Status Updates From The Art of Loving

Then one will also recognize that while one is consciously afraid of not being loved, the real, though usually unconscious fear is that of loving. To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others, because only he can be sure that he will be the same at a future time as he is today and, therefore, that he will feel and act as he now expects to.

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism

Modern man has exceedingly little self-discipline outside of work. When he does not work, he wants to "relax." This very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinization of life. Just because man is forced for eight hours a day to spend his energy for purposes not his own, in ways not his own, but prescribed for him by the rhythm of the work, he rebels this takes the form of infantile self-indulgence

Can anything be learned about the practice of an art, except practicing it?

Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves.

Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence. Only in this "central ex-perience" is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love.

Love as mutual sexual satisfaction, and love as
"teamwork" and as a haven from aloneness, are the two "normal" forms of the disintegration of love in modern Western society.

One of the most significant expressions of love, and especially of marriage with this alienated structure, is the idea of the "team." This description is not too different from the idea of a smoothly functioning employee; he should be "reasonably independent," co-operative, tolerant, and at the same time ambitious and aggressive.