What is love? Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.

Or is love a pleasant sensation,

which to experience is a matter of chance, something one “falls into” if one is lucky

The majority of people believe that love is “a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of
chance, something one ‘falls into’ if one is lucky".

We can learn to love. This is the hopeful message that Erich Fromm gave in his book “The Art of Loving”.

The author was able to see love as an art, a feeling that we all have the potential to experience, but that
requires care to be maintained.

what does it mean to love?, how can love be maintained?, is love fleeting?

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, say
music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.”

-Erich Fromm-

“People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love – or to be loved by – is
difficult.” (2) ‘Are you the right one for me?’ or, ‘Will I find someone better, more compatible, more
attractive to be with?’ are questions that focus on the other as an object. It makes partners replaceable
and relationships an investment that may have good or poor returns.

Remember that sharing your feelings requires you to be connected with them, understand them, and
take care of them, in such a way that you don’t end up looking for external ways to fulfill the needs that
you don’t know how to fulfill yourself.

When you use love to escape your own discomfort, you’re doomed to destroy it. If you use this feeling
as a refuge to hide from things you can’t handle in your life, you’re just running away from yourself.

From this reflection, you can gather how important it is for two people to relate to each other from their
own essence. Only by having a deep knowledge of each other will the couple be able to build a solid
foundation from which love can evolve. Remember that it’s a mistake to love just to run away from
yourself, because then it won’t be possible for a healthy and reciprocal encounter to develop.

Fromm thought that we misunderstand love for many reasons. First, we see the problem of love as one
of being loved rather than one of loving. We try to be richer, more popular, or more attractive instead of
learning how to love. Second, we think of love in terms of finding an object to love, rather than of it
being a faculty to cultivate. We think it is hard to find someone to love but easy to love, when in fact the
opposite is true. (Think of movies where after a long search the lovers finally connect and then the
movie ends. But it’s the happily ever after that’s the hard part.) Finally, we don’t distinguish between
“falling” in love and what Fromm calls “standing” in love. If two previously isolated people suddenly
discover each other it is exhilarating. But such feelings don’t last. Real love involves standing in love; it is
an art we learn after years of practice, just as we would learn any other art or skill.

I'm the end, though loving is difficult to learn and practice, it is most worthwhile and more important
than money, fame or power. The mystery of existence reveals itself—if it ever does—through things like
relating to nature and productive work but, most of all, through our relationships with other people.
Thus to experience the depths of life, we should cultivate the art of loving.