How do we learn to love in an authentic way?

Learning to cultivate love is a complicated task; it requires dedication and an authentic attitude.

Since we are children, the words that we hear most often conjugated by everyone and that we learn to imitate and use are, in many cases, "I love you", "I love you", "I love you". However, when we later try to obtain in reality, in facts, such conjugation, we find it very difficult to experience it in a healthy way. Unconsciously, our affective relationships are contaminated by egocentrism, jealousy, domination, passivity and other elements that make it difficult to connect with this verb.

Erich Fromm, in the book The Art of Lovingstates that love is not an easy feeling for anyonewhatever our degree of maturity. "All attempts to love are doomed to failure unless active efforts are made to develop the total personality and to achieve a positive orientation.

We all try to be loved, not to love, and we strive to achieve that goal. It is inferred that loving is simple if one finds the appropriate object to love or be loved by.

• Related article, "The 4 types of love: what different kinds of love are there?"

How do we learn to love in our day-to-day lives?

For Fromm, one learns to love as an art, internalizing the theory and practice in a gradual way and with the and with the clear awareness that it is a matter of paramount importance, on the achievement of which our psychological balance depends.

According to the author, the only valid solution to avoid emotional isolation lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, loving fusion. The inability to achieve it means insanity, destruction of the self and of others. "Love is the mature solution to the problem of human existence", says Fromm.

At the same time, Fromm sees the immature forms in "symbiotic relationships.". One of its manifestations occurs when we become obsessed with the other and actually convince ourselves that we love, when in fact it is an obsessive process. Therefore, when we say that we are crazy about each other, we are not defining the qualitative or quantitative aspects of the relationship, much less the loving authenticity, but rather the degree of loneliness in which we were before we met "lovingly".

In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love implies union on condition of preserving one's own individuality. In his doing and becoming, the human being is free, he is the master of his affection.

Respect as the foundation of love

Love resides in respect; if there is no respect, there is no love. It is obvious that respect stems from one's own dignity, emancipation and freedom.. To respect is to allow the development of the loved one in his or her own way and not as I want, to serve me, to agree with me, to resemble me or to respond to my needs.

In order to be certain that we "inhabit" a mature loving relationship, it is necessary that the man and the woman achieve integration between their masculine and feminine poles, a necessary and sufficient requirement and condition to reach maturity in love.

On the other hand, as far as mature love is concerned, the logical fallacy implied by the notion that love for others and love for oneself are mutually exclusive can be highlighted. The truth is that if it is a virtue to love one's neighbor as oneself, it must also be a virtue to love myself, because I too am a human being. Love for others goes through love for myself.

Love as an act of giving

Love we discover it only in a free, authentic human being, and it manifests itself fundamentally in the capacity to give.and it manifests itself fundamentally in the capacity to give. "He is not rich who has much, but he who gives much," says Fromm. Thus, we can distinguish between:

1. maternal love

Maternal love not only contributes to and fosters the preservation of the child's life but should also inculcate in the child love of life, the desire to be kept alive beyond instinct.. The "good mother" gives her happiness, her honey, and not only her milk.

Unlike erotic love, where two separate beings become one, in maternal love two beings that were united will separate and, therefore, a psychologically and emotionally healthy mother will encourage and cement her child's path towards autonomy, respecting its individuality. It is the ultimate test of maturity and maternal love in an extensive way.

2. Erotic love

Unlike fraternal or maternal love, erotic love is a union with only one personexclusive and, if it is also loving, it means to establish it from the essence of being.

3. The egoist

The egoist does not love himself, hates himself, has a low self-concept and a low self-esteem.. Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually dissimilar. If an individual loves only others, he cannot love at all; by the same token, if he loves only himself, he understands nothing about what it is to love.

A reflection on lovers and affection

Satisfaction in individual and social love cannot be achieved without the ability to love one's neighbor, without concentration, long-suffering and method. "In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the capacity to love must also be rare."

Fromm proposes that we must move from the universality of economic interest where the means become ends, where the human being is an automaton; we must build a supreme place and the economy is to serve it and not to be served, where others are treated as equals and not as servants and not as servants, that is, where love is not separated from one's social existence.