The Bible says, "Love never ends." (love never fails away.)” Literature that has been passed down through the ages celebrates great love—not narrowly conceiving of it as love, but also of friendship, affection, and oneself.
The 163-page book is extremely concise, and it takes you an afternoon to clean your heart. It tells everyone at the outset that if one does not strive to develop one's whole personality and thus attain a creative tendency, then every attempt to love will fail; if one does not have the ability to love others, if one cannot truly love others humbly, courageously, sincerely, and disciplinedly, then one will never be satisfied in one's own love life. Everyone can ask themselves, how many people have you really seen who are truly capable of loving?
Born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany, the author taught psychology courses and engaged in psychoanalytic research at Columbia University and the National University of Mexico, and one of the representatives of the psychoanalytic school was a "Freudian Marxist". The Art of Love caused a sensation when it was first published in the United States in 1956, and people rushed to buy it, and the first edition sold out within a few days. The second edition was published by George Allen and The Anvin Company; in 1962 a new edition was published and reprinted ten times in a row. It was reprinted countless times.
When I opened the book with this question in mind, the first chapter answered my doubts.
The two young men met on a misty rainy night, the boy handed the girl an umbrella, and between the electric light and flint, the two fell in love. Boys think girls are too beautiful and affectionate, girls think boys are tall and handsome. The two began a sweet love affair.
Is this love?
In this book, I found the answer: instantaneous passion and love can only be called "falling in love", and only when both parties reach the fit of body and soul and turn the short-term passion into a lasting "being in love", can we truly experience the beauty and intoxication of love.
So of course love is an art, it is an innate emotion, but not everyone can control it. We need to abandon our excessive obsession with achievement, status, fame, power, etc., and instead "regard becoming a master above all else." And only by mastering the soul of art can you become a master.
A poor painter who has been depressed all his life. Although he prides himself on being a painter and wants to become a famous painter, he has not studied the art of painting in his life, but thinks that he is not successful because he has not yet found the right object he wants to paint. If he found it, he would surely become a painter.
Most people understand love, like this painter, that love only needs to find a specific object, and that loving one person is the proof of strong love. And the author believes that:
"Love, first of all, is not a relationship with a certain person, but more of an attitude, a tendency in character. This attitude determines one's relationship with the whole world, not with the only object of love. If a person loves only his object and is indifferent to others, his love is not love, but selfishness. ”
1. Fraternity
Fraternity is love between equals. As the Bible says, "Love others as you love yourself." "This kind of love, there is no exclusivity. This requires you to have a sense of responsibility, care, respect and understanding of others for all of you.
And fraternity is based on love for those in need, for the poor and for strangers.
In this epidemic, our medical staff have shown their fraternity, entered the hospital, then you are a person in need of help in the eyes of doctors, whether you are poor or rich, whether you have known each other before, at this moment, you only have love in your hearts.
2. Maternal love
I don't think any mother in the world would think that she doesn't understand maternal love. But in the author's view, maternal love is an unreserved affirmation of a child's life and needs. It contains two aspects:
On the one hand, it is necessary to care for the young child and let his fragile little life grow up healthy; on the other hand, it is necessary to make the child love life and let him feel: or how good! What a joy to be a little girl/little boy!
Last September, a teenage child jumped off a building on the first day of school because his mother didn't play with his mobile phone. I thought, is the opening of school a willingness to make him unhappy? Or is it because he doesn't love life anymore?
Therefore, good maternal love not only requires you to let your child grow up healthily, but also let him learn to love life. And this requires that the mother should also be a happy person and spread the love of life to the child!
It is important to note that the author also mentions that maternal love is not just for one's own children. If you love your children, you should love other children, and all the children who need your help, maternal love does not belong to one person.
3. The love of men and women
Fraternity is for all people, maternal love is for children in need, and love for men and women is exclusive. The "beating of the little three" incident that everyone likes to hear is because the "little three" have destroyed this exclusivity.
But the love between men and women is very confusing, and many people think that if two people are willing to fight each other's body, they are in love with each other. But if the physical union is not based on love, it is back to produce a purely physiological temporary union. The combination of sex gives them an illusion, and when it's over, they're still a pair of strangers.
If men and women do love each other, there must be a prerequisite for their sex, and that is that I love each other from the essence of life and experience the essence of each other. Loving someone is not just a strong feeling, a decision, a judgment, a promise.
4. Self-love
Seeing this, you may ask, who doesn't love themselves? Or think that it is impossible for a person to love himself as much as he loves others, and to regard self-love as self-interest. Even the famous psychologist Freud believed that self-love is narcissism, and that loving others and loving oneself are mutually exclusive.
But the author believes that he is also the object of his own love. If a person can have creative love, then he must also love himself, but if he loves only others, then he is incapable of loving. For loving oneself and loving others exist in parallel. He believes that the self-interested person is because he feels empty and disappointed inside, so this timid person needs to make up for his lost happiness by obtaining satisfaction from the outside. It seems that such a person is very close to himself, in fact, he is only through his relationship with himself, to cover up and supplement his lack of ability to love.
Finally, the author also talks about Divine love, because religious beliefs are different from domestic conditions, so I will not repeat them here.
In the article above, we finally know what the true art of love is. But the real conundrum lies ahead: How can we truly acquire the art of love? The author believes that by reading a book is a mystery that true love cannot be obtained, and that the art of love can only be obtained through each person's own experience.
He made four suggestions:
1. Discipline is required first. This discipline is not achieved by practicing for a few hours a day, nor is it obtained by relaxing after eight hours of labor, but it needs to be obtained throughout your life.
2. Concentration. Here, I think what the author is saying is the need to go into society and get in touch with more people, rather than sitting quietly in the corner reading, eating, smoking, drinking.
3. Patience. To learn art is to be patient, and those who want to achieve results as quickly as possible will never learn an art.
4. Great interest.
"The Art of Love" has been written for more than half a century, but the loneliness and loss of the spirit is still the shackles that imprison modern people, so its ideas still have unquestionable practical guiding significance for us. As the author puts it:
"If I do love one person, then I love other people, and I love the world and love life." If I can say to a person, 'I love you,' I should also be able to say, 'I love all people in you, I love the world, and I love myself.' ”