A Love Letter from Fromm

When I was in high school, Erich Fromm was all the rage. A serious psychologist and philosopher, he did, for a short time, enter popular culture and become the man to read for “relationship” advice. Girls were delving into his book, The Art of Loving, seeking some affirmation of their feelings. Boys could also occasionally be found paging through the book, but clearly because they were misled by the title into thinking the book might be some modern Kama Sutra.

I was grateful for the book because it was the only writing I ever found that articulated my distaste for all the assumptions that people were bringing to the dating/marriage scene. Unfortunately, Fromm didn't seem to have much impact on how people actually behaved when seeking a mate. And now, his wisdom seems to have been forgotten altogether. I never hear any modern relationship gurus even remotely acknowledging his insights. In fact, most of the advice currently being dispensed on how to find a man, a woman, a soul-mate, etc. - actually ends up flying in the face of all of Fromm's recommendations.

Current relationship counsel is often based on how to more effectively act on attraction. Most of our discourse seems to legitimate attraction as the primary motive force in establishing a relationship. But it was precisely this kind of involuntary attraction that Fromm made a case against.

When I was a child, I was fascinated by a set of magnetic dogs my aunt had on her knick-knack shelf. When you positioned the dogs a few inches apart, facing each other, you could feel the space between them taking on a strength of its own. As you brought the dogs closer – WHOOSH! Their pull towards each other overcame my feeble attempts at keeping them apart. They mashed together, nose-to-nose. However, when you turned one of the dogs around, you got the opposite feeling. It was as if there was an invisible fluffy pillow between the dogs, rounding them, spilling them away from each other.

It's just that sort of force that people use as a criterion for engaging romantically with someone else. If that feeling of attraction is there – they approach. If it's not “Don't waste my time.” They feel attraction as something pushing them from the outside. It happens to them. They have nothing to say about it. “I can't help it. I like bad boys.” “And there she was. I saw here across the room in that tight red mini-skirt – and I was gone.”

People declare these reactions proudly, as if it were laudable to be out of control. They entertain, encourage, and lose themselves to these transports. They are driven and are not the drivers. They revel in being relieved of all responsibility for the outcome. They “fall in;” they “fall for” - as if love were a ditch they skidded into. But that kind of compulsive, addictive response was the very thing that Fromm fought against our using as the basis for long-lasting relationships, for real love.

Yes, it's true that we perhaps can't really help whom we are initially attracted to – for whom we feel a frisson of excitement, whether it's sexual excitement or the excitement of inspiration – or just a plain feeling of WOW! But then after that first moment of involuntary thrill, something more wholly at our discretion should operate. Contrary to the often-heard powerlessness of the statement, “Well, you can't help who you fall in love with” - there should come the empowerment of a recognition that you CAN help whom you love. Even more to the point, you CAN help with whom you maintain a loving relationship.

I never had much patience with the “I couldn't help myself” approach. I was especially puzzled by the kind of involuntary abandonment I heard people idly effecting in the wake of their pronouncements that, “I'm sorry. I just don't love you any more. I'm sorry, I've just fallen out of love with you.” I have even gone so far as to be puzzled by people of one sexual orientation leaving a partner in order to “hook up” with people who match some newly liberated sexual quest.

So what if you're not sexually attracted to someone? That doesn't mean you can't thrillingly, profoundly love that person. That's because love, according to Erich Fromm and according to my sense of things, is not a compelled response to sexual excitement or to the excitement generated by a charismatic character. It's not a response to any kind of compulsive force acting outside ourselves and beyond our control. It's the opposite of the kind of involuntary action featured in romantic fiction and assumed in TV/Internet counseling sessions. It's not being swept off your feet. It's not getting hooked or having your attention grabbed. It shouldn't be like the plot of one of those horror movies in which a hanged criminal's hand is transplanted onto a good man's arm and then takes over the man's personality – maniacally pulling its new possessor into frenzied displays of genius and diabolism – pulling him to commit murder.

Along with Fromm, I revolt at the notion that love is a switch – snap it on – snap it off. I rebel against justifications such as, “I just wasn't that into her” - “He just didn't turn me on” - “He just didn't grab me” - “She just wasn't my type.”

In other contexts, being a type is recognized as something undesirable. Actors bemoan their fate when they have been typecast. Once that happens to them, they can't any longer portray a full range of emotions. They are forever confined to producing duplicates of the man you love to hate, of the sex kitten, of the smart-Alec, of the ditzy blonde, of the loner – of whatever type brought them to their first fame. Similarly, it's recognized that being stereotyped or, in turn, of stereotyping people is a bad thing. But strip these words of their prefixes and suffixes and you are left with “type.” Then somehow it becomes, not only acceptable, but understandable, and even advisable, to operate on the basis of types.

But having such specifications is not only superficial, it can actually be the perverse of love. When you look beneath the assembly line surface of these specifications, you often find what are in fact, not only prejudices, but the even more confining strains of fetishes. When I read the love-match ad of a man looking for that “sassy brunette who will challenge me and put me in my place” I catch a whiff of someone who is bound to bondage. The woman who writes “I'm looking for an exciting, take-charge guy” seems bound to be someone who won't have the freedom to walk away from abusive, demeaning treatment. She'll be stuck there, pegged to the excitement, unpredictability, and drama, of whatever awaits her.

However, having said all this, I do have to acknowledge that there can be an argument made for following one's impulsive, compulsive attraction to someone. A study done years ago found that marriages triggered by some instant attraction to some superficial feature – lasted as long or longer and were as happy or happier than marriages that had followed long, laborious explorations of compatibility.

I hear about marriages that resulted from that sort of instant Romeo and Juliet attraction all the time. These types of relationships are most often instigated by men who, as the cliché goes, fall in love with their eyes (while women fall in love with their ears). For men, it's often a mere glimpse at a distance that does it. It's the sight of a Bo Derek 10 that captures them. So I hear over and over again some version of, “I saw her walk by wearing one of those fuzzy Lana Turner sweaters that were so popular back in the day – and I knew she was the one for me.”

My own grandfather was launched into marriage by just such an attraction. He owned a market in Chicago and would look out his big plate glass window at the people on the street. Once, twice, he saw a girl walk by on her way to work. (As it turned out, she was going to her job as an assistant to Oscar Meyer, who was just then starting up the ladder of success to what became his meat processing empire.) This was well before the era of Lana Turner sweaters. My grandmother was walking along in an ankle-length dress with a foundation of crinoline. She was always starched and laced and frilly. My grandfather saw this vision of “the perfect lady” wafting by his store window. Without ever having said a word to her, he pointed and declared to his workers, “That's the girl I'm going to marry!”

And so it was. Their way of getting together is considered a romantic idyll, an allowing of an instant, fated moment to take hold. In actuality, while I think they had a happy enough marriage, I sense it was one of separate lives. My grandmother fulfilled her role, cooking and cleaning. My grandfather came home from his meat market and sat in the parlor smoking his cigar. There was a certain prescribed estrangement to their relationship. However, one could call it a “good” marriage.

Many couples have gotten together based on such instant presumptive decisions. There are famous couples whose lives together clicked in one such moment of initiating attraction. One example that stands out in my mind is that of Will and Ariel Durant, the couple who “made” history together, collaborating on writing prize-winning history books for almost five decades. On a talk show late in his life, Will Durant confessed that it had been love at first sight for him. He was a teacher in a New York middle school when he'd been taken by one of his students. She was fourteen, he was twenty-seven. She sat in the front row of his class looking up adoringly at him. But it wasn't so much her adoring presence in his class that had first attracted him. He had seen her walking across campus, lithe and long-legged, like the “Ariel” he eventually re-named her – and wearing a fetching little red cap. It was those legs, that cap that had snagged him.

The two were married the following year, with the girl's mother standing by to attest that she'd given permission for “her child” to be wed. Today of course that sort of relationship would be deemed highly inappropriate, tantamount to pedophilia. But the union became one of the most enduring and inspiring ones on record. Will and Ariel collaborated on their writing and on making a life together for over sixty years.

So yes, I have to admit, such involuntary attractions can be successful – if the one to whom a person is attracted turns out to be relatively sane and congenial, and if the one who was attracted is similarly on an even keel, and if both have the ability to stick by that initial attraction and make it the spark that lights an eternal flame (if I might be allowed a bit of purple prose).

One of the positive aspects of acting on and sticking to some such initial attraction is that it isn't the result of a chain of assessments that then drags on into the indefinite future. It isn't judicial, causing the person to sit on high and issue an unending series of opinions about the case the person is presenting as a potential mate. Someone who has truly been ignited by some detail of another person doesn't behave like the people in the Seinfeld sitcom.

I enjoyed the Seinfeld series more than anything, but it's true that most of the time, the Seinfeld gang were assessors. They would constantly register the pros amd cons they were finding about people they dated, delivering a ticker tape update on their findings. “Well, she's pretty, but she eats her peas one a time! I can't be with someone like that.” “Or, she's smart, but she has such big man-hands!.” Or “Can you imagine? She actually likes the Docker commercials!”

By contrast, the Will Durants of the world are all-in from the start. Will had been instantly, irresistibly taken with that little girl with the red cap, and that was it. Case closed. What's appealing and positive about that approach is that it's unconditional. It can come closest to being like a mother's love – a love that says you're mine, and therefore I love you, no matter what – forever.

Ariel Durant's legs surely stopped being so long and unblemished as she approached her nineties. And she likely never wore a red cap again in her later years. But it didn't matter. That first image of her walking to her classes was indelible in Will. It was the lighthouse that stood over all the cragginess of decades of marriage, shining out over the waters, calm and rough. (A bit more purple prose.)

The Durants' way of getting together was more like Joe E. Brown's unconditional enthusiasm in the movie Some Like It Hot. The classic last line of that film illustrates the appeal of instant attraction. There's nothing Jack Lemon could do to kill Brown's ardor for him. Even after Jack Lemon said that he smoked all the time, smoked like a chimney, Joe E. Brown wasn't fazed. Even after Lemon sighed that he “could never have children – Joe E. Brown wasn't dissuaded. Finally, when Lemon delivered what he considered would be the coup de gras to Brown's ardor, when Lemon revealed that he was actually a man – Joe E. remained breezily, blithely committed, because after all, “Nobody's perfect.”

How wonderful to be married to someone like that – someone who couldn't be moved off the mark of their affection, no matter what - someone whose first impression had locked them in. So, I guess like a proper Oxford debater, I have prepared a case for both sides of the issue. Conscious decision versus chemistry. That instant chemistry side of the debate is certainly appealing, with all of Hollywood backing it as the way people should get together.

And yet, and yet, my heart still sides with Fromm – with self-determination. I want the freedom of nurture to win out over the force of nature. I want a slow growth of affection to win out over the unreasoning rush of Romeo and Juliet.

As per the title of Fromm's book, I feel love should truly be an art. It should be a decision we consciously make, not a reflexive reaction. Take the example of a painter. We wouldn't want his works to be the result of uncontrollable spasms of his arm. We want and assume his creations to be the result of some thoughtful, controlled expression of himself. Through training, skill, practice, and talent – we want him to give tangible form to some emotion or thought that was profoundly personal but previously inchoate.

So like Fromm, I want love to be an active process, not passive submission to some impersonal force such as magnetism, propulsion, or gravity. I agree with Fromm that true love is a decision that is within the power of each of us to make and to maintain. Without meaning to sound too Nietzsche-like about it – I want love to be a supreme act of the will.

I want love to be based on an art we develop rather than on an artifact that arrests our development by snagging our attention – an artifact such as a red cap on a passing teenager. Loving is best when it's a matter of listening, taking an interest, discovering a person anew each day, taking pains with her when she needs help, affiliating with him because of a reasoned, whole-hearted commitment to his essential goodness and to the goodness the two of us can build together.