How To Find the Love of Your Life
The Trick is in the Waiting…
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In the words of the great psychologist and arguably the greatest author on the subject of loving, Erich Fromm, “There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.” Though these words were first published more than a half of a century ago in his 1956 chief work on the subject, The Art of Loving, a book that I hold in such high esteem as to consider it the foremost important work to read for anyone who wants to embark on the grand adventure that is loving other human beings, the words themselves couldn’t be more relevant today. Looking around, I see people all over trying — and failing — at the prospect of love, a feat they undertake with the highest of hopes and the obvious expectations of success, only to be consistently reminded that, honestly, loving someone else is an extremely hard thing to do.
While this may be true, I strongly subscribe to Fromm’s powerful ideas, one of them being that loving is only a difficult thing to do for those who don’t know how to do it. When we look around at the great violinists of the world, scarcely would anyone think that they became great through some natural endowment, not to mention the weird and persistent belief that people seem to have the being a great lover is something that we’re all born with. This is especially true for those of us born into patriarchal and consumer cultures, cultures that place individual egotism and selfishness above all other virtues, as the cardinal virtues by which we’re supposed to live our lives.
I’m fortunate to have picked up this work by chance in my late teens and have digested it wholesale before embarking on my voyages of love, and still, I failed many times. Giving advice to a friend who’d gone through two recent breakups and a bit of a nervous breakdown, I found myself referencing Fromm’s ideas and explaining to them that, yes, all of us will fail at love a lot. But the other, darker side of the coin, the side that nobody wants to even think about, let alone focus on, is the reality that most of us will outright fail at love — by fail, I mean we’ll never learn how to do it in a wholly healthy and mature way. Given the statistics and a quick glance at the FBI statistics on crimes of passion…
