The 2 Biggest Things People Get Wrong About What Love Really Is

Today was a full day at work, and when I got back to my apartment and considered what I wanted to post, I breathed deeply and thought, “I just want to write something pretty.”

"Something pretty" is how I got some citations from "The Art of Loving," which I read over the weekend and was, as promised, one of those rare books that rises to the top as “good.” And, sure, “pretty.”

And while it reads a little more sullenly that I was feeling, I still ran my fingers through some of the good parts, right there in chapter one, to share them with you here.

I believe this. I believe that people subscribe to the promises of love, and I believe that we are, for the most part, optimists on the subject. (Even those of us who are jaded are only jaded because we were (and deep down still are) optimists.)

But people often mess up the doing of love, and to that, I gently take you by the shoulder and scoot you a little to the left. Because: most of us are doing this wrong.

People like love. But in the wrong way.

“They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love — yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.” — Erich Fromm, "The Art of Loving"

All of us, it seems, instead aspire to “fall into it,” to find ourselves swept up in the feelings we see portrayed (and, to an extent, project) in everything we consume about love, and we end up feeling more strongly about our idealization of love than we do about love itself.