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Love Is Not a Feeling
It’s a way of being in the world
In the class I taught for seven years at The School Of Life in Melbourne on sustaining long-term relationships, there was an exercise in which I asked participants to think about love, friendship and sex as three overlapping circles. The aim was to explore which of these elements participants considered to be essential to a viable long-term relationship. Yet almost always when I ran this exercise, participants expressed some confusion about the definition of ‘love’. Friendship and sex are clear enough, but what exactly does that third circle delimit? Romantic feelings? Passionate attachment? Adoration?
If the love we feel for a friend doesn’t count, then what exactly does? Usually this led to me talking about the various words which the Greeks used for love — eros, agape, filia and so forth. Like the Inuit with their (alleged) twenty different words for ‘snow’, surely we require a more nuanced vocabulary to talk about something that is so central to our aspirations, fears and hopes. Once we recognise the promise of perfect, unending romantic/sexual bliss for the mirage it is, what are we left with? What does it really mean to love someone?
The German psychiatrist Erich Fromm offered one answer to this question in his classic book The Art of Loving. According to Fromm, we put the cart before the horse…
