gardening but his yard is full of wilting, dying plants, we would assume he really does not care after all. In the story of Jonah, God shows his care for the people of Nineveh by sending the prophet Jonah to preach that forgiveness is waiting for them if they turn to him. Jonah has a strong sense of right and wrong, but not love. He tries to run away and is swallowed by a whale, a metaphor for his isolation and the way hatred entraps us. According to the story, Jonah eventually does what God commanded, the people of Nineveh repent, and God relents—much to the disappointment of Jonah. Jonah did not care about the people of Nineveh. He wanted justice and resented God’s merciful care for them.

It is difficult to talk about care without bringing in responsibility. More than a top-down imposition of duty, true responsibility is voluntary. It is the capacity and willingness to respond. We could call it “respondsibility” because it is about our ability to respond. In the story of Cain and Abel, the answer to Cain’s rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is not “No” as Cain thought, but “Yes.” You are part of this world and you shoulder some responsibility for your brother even as you shoulder full responsibility for yourself.

The third component of mature love is respect. Without respect, responsibility can devolve into manipulation and overpowering the other. The word “respect” is derived from the Latin word respicere meaning “to look at.” True respect is not compelled through fear; it requires you to see someone as a unique individual, and accept him as he is, not as you wish him to be. Loving a person means wishing for his growth, but for his own sake, and in his own way, even if it is not what you envisioned.

Care, responsibility, and respect are necessary conditions for love, but not sufficient for mature love without knowledge of the person you seek to love. Without knowledge, our care, responsibility, and respect would be useless because we would not know what shape our actions should take. Knowledge can take us to the core of a person. But this requires independence. We use people if we are not independent, and use our knowledge of them to serve our own needs and purposes. But if we are independent, we can, for example, see someone’s anger without retreating from it to find safety or conquering it to feel more  powerful, or by assuaging it to feel like a savior or hero. We can gain a true knowledge of the anger, and see it as an expression of anxiety, and that beneath the anxiety is fear and shame. Suddenly, we see a person who is in serious pain, rather than just angry. Knowledge helps us go deeper and love someone in the particular way in which they need to be loved.

Knowledge, care, respect, and responsibility come together to form a mature love that people can give to each other to form a long-lasting bond. It is this kind of love, and no other, that answers the problem of human existence, that answers our need for union.