Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.
Interpretation
Love requires care, responsibility, and respect for the individual, or it risks becoming possessive.
In this quote, Erich Fromm emphasizes that true love is built on care, responsibility, and mutual respect. When one loses sight of the individual qualities and needs of their loved one, love can transform from a nurturing bond into a controlling and possessive relationship, ultimately leading to its deterioration.
In practice
In a relationship seminar discussing the key elements of healthy love.
Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict; joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are only one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves.
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.
To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern β and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.
In times of change, learners inherit the earth
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
A dog doesn't care if you're rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his.
I love myself...I love you. I love you...I love myself.
He painted me when I was young because he was in love with me, but now that he has loved me he doesn't paint me anymore.
Two pure souls fused into one by an impassioned love-friends, counselors-a mutual support and inspiration to each other amid life's struggles, must know the highest human happiness;-this is marriage; and this is the only cornerstone of an enduring home.
The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
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