I wanna know what love is

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

Last month I began reading this book. It’s a challenging book, a short, dense, mid-century tome, written by a European psychoanalyst and social theorist. In short, despite the title The Art of Loving, it’s not your usual, prescriptive, self-help book. I can’t locate the quote, but I recall reading that the author Erich Fromm himself expressed some chagrin at the success of the book, both that people were reading it as a “how-to” manual and that so many were so despairing from lack of love that they sought out a guide to how to find it.

It was fitting that I read this book while on two days of bed rest and under the kind, patient care of my husband. I am pregnant with our third child, a midlife surprise. While my husband and I have always had a marriage of friends and equals, like any two-decade-long relationship, it has had ups and downs when it comes to unfettered joy in one another. I’m happy to say that we are in a very happy period which preceded the pregnancy (and probably contributed to it). I am extremely lucky in love and truly grateful for that.

Most people I know who read this book did so in college, when psychology and sociology majors were reading Freud and the major European thinkers whose works are one aspect of the liberal arts canon. I picked it up for a more personal reason. In 2012 while at VCCA I finished a draft of the book manuscript I’ve been working at, on and off, for too many years. Though I was glad to be “finished” with one iteration, as months went on, I realized I had a long way to go. Early this year I asked a friend to read and edit it so that I could proceed to make the next draft better. My friend, who I will not name here just in case she secretly wants nothing to do with my book, is a tough nut. She’s a successful fiction writer who writes heartbreaking, gritty novels. She knows from personal experience what suffering, love, and redemption mean, and that everything we value is hard won. When she returned my manuscript to me, she had many notes that were overwhelming in what they suggested for the next draft. But one thing she said as we discussed her critique was that, for a book about parents, children, and what it means to be a family, I hardly ever used the word love, nor talked about it. There was more in this vein, but the lack of “love” was what resonated. As I began work on the second draft at Ragdale, I sought out “definitions” and “examples” of love. But ultimately the search drew me to examine interpersonal interactions, film and television, and whatever else I could observe around me. Then I came upon this book.

While I won’t review the book here, and I don’t pretend to understand it well, there were a few salient points that especially resonated in my ongoing quest for understanding.

One is that we are all basically alone and are desperate to forget that unfortunate fact. The entire passage (pp. 80-81 of the paperback) could be read as a prescient indictment of social media and reality television, but some version of it was evidently true even in the mid-1950s. In a damning indictment of what constitutes a “happy marriage,” Fromm describes a polite pair that makes up a “team” that at it’s logical extreme is “egoism à deux”:

“While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome.”

“In this concept of love and marriage the main emphasis is on finding a refuge from an otherwise unbearable sense of aloneness. In ‘love’ one has found, at last, a haven from aloneness. One forms an alliance of two against the world, and this egoism à deux is mistaken for love and intimacy.”

Fromm later (pp. 92-93) describes two examples of “pseudo-love” — idolatrous love and sentimental love. The latter struck home as a particularly insidious form, the kind where one seeks the “love as a daydream” that is sold to us in film and television and can experience happiness when watching it, a thing that cannot be replicated in the real world, leaving the seeker “frozen” instead of able to experience authentic emotion.

The last and most prescriptive points (pp.100-102) are that love requires discipline, concentration, patience, and practice. As Fromm writes, it’s not just love, but any skill or art that you care about that requires these elements. It’s lot to put into a brief synopsis, and as I said earlier, I don’t fully understand it. I really recommend you read the book yourself, challenging though it is. But the “concentration” part reminded me of a scene from an indie movie I liked in the 1990s, The Opposite of Sex. The Sherriff and Lucia were played by Lyle Lovett and Lisa Kudrow:

Sheriff Carl Tippett: What’s the point of sleeping with you if it doesn’t get your attention? If I always come second to Bill?

Lucia: Excuse me?

Sheriff Carl Tippett: Say the point of sex isn’t recreation or procreation or any of that stuff. Say it’s concentration. Say it’s supposed to focus your attention on the person you’re sleeping with, like biological highlighter.

[significant pause]

Sheriff Carl Tippett: Otherwise, there’s just too many people in the world.

Lucia: So while I’m sleeping with you, I’m not supposed to care about anybody else?

Sheriff Carl Tippett: Look for me first in any crowded room. And I’ll do likewise.

[poignant pause]

Sheriff Carl Tippett: Otherwise, a person ends up sleeping with somebody else.

[Looks at her intensely and then sits back and waits]

Lucia: It’s just a habit, thinking about Bill. Because of Tom.

Sheriff Carl Tippett: I know.