How do we learn to love in an authentic way?

As children, the words that we hear the most conjugated by everyone and that we learn to imitate and use are, in many cases, "I love you", I love you. However, when we later try to obtain such a conjugation in reality, in fact, we find it very difficult to experience it in a healthy way. Unconsciously, our affective relationships are contaminated for him egocentrism, the jealousy, domination, passivity and other elements that make it difficult to connect with this verb.

Erich Fromm, in the book The art of Loving, asserts that love is not an easy feeling for anyonewhatever our degree of maturity. "All attempts to love are doomed to failure unless one actively seeks to develop the total personality and achieve a positive orientation."

We all try to be loved, and not to love, and we strive to achieve that goal. It follows that loving is easy if the appropriate object to love or be loved by it is found.

• Related article: "The 4 types of love: what different kinds of love are there?"

How do we learn to love in our day to day?

For Fromm, you learn to love as an art, internalizing theory and practice gradually and with the clear awareness that it is a matter of paramount importance, on the achievement of which our psychological balance depends.

According to the author, the only valid solution to avoid emotional isolation it is in the achievement of interpersonal union, the loving fusion. The inability to achieve it means insanity, destruction of oneself and of others. "Love is the mature solution to the problem of human existence," says Fromm.

At the same time, From sees immature forms in “symbiotic relationships”. One of its manifestations occurs when we become obsessed with the other and really convince ourselves that we love, when in reality it is an obsessive process. For this reason, when we say that we are crazy for each other, we are not defining the qualitative or quantitative of the relationship, far from it, loving authenticity, but rather the degree of solitude in which we were before we met "lovingly"

In contrast to symbiotic union, the mature love it implies union on condition of preserving one's own individuality. In his doing and becoming, the human being is free, he is the owner of his love.

Respect as the foundation of love

Love resides in respect; if there is no respect, there is no love. It is obvious that Respect is born from one's own dignity, emancipation and freedom. Respect is allowing the development of the loved one in her own way and not as I want, to serve me, agree with me, resemble me or respond to my needs.

To have some certainty that we "dwell" in a mature loving relationship, it is necessary for the man and the woman to achieve the integration between its masculine and feminine poles, a requirement and necessary and sufficient condition to reach maturity in the love.

On the other hand, as far as mature love is concerned, the logical fallacy which implies the notion that love of others and love of oneself are mutually exclusive. The truth is that if it is a virtue to love your neighbor as yourself, it must also be a virtue to love myself, because I too am a human being. Love for others passes through love for me.

Love as an act of giving

Love we discover it only in a free, authentic human being, and manifests itself fundamentally in the ability to give. "It is not rich who has a lot, but who gives a lot," says Fromm. Thus, we can distinguish between:

1. Maternal love

Maternal love not only contributes and fosters the preservation of the child's life but must also instill in the child the love of life, the desire to stay alive beyond instinct. The "good mother" gives her happiness, her honey, and not only her milk.

Unlike erotic love, where two separate beings become one, in maternal love two beings that were united will separate and therefore Therefore, a psychologically and emotionally healthy mother will encourage and cement her child's path toward her autonomy, while respecting her individuality. It is the maximum proof of maturity and extensive maternal love.

2. erotic love

Unlike brotherly or maternal love, erotic love is a union with a single person, exclusive and, if it is also loving, means establishing it from the essence of being.

3. the selfish

The egoist does not love himself, he hates himself, has a low self-concept and low self-esteem. Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are really dissimilar. If an individual only loves others, he cannot love at all; For the same reason, if he only loves himself, he understands nothing about what it is to love.

A reflection on lovers and affection

Satisfaction in individual and social love cannot be achieved without the ability to love one's neighbor, without concentration, long-suffering and method. "In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the ability to love must also be rare."

Fromm proposes that we must move from the universality of economic interest where the means become ends, where the human being is an automaton; you have to build a supreme place and the economy is there to serve it and not to be served, where others are treated as equals and not as servants, that is, where love is not separated from social existence itself.