A random Bumble guy once answered a prompt and suggested I read The Art of Loving.
Some weeks later, after one of the hardest breakups of my life, I finally picked it up. And somehow, it feels like a promise to myself: a promise to never stop believing in the power of love.
Yes, some of Fromm’s theses are outdated, but his core message remains powerful. Love is not simply an emotion we fall into, it is an everyday conscious act, a discipline, and a practice. Being “in love” is one thing, but learning to love is an active decision.
Fromm insists that love requires discipline, concentration, patience, and, as with any art, consistent practice. Throughout the book, however, some of his ideas reveal their age — especially his binary distinction between motherly and fatherly love, framed in gendered ways, and his brief, problematic reference to homosexuality as a disorder. Yet despite these limitations, Fromm’s central insights remain timeless.
At the heart of his vision of love are the values of care, respect, and knowledge. To love, he argues, is to care — and to care is to actively want to see someone grow.
Importantly, Fromm clarifies that love is not the absence of conflict, but the desire to understand the other person. It is not about worshipping someone blindly, but about working together to heal what is broken. It is not about replacing a partner with a “new god,” but about loving their humanity fully. And for Fromm, self-love and love for humanity are inseparable: to love myself is also to love the other, because they are as human as I am.
One of his most compelling distinctions is between immature and mature love. Immature love says: “I love because I am loved.” Mature love says: “I am loved because I love.” To love only in order to be loved, Fromm argues, is deeply problematic — it limits our freedom and keeps love transactional.
True love is the act of a free person. Especially in romantic love, he argues, two partners may merge in deep unity, but they must also remain individuals. Real love unites without erasing.
Fromm also categorizes love into different forms as most philosophers do — brotherly, motherly, erotic, self-love, and love of God. While these categories can help illuminate his vision, they also oversimplify the complexity of relationships in the modern world.
He is particularly sharp in his critique of capitalist society, seeing clearly how over-consumerism corrodes relationships. He describes modern man waking up to a 9-to-5 routine, alienated and exhausted, too drained to give attention to what really matters. In such a system, love is reduced to exchange and profit — a transaction rather than a practice. While many in his time celebrated the “freedom” to choose one’s partner, Fromm did not romanticize it. For him, freedom without responsibility, understanding, or effort leads only to shallow connections.
At the same time, Fromm never provides a “manual” for love. Someone expecting step-by-step guidance will be disappointed. Instead, his work reads more as philosophy than as practice — inspiring, but abstract. Critics also note that while he emphasizes self-love as the foundation for all love, he doesn’t fully clarify the difference between healthy self-love and narcissism. His brief analysis of narcissism leaves us with more questions than answers. For Fromm, narcissistic tendencies seemed to be overemphasized by psychology, and he chose not to dwell on them. Yet in doing so, he fails to clarify a crucial distinction — the line between healthy self-love and destructive self-absorption. This gap is significant, because without it, readers are left uncertain about how to practice self-love without falling into egoism.
Still, his conclusions about family dynamics and the impact of early childhood on one’s ability to love remain powerful. Again and again, he insists that being unable to love yourself makes it impossible to love others. Yet he also leaves room for transformation: the moment a person begins to learn self-love, they also open the door to extending love outward — to friends, partners, and neighbors.
That power, once turned inward, can radiate outward. But learning to love ourselves isn’t simple. There are people who never learned to love — not because they didn’t want to, but because no one ever showed them how. That is how generational trauma is passed down. And it takes just one person to disrupt the cycle — one act of noticing, understanding, or choosing to change.
In this way, loving becomes an act of resistance. It is truly revolutionary. Our system is not built for it; in fact, it perceives love as a threat. Imagine a world where people loved — freely, deeply, without asking, “What do I gain from this?” Capitalism would collapse in a day. That is how radical the art of loving can be.
Much has changed since this book was first published, but not its central truth: love is an art, and like every art, it requires practice. Love may feel difficult right now, but it remains the goal — and I don’t just mean the romantic kind.
✨ To love is to resist. To love is to live.
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