“He who does not love abides in death.”
1 John 3:14
In our Indian society, there is no powerful discourse on love, or people to teach ‘How to Love 101’. There is even less acceptance of love in uniting people across social identities, the concept of love in dignity and integrity, and most of all - in marriages.
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Narratives on love are everywhere – movies, literature, history, folk culture, mythology, and media. As a society, we have set our standards of a person who is 'loveable'. Borrowing from Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving, love in the current era of capitalism is very similar to that of a commodity, or something you possess.
From our formative years, we have been taught of the qualities that make us 'desirable', which in our later lives become standards that we look for to love someone. According to Erich Fromm, Men grow up wanting to become successful, powerful, and rich while women work on themselves to become attractive by acclimatising to the current ideas of dress style, body, and femininity. In her book 'All About Love', Bell Hooks talks about how we are raised by our parents and society pointing out our flaws and having us work on ourselves to become better and more likeable. My life has not been any different. The yardsticks have been the same and so are my standards to love someone else. It’s not like we haven’t heard of the idea of love or not pictured and seen what love must look like from all the media we consume. We grow up wanting to be liked and loved. Yet, we seldom try to learn and understand what love is.
I have seen movies that depict how love can be so subjective. One can never define what it is like to be in love. Music playing, scarves flying, people dancing around in perfect coordination, has always been my imagination of love, thanks to all the stupid movies I watched, and Chetan Bhagat and Durjoy Dutta novels that I read.
For me, love was supposed to be magical, a feeling and not a choice because it just happens. Can love ever have a definition if everyone’s version of love is different?
How would you learn Science if it were subjective and incomprehensible? And if ‘love’ is so important in our lives, why shouldn’t it have a definition or a textbook?
Bell Hooks borrows Scott Peck's idea of love as something influential, an intention and a choice. And interestingly, there is a definition for it.
American Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck defines love as a will to extend one's self to nurture one's own or another person's spiritual growth.
If one is to consider the definition Peck gives of love, it goes contradictory to what we have been taught all our lives – the premise that love is subjective and just a feeling that cannot be put into words.
Surprisingly, love also has ingredients. Hooks says to love, we need to have ingredients like care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and open and honest communication. In her book, Hooks talks about all of these aspects in detail, which I will not do in my essay.
When I learned about this aspect of love, all I wanted to do was sit down with myself and think about all the people I think I loved, revisit the relationships I have had with my friends and loved ones. Somehow, I still haven’t been able to get through that process, which only tells me how difficult understanding love is.
Psychologist Erich Fromm draws from all the discourses on love and proposes that love is an art and that more than wanting to be loveable, one needs to learn how to love.
"Love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine and engineering."
“Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one “falls into” if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe it is the latter.”
Erich Fromm
The two quotes above helped me think more clearly of love. Fromm talks about the practice of love in the latter half of his book. It isn't as easy as it seems, or as our society makes it look. There are no manuals or DIY videos on YouTube that will show you how to practice love. When I reflect on the previous paragraphs, I think the first step could be to stop looking at love as a noun and start looking at it as a verb.
Make love action, a will, and an intention rather than something you don't have a choice over and that you fall into.
And if do think you ‘fell’ in love, then stand back up and choose to love someone.
Maybe this way we can finally start to understand what love is capable of, and what Gandhi meant when he said love is the strongest force that the world possessed yet the humblest imaginable.
References and Further Reading to Explore on Love:
1. All About Love by Bell Hooks
2. The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm
The Road Less Travelled by M Scott Peck
P.S. Thanks for reading. <3