There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.
Interpretation
Love often begins with high hopes but frequently leads to disappointment.
This quote by Erich Fromm highlights the paradoxical nature of love, where many people embark on the journey of love filled with optimism and aspirations. Despite these high hopes, love often ends in failure or heartache, illustrating the complex and sometimes painful reality of romantic relationships.
In practice
During a discussion about relationships in a workshop, one might say, 'As Erich Fromm wisely noted, love is often accompanied by great hopes but can lead to unexpected failures.'
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.
Practicing love often means feeling through fear: intentionally opening yourself when you would rather close down, giving yourself when you would rather hide. Love means recognizing yourself as the open fullness of this moment regardless of its contents -- trenchant thoughts, enchanting pleasures, heavy emotions, or gnawing pains -- and surrendering all hold on the familiar act you call 'me'.
A soul cannot live without loving. It must have something to love, for it was created to love.
Love is just a word, but you bring it definition.
Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.
Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.
I always think the most romantic books or films are the ones where the romance doesn't happen, because it makes your heart ache so much watching it.
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