If my mate George hadn’t recommended this book there is no chance at all that I would have read it. I’ve a strange relationship with LOVE – in that I think it is grossly overrated by our society. You could get away with thinking that if you were not ‘in love’ in our society then there is something terribly wrong with you. Never mind that the notion of being constantly ‘in love’ – in a world where this is all too frequently confused with being infatuated – would be a nightmare not worth living.
As I said to George – I can see why people settle for sex, rather than love. Fromm’s idea of love sounds far too hard.
This is what I would generally call a ‘white-board’ book. A book in which someone has picked a term rich in meaning – in this case love, but other’s I’ve read have been on Lust or the parts of the human body - and run with it. Germaine Greer has one out at the moment called Rage I believe, although she could just as easily have written one called mock-outrage.
All sorts of love are covered, Brotherly Love, Romantic Love, Religious Love, Motherly Love… Like I said, a white-board book where a huge mind-map has been padded out into continuous prose.
This all makes the book sound much less interesting than I actually found it – but I want to give you an idea of some of my dissatisfactions too. I mentioned that I was reading Fromm to someone at work and he asked who is Fromm. I said, “I guess he is a bit of a Freudian–Marxist with an interest in Buddhism.” My friend looked at me quizzically for a moment and said, “Well, it isn’t exactly saying, ‘pick me up and read me’ just yet.” I didn’t dare tell him what the book was called.
When I was separating from my wife a very dear friend of mine suggested that I read a book called, Pulling Your Own Strings. I worked at the City Council and had the luxury of being able to turn to the computer on my desk, order a book from the city library and have it appear on my desk the very next day. There are few nicer pleasures in life. Anyway, the book appeared and it had a rainbow in the cover… I told her that I didn’t think I could read this book. The problem being that I would need to read it mostly on public transport – and a rainbow, I mean, Jesus. I said to her, “Look, the title is bad enough, but at least I can pretend that I thought it was about masturbation, but a rainbow…there is no excuse for a rainbow unless the book is called something like, Classic Gay Shortstories.”
There is a very similar problem with a book called, The Art of Loving. One expects it to be written by Hugh Heffner or Dr Shagalot.
The question is what is love? Is it a rather pleasant sensation or an art and therefore something one learns and gets better at over time? Fromm points out that mostly we act as if love were a sensation – something that happens to us and we have mostly no control over. We believe that love is something that just is. We can’t help who we fall in love with, we can’t help who we fall out of love with and we fundamentally believe that there is someone out there that is just right for us. There is no effort involved in loving – in fact, effort implies the two people weren’t really ‘made for each other’ and that effortless love is the only ‘real’ love. We look down on other cultures where marriages are ‘arranged’ and although I won’t be arranging my daughters’ marriages, I’m not quite so smug about the ‘self-evident’ superiority of marrying for ‘love’.
The main problem with arranged marriages, for me, is not the impossibility of love in these types of marriage – the arranged marriages I’ve witnessed in my life have involved much more ‘choice’ than we generally consider possible in our standard Western interpretation or plots for dozens of Disney cartoons. The real problem is how women in such marriages tend to be traded like chattel. It is hard to see how this could possibly be avoided in ‘arranged marriages’ – although, in the large grey area between the black of arranged marriages and the white of marrying for love there are ‘blind dates organised by friends’ and ‘marry anyone you can get your hands on so as not to end up on the shelf’ and other such shades.
One of the things I found most interesting, and perhaps one of the most illuminating ideas in the book, was his talk about the love of God. Quite early on he says, “In conventional Western theology the attempt is made to know God by thought, to make statements about God. It is assumed that I can know God in my thought. In mysticism, which is the consequent outcome of monotheism … the attempt is given up to know God by thought, and it is replaced by the experience of union with God in which there is no more room – and no need – for knowledge about God.”
Love for another person – particularly love for a life-partner (as I guess it would be called today) – is fairly similar to this love of God, love as atonement with God. Fromm repeatedly says that our highest desire (whether we recognise it or not) is unity with another. For Fromm this is the ground of love of all people and true love of another is premised on our being able to love everyone. There are all manner of qualifications for this unity – not unlike the line from The Prophet:
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but each one of you be alone, even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
The big downer – to use an Americanism – is that Fromm barely feels that true love is possible in Western Capitalist societies. Our obsession with consumerism; our ideas that love is a sensation, rather than an art; our alienation from our essential selves; our inability to concentrate and focus – all of these work against us truly ‘being’ in love.
This, then, is the Buddhist aspect of Fromm. The point is to learn how to be in the present – and being in the present implies truly being ‘with’ your partner. I think I finally got the point of sex once I realised it wasn’t about what I was feeling, but about understanding and anticipating the feelings of the person I was with. When I was too young to understand I heard Dave Allen tell a joke on TV about a newly married couple who rolled over to go to sleep rather than finish having sex after one of them asked, “Can’t you think of anyone else either?” I’d have preferred to have never been old enough to understand that joke. Shakespeare makes a similar point when he has Edmund (why do his ‘bad-guys’ so often get the best lines?) say in King Lear about the lecherous begetters of bastard children when compared to most ‘married sexual partners’, “Who, in the lusty stealth of Nature, take more composition and fierce quality than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed, go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fobs got ‘tween a sleep and wake?”
Gods, stand up for bastards indeed.
Or as Fromm himself would have it: “The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism”.
But it is not just about being present in bed for Fromm. Loving is about being alive – and being alive is about being truly conscious. Fromm is concerned that many of us think life is somehow supposed to be about ‘relaxing’ – to Fromm the only time one should relax is when one is asleep. He is a man well aware that time, and therefore life itself, is not to be wasted – that we are better to wear out than to rust.
More than once I experienced a ‘shock of recognition’ in reading this book, particularly towards the end when he was discussing dysfunctions based on experiences of parental role models. Although I found his division between maternal and paternal love all a little simplistic, some of this did make me question my relationships and how they may have been based on my own experiences and learnings from my parents and also to wonder about the examples I’ve given my daughters. Never pleasant thoughts.
I didn’t enjoy this book nearly as much as The Art of Being, but there are more ‘thoughts per page’ here than in your typical book on this subject and if it is a ‘whiteboard book’ it is a particularly full and rewarding one.