Fromm Loving

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one object of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the loved person. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.

– Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving