I've been thinking about Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving (1956). The book starts from a surprising premise: most people think of love as a feeling, something that happens to you. Fromm argues that love is a skill — something you practice, something you can get better at, and therefore something you can also fail at.
This idea rearranged how I think about my own relationships.
Love as practice, not feeling
We say "I fell in love" as if love were gravity — something that pulls you in without any agency on your part. But Fromm says that framing is backward. Falling in love is easy. It's the early stage when the novelty is intense and the other person's flaws haven't yet surfaced. What we call "being in love" is usually just the beginning.
Real love — mature love — is something you build. It requires care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge of the other person. You don't love someone by feeling intensely about them. You love them through how you act toward them, consistently, over time.
A conflict that made me think
My partner and I went through a difficult period recently. We had a fundamental disagreement — not about something trivial, but about values that mattered to both of us.
My instinct was to try to resolve it quickly. Get to the bottom of the disagreement, figure out who's right, and fix it. But this kind of pressure — the urgency to resolve, to reach consensus, to stop the discomfort — can actually destroy the relationship it's trying to save.
Reading Fromm helped me see that. The discomfort of not being fully understood by another person isn't something to eliminate. It's the normal condition of being in a relationship with a real, separate human being.
Two people, not one
There's a fantasy at the core of romantic love: that you will find someone who completely understands you, who sees everything you see, who wants everything you want. Two becoming one.
Fromm dismantles this. Two people cannot become one without one of them disappearing. Healthy love is the union of two complete, separate people — not fusion, but connection. The gap between you is not a failure. It's what makes love possible.
What this requires is what Fromm calls "the productive orientation" — an active care for the life and growth of the other person, without losing yourself. You want them to flourish as themselves, not as an extension of you.
What I'm practicing
I'm trying to sit with discomfort instead of rushing to resolve it. To trust that not every disagreement needs an immediate answer. To stay curious about my partner's perspective instead of defending my own.
None of this is natural for me. I have a bias toward clarity and resolution. But relationships aren't problems to be solved — they're something to be tended.
Fromm writes: "To love means to commit oneself without guarantee." That's the hardest part. You can't love safely. But the alternative — holding back, protecting yourself, never fully committing — is its own kind of loss.
