In 1956, a philosopher named Erich Fromm wrote a short but powerful book about love. In it, he made a claim that was contrarian at the time and still is to this day: Love is not an object or an event. It’s an ongoing lifelong skill.

“Love” is a terribly misused and overly vague word in the English language, almost as much as the word “happiness.” Many of us think of love as an emotion. Others think of it as something that happens to us, like an act of serendipity or destiny. 

We talk about “making money” and “achieving success” as the active concepts they are, but then we use the curious phrase “finding love.” As though all we can do is keep moving along and crane our necks, hoping it will miraculously be around the next corner.

This, Fromm argues, is a completely screwed-up way to look at it.

“Love is an activity, not a passive effect; it is a ‘standing in,’ not a “falling for,’” he argues. “In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.” ¹

His book is a mere 121 pages; critics complained he over-simplified his topic and didn’t explain the “how” part enough. Fromm himself told his readers, “[If you] expect to be given prescriptions of ‘how to do it yourself’…you will be gravely disappointed.” In other words, love is not the kind of thing you can reduce to a series of handy-dandy steps in a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation. It’s far too personal and too deep.

However, there are basic truths that will help you achieve love in your life, and not just the romantic kind but love in all its varieties.

Here are four of the most important ones, according to Fromm. Together they form a guide on not only how to cultivate love, but how to be a lovable person in the first place.

1. Be Present and Active 

Fromm would probably have a conniption fit if he were alive today to see how dependent people have become on their screens.

Even in his day, back in the 1950s, he lamented how few people are capable of what he refers to as “concentration.” “The most important step in learning to concentrate is to learn to be alone with oneself without reading, listening to the radio, smoking or drinking,” he says. “Indeed, to be able to concentrate means to be able to be alone with oneself – and this ability is precisely a condition for the ability to love.”

It’s an interesting Catch-22, but it makes sense: If you want to be able to love others and inspire their love, you have to be okay with being alone. Solitude is an important part of self-development. The person who can’t be alone with their thoughts won’t be able to truly love and understand themselves or figure out what their values are. If you’re always tuning out, you won’t make a good listener, a good friend, or a good partner.

Fromm puts it this way:

“To be active in thought, feeling, with one’s eyes and ears, throughout the day, to avoid inner laziness, be it in the form of being receptive, hoarding, or plain wasting one’s time, is an indispensable condition for the practice of the art of loving.”

“Be a less lazy, more interesting person” is not the advice we expect or want to hear when we’re feeling lonely and hoping to find a soulmate. Yet it’s exactly the advice many of us need.

2. Be Objective in How You See Others

“The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism,” Fromm tells us. You can’t love or be loved when you’re self-absorbed.

The opposite of narcissism is objectivity: “the faculty to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.”

Anyone who has been the “object” of another person’s desires knows how yucky it feels to be “loved” or wanted by someone who is projecting a certain reality on you. You can’t love someone if you don’t know who they are, or at least make your very best effort to see and know who they are and not who you want them or imagine them to be.

We don’t have to wait to find someone truly remarkable to practice the art of being objective. Every human being, especially any decent one, deserves to be seen and understood. Being a fair, empathetic, objective person will take us far in making connections with others throughout life. If we aren’t practicing this already we’ll have an impossible time finding love on a deep level with anyone.

3. Have Faith

Overcoming narcissism is important, but according to Fromm, it’s still not enough. We also need faith.

Faith is another one of those often-muddled words. Fromm makes an important distinction between irrational faith and rational faith. The former is blind or unquestioning adherence to something or someone; the latter is a quality of character, being able to think creatively in combination with study and reflection to arrive at a personal conviction.

Put another way:

“While irrational faith is the acceptance of something as true only because an authority or the majority say so, rational faith is rooted in an independent conviction based upon one’s own productive observing and thinking, in spite of the majority’s opinion.”

True faith requires us to have a strong sense of self, to live to ourselves, and to be comfortable and happy with who we are. “Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others,” Fromm explains, “because only he can be sure that he will be the same at a future time as he is today and, therefore, that he will feel and act as he now expects to.”

In order to love others and believe in them and their potential, we have to love ourselves and believe in ourselves.

4. Be Courageous

Whenever we have faith in someone or something, we are taking a risk and being vulnerable. This is an important part of love, and it calls for us to have courage. 

It takes courage to talk to someone new, to reconnect with an old friend, to raise a child, to stick to our own goals and follow our dreams year after year. Courage is not easy; it requires us to really focus and commit to someone (or something). “To be loved, and to love, need courage,” says Fromm, “the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern — and to take the jump and stake everything on these values.”

In our anxiety-ridden age it’s easy to second-guess everything, to pull out of obligations to others and even to ourselves. We value security and self-protection to the point of playing it too safe. If we want to love and to be loved, we must be open to both the joy and the pain that comes with it, to have faith and be hopeful that we will find love that lasts – not just with that “special someone”, but with all the people who make up the tapestry of our life: friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues. 

Love is an art, a skill: this is both the bad news and the good news. It’s bad news only insofar as it means there’s a lot of work to do on our end. Ultimately it is very good news because it means that we are responsible for how our lives turn out, including whether or not we experience love. 

Today’s culture is very much focused on “having” and “getting”, and to this end, we are often disappointed and impatient. When our focus instead is on becoming a better person, the things we desire the most — including love — are more likely to become ours.

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1. Fromm, E. (2013). The Art of Loving. Open Road Media.