Erich Fromm on Why Love is Not About Finding ‘the One’

“Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love.” So begins Erich Fromm’s 1956 classic, ​The Art of Loving​, in which the philosopher outlines how our romantic troubles often stem from misconceptions about what love actually involves.

One of our most insidious misconceptions, Fromm declares, is that success or failure in love hinges entirely on the qualities of a prospective partner. We think that 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.

Culture would have us believe the problem of love simply comes down to finding ‘the one’.

Film, music, and literature persuade us that an infallible Prince Charming, a brooding Mr Darcy, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl await us just around the corner, just on the next night out, just another few swipes away on the dating app.

Such idealized visions of love are only compounded by the relentless consumerism of contemporary life. “Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange,” Fromm observes.

We browse people like products on a personality market. Only when we’re certain we’ve secured the best deal will our searching cease:

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.

Meanwhile, to increase our own relative value in the market, we focus on cultivating whatever fashion prizes at the time. We hit the gym to achieve a particular body shape. We parade the shops to buy a certain wardrobe. We read the latest opinion pieces to accumulate a nuanced view on current affairs.

By doing these things, we become more attractive, a better ‘catch’, an unbelievably high value deal — and we might bag ourselves a higher value prospect in the process. In fact, we might even secure the one…

Our mistake, Fromm argues, is to think that the qualities of initial attraction make good foundations for lasting love.

Suppose we do discover a brilliant match. Suppose we even fall in love! Head over heels, the world upheaved and transformed in gold…

Falling in love is so exhilarating, so natural and spontaneous and automatic, that when experiencing its heat, it seems there is absolutely nothing more we could possibly learn about love. We are masters. We are prodigies. The one and I have found each other, and all that remains is to bask in our mutual glory. Mission complete: happily ever after…

But of course, though it’s the climax of fairy tales, this is rarely the end of the story in real life. As Fromm puts it:

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.

The transition from love’s initial bloom to a calmer, more routine affection may lead some to think they have fallen out of love. Or we may just discover that our initial attraction was informed by ideals we imposed upon our beloved, who inevitably couldn’t live up to them.

Back we go to the personality market, looking for that spark — a spark that, this time, despite all evidence to the contrary, will spontaneously grow into an eternal flame; this time it will be different, this will be the love of our lives…

Fromm thinks we’d do better if we approached love not like a once-in-a-lifetime transaction but like an art, the mastery of which takes work.

Romantic success is determined less by securing the best deal on the personality market, and then simply hoping it works out, and more by nurturing our capacity for love.

You don’t sit down at the pottery wheel and instantly begin shaping delicately curved pots. The clay collapses in your hands, time and time again. Improvement takes practice and commitment.

Love is no different, Fromm implores. Its initial spasms may mislead us into thinking it will be easy forever, but lasting love is an art that requires effort and skill.

​The Art of Loving​​ is Fromm’s attempt to lay out the theory and practice of love. While we won’t cover it all here, important qualities he discusses include:

• Knowledge (seeing the other person on their own terms)
• Care (active concern for the life and growth of the beloved)
• Respect (wanting the other person to unfold ‘as they are’)
• Concentration (paying close attention to ourselves and others)
• Responsibility (being able and ready to respond)
• Discipline (showing up even when it’s hard or we’re not in the mood)
• Patience (tempering our need for quick results)
• Supreme concern (“if the art is not something of supreme importance, the apprentice will never learn it”)

Put aside the ever-changing fashions that render us merely attractive: these are the enduring characteristics that make us truly lovable, these are the qualities that actually contribute to a ‘happily ever after’.

But cultivating them takes courage, Fromm concedes. While we may feel afraid of not being loved or lovable, the real fear we need to overcome is that of committing to love:

To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

Commitment is scary, but it’s the only way that love can last: love requires ongoing activity. It’s not a passive thing that happens to us, that we ‘fall into’ if we are lucky; it’s a constant state of “active concern for the life and growth of that which we love”, Fromm writes.

The problem of enduring love thus hinges less on finding an elusive ‘one’, a soul mate who will forever live up to unreasonably high standards and ideals, and more on our ability to nurture the qualities conducive to love: patience, empathy, courage, commitment, kindness, the capacity to apologise, forgive, move on...

Of course consistently holding an open loving stance in a dark and difficult world is not easy. A transactional society like ours only heightens the difficulty we have in radiating love and understanding: we are pitted as all against all, incentivised to close ourselves off into fortified little units, counting money and calculating status.

But we must push back against these sham material distractions, Fromm tells us: we must resist the social forces that pressure us to view ourselves and others merely as commodities, as products on the personality market, as consumers whose every activity becomes subordinate to a trade.

Love is “the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence”, Fromm implores. Authentic connection to others is our only healthy escape from existential loneliness, the source of all our anxiety, shame, and fear.

By cultivating our faculty for love, by attempting to tackle our own misconceptions and defence mechanisms, by trying to recognise that there will only be a ‘happily ever after’ if we actively work to produce one, we salve the deepest human wound there is. As Fromm puts it:

Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever.

What do you make of Fromm’s analysis?

• Do you think love revolves around finding the perfect person?
• Or, if a suitable match is found, should the emphasis be placed on growing and sustaining love through effort and work?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• Authentic Love: Simone de Beauvoir on What Makes a Healthy Relationship
• Plato’s Scala Amoris: the Ladder of Love
• Aristotle On the 3 Types of Friendship (and How Each Enriches Life)
• True Wealth Lies in Friendship: Epicurus and Ho Kepos
• Nietzsche on Friends Growing Apart

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