Love Is An Art Project: We Must Create It On a Daily Basis

Today more than ever before we understand the science behind “love.”

While we still have much to learn, we know that love (specifically “romantic love”) is often driven by a range of factors including: physical attractiveness, cultural/personal similarities, socio-economic status, evolutionary biology (the instinct to survive and reproduce), and – on a neural level – a cocktail of chemicals in the brain that make us feel intensely connected with another person.

But no matter how much we learn about “love” through science, it still remains a complicated and elusive concept in our everyday lives.

Theoretically, you can learn all about what “love” is in a science book, but still have no idea how to create or practice love in the real world. And despite all we now know about love, people still struggle finding it for themselves.

One of the main themes behind the classic psychology book The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm is that “love” will always be a type of art – like painting, or sculpting, or poetry.

If you want to be a painter, it helps to learn different theories and techniques, as well as the history of different styles of art. But at the end of the day, if you really want to be a painter: you have to practice creating art of your own.

Love works in a similar way. You can learn all about it, but the only way to really get good at it is to turn it into a daily practice. And like all art, that will take focus, time, effort, and learning as you go.

Love is a product of what you put into it. It isn’t just a passive thing that happens to you – something that you “fall into” or “fall out of” helplessly – but rather an activity that you must deliberately practice to become a master at.

This is true whether you’ve just started dating someone new or you’ve been married to the same person for over 50 years. Love is a never-ending art project.

Our first experiences of love are often as a child deeply connected to his or her mother. In this stage of our development, we just receive love from our mother (through attention, food, and comfort), but we haven’t yet learned how to give love.

“For most children, before the age from eight to ten, the problem is almost exclusively that of being loved – of being loved for what one is. The child up to this age does not yet love; he responds gratefully, joyfully to being loved. At this point of the child’s development a new factor enters into the picture: that of a new feeling of producing love by one’s own activity. For the first time, the child thinks of giving something to mother (or to father), of producing something – a poem, a drawing, or whatever it may be. For the first time in the child’s life the idea of love is transforming from being loved into loving; into creating love.”

According to Fromm, those who expect to only “receive love” and never “give love” are stuck in a state of emotional immaturity.

Of course, this can manifest itself in many different forms of dysfunctional relationships (which I don’t want to get into). However, the main feature is this: the person becomes dependent on others to “create love” for them because they don’t know how to create it on their own.

This is like the “painter” who never paints. They only consume other people’s work of art, but don’t produce anything new themselves. They haven’t become an artist of their own – they haven’t yet started to experiment, to fail, to learn, to grow, and to hone their craft.

But all of these stages are necessary to master the art of loving, just as they are necessary for mastering any other type of art.

Love is an art project: Everyone expresses it in different ways

One key thing to remember about love is that – like art – it can be expressed in many different ways.

Just as two painters can have very different styles, two couples may be in equally healthy and loving relationships, but those relationships can look drastically different to an outside observer.

Some expressions of love are more open and outgoing, while other expressions of love are more reserved and subtle. Some couples may be very affectionate and physical, while others are more intellectual and conversational.

What’s most important, however, is that the exchange is being appreciated and reciprocated.

Often our expressions of love can be small and simple, but still very effective: a genuine compliment, listening to someone talk about a rough day without judging them, preparing a meal together, or sharing time doing something you both enjoy, etc.

How exactly love is created and expressed isn’t as important as actually putting in the effort to create it. And hopefully, if your message is sent clearly and genuinely, the other person will receive it and appreciate it.

And if people don’t reciprocate your love, that’s okay too – because you know how to create it on your own – and therefore you can share it with anyone you choose to.

In this article I’ve mostly discussed “romantic love,” but Fromm writes about plenty of other types of love too (“motherly love,” “fatherly love,” “brotherly love,” “love for God”).

At their core, however, all types of “love” require the basics of mutual respect, caring, and admiration. And this type of love can be extended to anyone:

“If to love means to have a loving attitude toward everybody, if love is a character trait, it must necessarily exist in one’s relationship not only with one’s family and friends, but toward those with whom one is in contact through one’s work, business, profession.”

If love is part of something you “do” and you “create” (and not something you “find”), then it’s possible to act lovingly toward anyone in your life, even toward random strangers.

Just like art, relationships require creativity if they are to be genuine and meaningful.

When you build a connection with someone, it’s not just about following a social script, or going through daily pleasantries, or simply doing what is expected of you. You have to be yourself, be engaged, and participate in the present moment.

Active participation is what creates genuine moments and meaningful connections.

A big part of this is reducing the amount of mindless “small talk” we do on a daily basis. Fromm writes briefly about this, referring to some people as “zombies.” However, he says it’s possible to override these automatic responses in others, by first overcoming them in ourselves:

“I mean also [to minimize] the company of zombies, of people whose soul is dead, although their body is alive; of people whose thoughts and conversations are trivial; who chatter instead of talk, and who assert cliché opinions instead of thinking. However, it is not always possible to avoid the company of such people, nor even necessary. If one does not react in the expected way – that is, in clichés and trivialities, but directly and humanly, one will often find that such people change their behavior, often helped by the surprise effected by the shock of the unexpected.”

Good conversation – like good art – is creative, spontaneous, and unscripted. And when you’re good at it, it can grab people’s attention, wake them up, and thrust them into the present moment. It breathes life into zombies.

If you act real and genuinely toward others, it will bring out more realness from them too. This is why you must ultimately pay the costs of being yourself if you want to master the art of love. This includes learning how to love in your own way.

The Art of Loving has taught me that love is an active process that we must participate in, and not just something passive that we wait to happen to us. Love is a never-ending art project – it isn’t something we just “discover” and hold onto, but something we must deliberately create on a daily basis.

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