love

Goofing on Fromm again
Oh god I love this dude! Wonder why, huh? ;-)

"People believe that to love is simple but that to be loved is most difficult. In our marketing orientation people think they are not loved because they are not "attractive" enough, attractiveness being based on anything from looks, dress, intelligence, money, to social position and prestige. They do not know that the real problem is not difficulty of being loved but the difficulty of loving; that one is loved only if one can love, if one's capacity for love produces love in another person, that the capacity for love, not for it's counterfeit, is a most difficult achievement."
Eric Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion

When I first read the above, it took a few minutes for me to get it at all. And even longer for true understanding to come. As a matter of fact I'm still chewing on it. (That's one of the things I love about Fromm. He can be so straightforward. Yet still I find I must work at it. And every time I do, I find that I am rewarded with new insight :)

I instantly got the first part - "In our marketing orientation people think they are not loved because they are not "attractive" enough...."
For me puberty coincided with the beanpole Twiggy's rise to stardom, and so I've been going round in circles with this attractiveness-monkey most of my life. I know the ins and outs of those feelings intimately. I've learned time and again that what you know and what you believe about yourself does not always coincide with how you feel. And no amount of intellectualizing or will power can change those feelings permanently. No wonder so many folks fall into this I-am-not-______-enough trap. afterall our culture and economic system is dependent upon keeping us in this unbalanced state.

The next part is what stopped me and forced me think.
"that one is loved only if one can love, if one's capacity for love produces love in another person,"
I had to turn "produces love in another" over in my mind again and again. I just didn't get it at first. What did he mean "produces"?

Eventually I decided I needed to figure out who "produced" love in me, to go looking for it, to see if I could feel love, feel having been loved. Maybe then I could understand.

Note, I can't count how many times in the past couple years that I've been told "You are thinking too much, try to feel". And so this trying to feel business is a skill I've been consciously attempting to cultivate. Funny, as useful as I have found it to be, it still doesn't come on its own but must be summoned on purpose for most tasks. This seemed an appropriate application.

I started thinking of certain people I've known over the course of my life, starting with the most obvious of loved ones, my father and his mother. I was searching for the emotions inside me that colors their memory. And I was thinking, how should this 'love produced' feel? And I was wondering who all I could lump together in similar feelings-produced categories.

Again and again, I purposely placed my mind on specific people and waited. Eventually I was able to recognize an emotional pattern that I believe is love. I believe it to be an aching yearning feeling; a hunger; a longing to reach out, to touch, to be with; and a desperate desire to give back in kind, a gratefulness. I've decided this specific combination is a good litmus test.

Over the course of a few days time I ran my mind over lots of people, relationships and emotional memories. And I came up with a short list. It seems that only a few special people cause this love-feeling to well up. I guess love is not as common as commonly thought, or at least in my life, not. Another observation I made is that, for me, the warm and fuzzy brought on by thoughts of these loved ones, is tinged with a bitter-sweetness, an ache brought on by loss and/or distance; some are dead, some moved far away and others have never been physically nearby.

I've been sitting with these love ideas now for a few weeks wondering, "Well what now?" The melancholy perpetually threatens but I don't want to go there. Knowledge like this needs to be leveraged and so I've been sitting with it, trying to accept and understand this love thang more completely. Below are a few of the places I've gone with it.

When I say "the desire to give back in kind" I mean the desire to love them back, to love the lovers. I think that is a very telling part, the way that desire arises spontaneously, from up and out of their love, from the love they produced inside me. I realize now that this is something different than what I would describe as my everyday giving-love motive. It is hard exactly to describe where the love-giving that I have done over a lifetime has come from, but I can definitely sense that for the most part, it is from some place different than the emotion-place that the folks on my short list take me.

It is embarrassing and sad, but there is no getting around the fact that, I think I've spent my whole life working so hard at trying to love, trying to let others know, or convince them, that I loved them, that I'd not noticed, actually not been able to identify, the lack coming back in my direction. I've taken in love's counterfeit, without question. I've lived on it so long that the malnourishment compounded. I accepted 'loves' at face value and never looked under the surface. I never bothered to compare, 'Why does this love feel different than that love?'; never considered, 'Is it possible that some situations/exchanges labeled love are not love at all, but instead, its counterfeit?'

My right brain has a song for most every occasion. Shakira is one of many that fits here.
"Did it again, love, I got it all wrong
But it felt so right, I can't believe it
And all the mistakes that went on for so long
Wish there was a way I could delete it"

And now to complicate the emotional landscape further -
Realizing that my attempts at loving were not always generated by genuine love itself, I must ask,
Did I produce love in them? Could I? Can I? Is it possible to fail in one of love's directions but succeed in the other?
I don't know.
Can misguided motivations sincerely executed produce the desired results?
I don't know. I think the Magic 8-ball answer would be "it is doubtful". Afterall it seems that those I've loved, tried to love, have not been motivated to give back in kind, and that is one of my criteria, right? I didn't give expecting anything specific in return but it is just that as I look around at my "closest" relationships lately I see an awful lot of what can only be described as profound disrespect. And that hurts. It is hard to reconcile with my giving spirit.
But what if I don't know how to receive love?
And what if that is the reason for the very short list?

My questions are endless. Maybe tomorrow I'll continue this and contemplate other love related topics such as the too-good-to-be-true a.k.a. experiencing-love-makes-me-paranoid phenomena. Until then I'll keep reading Fromm and others, content that I am learning, and resting in the warmth of the love I know is real.