To love, for psychologist Erich Fromm, signifies to care for the greatest interests of the beloved and to actively work to promote those interests. This means that love is really a faculty, and ability, and not an object.
The noun/verb confusion may perhaps be just one reason why many are puzzled by the matter of love. People conceive of love as an object, a “something” that is to be had, possessed, when in reality love is the active everyday practice of an ability. And like any ability, love – to love – takes practice. It can be, in reality, the single thing that makes us most fully human.
Explanation has been held up as the most uniquely human trait, but in reality that distinction a lot more properly belongs to love (specifically, the ability to love), which is, on the face of it, pretty illogical – unless one understands the interconnectedness of all humanity; indeed, all life. Man is an animal, to be sure, but one that has self-reflective awareness plus the capability to reason – and to love.
Love, for Fromm, grows out of man’s rational faculty, and complements it, even superseding it, in a sense. And interestingly, love is both ability and a need to have – human beings are able to love and actually need to love, to express care and concern above and beyond themselves. And insofar as folks do not allow themselves to love, they don’t permit themselves to be happy.
The intimate connection between love and happiness seems obvious enough, but most individuals confuse love with desire and desire with pleasure. In fact, desires could be pretty unpleasant and desires most surely can exist without having love. As Fromm writes, not I love you due to the fact I need you, but I need you because I love you. And so it truly is that by practicing love, but (being) loving, we are also happy.
