Is Love an Art? Essay

Is retire an fine artifice? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to throw is a matter of chance, something one f altogethers into if one is lucky? This little book is ground on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people forthwith believe in the latter. Not that people think that love is not important. They argon starved for it they watch endless numbers of films most happy and hard put love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love yet hardly eachone thinks that there is anything that needs to be guideed about love. This peculiar attitude is based on several(prenominal) premises which either singly or feature tend to uphold it. Most people see the problem of love originally as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of ones capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable. In pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. One, which is especially employ by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of ones position permits. Another, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating ones body, dress, etc.Other ways of making oneself attractive, used both by men and women, are to develop pleasant manners, interesting conversation, to be helpful, modest, inoffensive. Many of the ways to make oneself lovable are the same as those used to make oneself successful, to win friends and diverge people. As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture in the midst of being popular and having sex appeal. A second premise behind the attitude that there is zippo to be learned about love is the self-confidence that the problem of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love or to be loved by is difficult. This attitude has several reasons ro oted in the development of modern society.One reason is the great change which occurred in the ordinal century with respect to the choice of a love object. In the Victorian age, as in many traditional cultures, love was mostly not a spontaneous personal experience which then might lead to spousal. On the contrary, marriage was contracted by convention either by the respective families, or by a marriage broker, or without the help of such intermediaries it was concluded on the basis of social considerations, and love was supposed to develop once the marriage had been concluded. In the last few generations the concept of romanticistic love has become almost universal in the Western world. In the United States, while considerations of a conventional nature are not entirely absent, to a vast extent people are in search of romantic love, of the personal experience of love which then should lead to marriage. This new concept of freedom in love must have greatly enhanced the importance of the object as against the importance of the function. Closely related to this factor is another feature characteristic of contemporary culture.Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the subject of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern mans happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He(or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl and for the woman an attractive man are the prizes they are subsequently. Attractive usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and relieve oneself in girl, tough and sexy, was attractive forthwith the fashion demands much domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious today he has to be social and tolerant in order to be an attractive package.At any rate, the sense of fall uponing in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of ones own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying authoritative estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing druthers prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same material body o f exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market. The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the muddiness between the initial experience of falling in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might break off say, of standing in love.If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of junction is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being crazy about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.This attitude that nothing is easier than to love has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love. If this were the case with any other activity, people would be eager to know the reasons for the failure, and to learn how one could do better or they would give up the activity. Since the latter is impossible in the case of love, there seems to be onlyone adequate way to overcome the failure of love to assure the reasons for this failure, and to proceed to study the meaning of love . 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. What are the necessary steps in learning any art?The process of learning an art can be shared out conveniently into two parts one, the mastery of the theory the other, the mastery of the convention. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But,SynopsisThe Art of Loving has helped hundreds of thousands of me n and women achieve rich, productive lives by developing their hidden capacities for love. An astonishing frank and candid book renowned psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, it explores the ways in which this extraordinary emotion can alter the course of ones life. Most of us are unable to develop our ability to love on the only level that really counts-a love that is compounded of maturity, self-knowledge, and courage. Learning to love demands practice and concentration. Even more than any other art, it demands genuine insight and understanding. In this startling book, Fromm discusses love in all aspects not only romantic love, so surrounded by false conceptions, but also love of parents for children, brotherly love, erotic.