Do You Love Or Are You In Love?

To love vs. to be in love

The fear of loneliness generates many of our actions. Spring, one of the answers to this anxiety, is the search for love. Not surprisingly, we are interested in various "arts of love." But often we are not paying attention to what it means to master an art: a long apprenticeship.

The ability to love is formed to a large extent through learning, and it is not something that grows on its own in us or can be hastily picked up from the side of the road.

There are three essential conditions for being fit for love:

First of all, to know what love is (and especially what is not love), what to do when you love; second, to practice learning how to maintain love;

Finally, just as no one has ever become a master of the art of painting by practicing it only when he has nothing else to do, so no one learns to love unless he gives the highest priority to this activity.

Luck in love

Love is an activity, that is, it requires our active participation. We often say "good luck in love", as if love is something that happens to us rarely and by chance; but we confuse love with love and then fall into the trap of trying to maintain our state of love instead of building our love.

The four pillars of such a construction are care for each other, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Too often we are inattentive to those we say we love; I talk and behave carelessly, telling my partner that I know I love him; but the essence of love is to work every day for it to grow, to take care of the loved one. It's not just a metaphor; you can see her embodied in a growing child.

Responsibility is not an external obligation but a voluntary response to the partner's needs; in other words, it is not enough just to work and give him what I think is important, but to find out what is important to him and find ways in which I can respond to those desires.

Respect in love means being able to see the other as a unique and valuable person as he is, not according to the correspondence with the idealizations in my mind.

Respect is considered to be external to love or even a sign that love does not (anymore) exist only for those who confuse love with love. Indeed, in the phase of falling in love, respect does not appear on the surface because you do not see the other: this is just a hanger for the fantasy of the absolute.

A second reason why respect is not visible during this period is that it takes two free people to be respected; or the two are just living the illusion of total fusion, of full mutual dependence. Falling in love, being transient, there are two ways to get out of it: trying to dominate or knowing the other to use the opportunity to approach the date of love in an attempt to build love.

Knowledge is the cement of love: it generates respect, guides responsibility, gives meaning to care for the loved one.

We talked about what love entails, now I will say a few words about how to acquire the ability to love. We can describe four skills that make love lasting: trust, discipline, concentration, patience.

Trust between partners is formed by the courage to expose me, to expose vulnerabilities in front of the other. Let your partner know you so that you can evolve and he can support you.

Discipline is what makes the difference between love as fun ("cool", "fun") and love as a way of life. If I do something only when I feel like it, it's not one of the most important things. What does discipline mean? To have time dedicated to love, to have plans to develop the relationship with the partner as we have, for example, career plans.

Concentration means being present in love, now and here, not just in beautiful memories or plans for the future. It means that the present moment should not be diluted, that we should be together, not just next to each other in front of the TV.

Patience may be more difficult to learn in a world of speed, but it is an essential quality both to have a deep knowledge of the other and to maintain a delicate balance between my needs and the needs of the other.

The ability to love is learned and involves overcoming obstacles. We talked about this above, not about love. For the one who has learned the art of love, all the work necessary to keep love is easy and pleasant. He who wants a shorter path is chosen with a counterfeit, a pale copy of what could have been love.

And then don't say that love is fleeting. "Whoever thinks that all fruits ripen with cherries knows nothing about grapes" (Paracelsus, quoted by Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving - a book from which I have presented many ideas in this article and which I recommend).