The Forgotten Art of Love. Armin A. Zadeh

       Introduction

      Love is a fundamental concern for all of us. Indeed, most people would list love as the most important element in a happy life. Yet our knowledge of how love evolves, how we can have love, and how it helps us attain happiness is surprisingly scant. For most aspects of life that are important to us, such as our hobbies or job, we typically spend many years training and mastering skills. People may spend weeks and months mastering a video game that may be of little relevance to the practicalities of life.

      If love is so vital to us, why don’t we invest similar effort to bring it into our lives and keep it strong? First, many believe that love is something we cannot control. We may think that we just have to be lucky, and love will come to us. I challenge this view and argue that anybody can find love. Another problem — particularly in the English language — is that the word love is not clearly defined: it has different meanings in different contexts. We may say, “I love ice cream,” but we probably don’t mean the same thing as when we say, “I love my children.” We may also whisper, “I love you,” to somebody on whom we have an enormous crush, but we may feel something quite different when we say the same to an old friend. Do we really mean love when we try to love our neighbors? Are these different loves? Is there a unifying concept of love?

      I did not have answers to these questions thirty years ago, when a book on my parents’ bookshelf grabbed my attention. Its title was The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm, first published in the 1950s.¹ As a young adult, I hoped this was a new version of the Kama Sutra, and I eagerly pulled the book off the shelf. After overcoming my disappointment at finding a rather sober analysis of the phenomenon of love instead of practical instructions on lovemaking, I found myself drawn into the author’s arguments. I read for hours in growing fascination.

      Fromm described aspects of love that rang true to me but at the same time seemed contrary to the general perception of love. Fromm’s concepts seemed helpful in addressing many problems in human relationships and the entire human condition. At the time, I did not know that I was holding an international bestseller that has helped thousands of people develop a fuller understanding of love. In a speech in London in December 1964, just days before he received the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King Jr. hailed Fromm for identifying love as the “supreme unifying force of life.”²

      While I found Fromm’s understanding of love compelling, I also felt that he did not get it entirely right. Several aspects of his descriptions and arguments struck me as incorrect, or at least incomplete. Furthermore, Fromm wrote his book in the context of the field of psychology in the 1950s, influenced by personal and widely prevalent religious views on the purpose of human existence. The book was written before the social revolution in the 1960s and before we gained vast insights into human biology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I discussed Fromm extensively with my mother, a psychologist, and my father, a forensic psychiatrist, but I did not get satisfying answers to my questions.

      In the 1980s, The Art of Loving was largely forgotten, read only by those with a keen interest in literature or psychology. Since that time, I have wanted to bring Fromm’s ideas to a new generation, expanding his concepts and addressing their shortcomings. Love is a multifaceted phenomenon that affects many aspects of human life. Any attempt to view it solely from the angle of biology, psychology, sociology, spirituality, or philosophy will not do justice to its enormous complexity or its power over our lives.

      Not being in the position to provide such a comprehensive view at that age, I parked my ideas on The Art of Loving in the back of my mind and continued with my education. I went on to study medicine and became a cardiologist, professor, and scientist. Even more important, I became a husband and a father. Naturally, these roles influenced my ideas about love. I continued my informal education on the subject, and these ideas continued to evolve over the decades; more, they became a steady companion in my activities.

      As a physician, particularly one who takes care of patients with heart problems, one cannot afford to take too narrow a view of cardiac diseases when helping patients. Doctors need to understand how patients’ emotions can affect their sensations and physical well-being. We know that heartfelt attention, the sense of physicians’ and nurses’ genuine care, has a tremendous influence on a patient’s healing.

      To understand a person’s suffering, we need to understand the person. To understand the person, we must look at the human condition. What constitutes well-being and happiness? What makes a person hurt? The most severe physical pain may be easier to bear than emotional anguish. Among the worst forms of agony is a broken heart. Not only the end of a romance but the loss of any love can cause excruciating grief and misery. Love is the single most precious aspect of human life — even more precious than life itself. If we don’t know about love, we don’t know much about life.

      In many ways, this book is the result of fifty years of living in search of answers about love. In the first twenty years, I was mostly passively absorbing ideas about love, particularly through the affection of my parents, family, and friends. The next thirty years involved active attempts to find answers to questions about love, many of them raised by Erich Fromm.

      Going beyond Fromm’s hypotheses, I explore love on the basis of contemporary insights into physiology and evolution. I attempt to disentangle love from commonly associated human instincts, such as sex and attachment, and discuss it in the context of society, philosophy, and religion. Last, I show the importance of educating our society, particularly our children, about love.

      This book is not meant to be scholarly. Although I cite scientific articles to support some of my arguments and for further reading, this is not a literature review of scholarly research on love. Rather, I want to offer a framework for love that considers insights from different fields of human endeavors to formulate an understandable, constructive, and practical approach to love that is applicable to our daily lives. Our days can be filled with love. It is up to us to realize it.