Love Isn't Something That Happens to You: It's an Art You Practice
Introduction
Most of us grow up with an idea of love as something that simply happens: the right person appears, the spark flies and, with luck, it lasts. Under that belief, when a relationship fails the conclusion is that it wasn't the right person.
Erich Fromm proposed another way of understanding it in The Art of Loving, more demanding and more hopeful: love isn't a stroke of luck, it's a capacity that is learned and practiced.
The question isn't whether you'll find the right person. It's whether you're developing the capacity to love.
The error of thinking the problem is finding
Fromm observed that most people see love as a problem of object rather than capacity: they believe loving is easy and that the hard part is finding someone to love, or managing to be loved. So we invest enormous energy in being attractive and almost none in learning to love.
It's like someone who wants to paint and, instead of learning to paint, devotes themselves to finding the perfect landscape. The landscape helps; without the art there's no painting.
Loving is an active verb
The central distinction is between falling in love — something that happens to you — and loving — something you do. Falling in love is passive, intense and brief; loving is a sustained activity.
And like any activity, mature love has trainable components:
Care. Actively concerning yourself with the other person's life and growth. Love shows up in attention, not in declaration.
Responsibility. Responding to the other's needs by your own decision, not as an imposed obligation.
Respect. Seeing the person as they are and wanting them to grow according to their own nature, not molding them to your convenience. Fromm noted the word's root points to "looking": to respect is to actually look.
Knowledge. Caring to know the other beyond the surface, again and again, because people change.
Loving starts with yourself
One of Fromm's ideas is often misread: to love another you must be capable of loving yourself. He isn't talking about selfishness — he explicitly opposes it — but about the fact that someone who doesn't care for or respect themselves will struggle to give that to another. Love isn't a cake to be divided: it's a capacity, and whoever has it exercises it with themselves and with others.
Translated into practice: working on your autonomy and your interests doesn't take you away from love, it prepares you for it. And it avoids the most common dynamic in relationships that wear down, which is expecting the other person to fill a void that isn't theirs to fill.
What practicing love means
If it's an art, it requires what any art requires: discipline, concentration, patience and dedication.
Real presence. Full attention, no screens in between. Actually being there when you're there.
Consistency over intensity. Small repeated acts sustain more than grand occasional gestures. John Gottman's research points the same way: what predicts a couple's stability isn't epic moments but how people respond to everyday bids for connection — the passing comment, the small question — and the ratio of positive to negative interactions.
Getting out of your own viewpoint. Grasping what the other needs, how they see the world, what they feel. It's the hardest work and the most noticeable.
Accepting that there's work involved. A good relationship doesn't maintain itself, just as a musician doesn't play well without practicing.
A necessary caveat
That love is a capacity you practice doesn't mean every relationship can be saved with more effort. Some bonds end even when both people work at them, and there are situations where "try harder" is actively harmful: relationships with abuse, sustained contempt, or where only one person holds the thing together.
The correct reading of Fromm is that love requires practice, not that endurance is a virtue. If there's physical, psychological or economic violence, the answer isn't more practice: it's getting help and getting out.
Common mistakes
Confusing intensity with love. Intense beginnings and dramatic swings usually indicate something else.
Expecting the other to guess. Knowing someone isn't telepathy; you ask.
Taking the bond for granted. Care that stops being exercised is noticed sooner than you'd think.
Looking for someone to complete you. Two halves don't make a relationship; they make a dependency.
Conclusion
Seeing love as an art changes the question: it stops being "will I find the right person?" and becomes "am I developing the capacity to love?" The first leaves you at the mercy of luck; the second gives you back some control. Start this week with the smallest and best-evidenced thing: when the person you love makes some passing remark seeking your attention, put down what you're doing and actually respond. That, repeated, is most of the art.
References
- Fromm, E. (1956). The Art of Loving. Harper & Row.
- Fromm, E. (1976). To Have or To Be?. Harper & Row.
- Sternberg, R. J. (1986). A triangular theory of love. Psychological Review, 93(2).
- Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1992). Marital processes predictive of later dissolution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(2).