Reddit mentions of The Art of Loving

I'm inclined to say no. If you don't treat someone with empathy and respect, what you are doing is not loving them. Generally, I don't think love is something you feel, but something you do, and it has to include having genuine respect and empathy for someone. I think it is very easy for your mother and husband to say they love you, but much harder to actually do it, and they are simply not doing it.

I found the book The Art of Loving a good read on the subject, and you can actually download a pdf of it here: http://farzad.devbro.com/the%20art%20of%20loving.pdf

I recommend reading The Happiness Hypothesis and The Art of Loving.

Those two books are a good start to philosophical and spiritual inquiries that people have always had. They deal with the meaning of life and are relatively easy to read.

Personally, I learned that I might never find my passion, because we're not necessarily supposed to, and I'm so much happier now.

Yeah. What I'm getting here as that you're very lost from yourself. What it's looking like is that you do actions, initiatives, etc., with a strong kind of will. You push through, but in truth you appear not to be quite bringing yourself along. This requires an adequate conception for you to use.

I'll try and use a simlie: we are like trees with legs, that can walk but are also partly rooted. This is to give a sense of how our movements of self work and happen. In your initiatives, you're sort of divided into a little boy who is in the tree and sets out on adventures, but the tree itself stays rooted and in a certain way forgotten. So you go and do, according to goals and ideals you have. These are things that should, in a way, work, but they don't work quite the way you think. So you undertake them, but you're left depleted and unfulfilled. Then you sort of crawl back into the tree, a bit beaten.

But you are the tree, and the tree has feet instead of roots, and yet at the bottom of the feet are roots, too. So it's like a walking kind of tree that roots down. This is a goofy image, but it's good enough I think. A person is like a walking tree and the feet do lift up, but they also set roots. Both at the same time. When you've set out on your projects and initiatives and relationships and lovemaking, in a way you haven't really brought yourself along. Your heart. Here I'll add your heart. The picture of the tree is just a guiding idea, it's not a serious, serious metaphor. But that is part of it.

You are that tree, not the little boy in the tree. Your heart glows when the tree is nourished and connected with the world, the rain, the soil, when it lifts its feet and takes real steps. Here you lose sight of your heart.

The idea of "forcing yourself to have conversations" is a good evidenceof this problem. What is "bae"?

So you set out on a healthy diet thing, a lot of effort. Strong will. Working out. That's just one branch of the tree, but in addition you didn't so much do it from the branch but went off and did it on a kind of virtual branch. It wasn't attached to your "tree self". Your heart wasn't really involved in this adequately.

It's not clear if you did talk to people or it's an idea you have and you are afraid to do it. I'd say that you might fear it because your talkign won't mesh with their talking because their treeself is more unified with themselves, while your's is separated and stagnant, even though you can have high initiative. So when you "talk" you don't talk from the heart and don't connect so well. So the other senses this and it's uncomfortable. You are trying but it's not connecting. Because you are disconnected from yourself.

Your selflessness with sex is the same, it looks like. Your self is separated off from your true self, which is more a rooted thing, a slower growing thing. But bear in mind that since you're separated off from it somewhat, it isn't just slow growing, it's in trouble and not growing right, like you've got it stuck in a bucket and not put in the ground. You're selflessness is to willfully engage, with respect and what not, it appears, but it's still not you that much; it's more willful. That might explain how the sex wasn't good on your end. How you describe it is more that it was a performance, but less really you.

The books you read are superficial. It's good info, but it's not enough about your deeper self. I don't know which books are best for this, but Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving is enough to give you a much better idea of your deeper self. Most of what he's about there is about calming down too much willful effort yet bringing the will into concentration, even meditating in a certain way, but really loving someone. You're efforts seem to be far from that. Self-help is a funny word, but the books you read are much more superficial stuff, oriented to performance and will, but deeper self stuff is another matter. As soon as you can tap into that deeper self, the slower growing, deeper heart, the real you, you will find things that connect to it all over. Even just in the world, in life, in people you meet or have known: it opens up when you open up like that.

The sex example can be a good thing to think about. How would your slower, treeself, true self, heart self be regarding sex? The trick would be strangely simple: date someone without having sex. Put off sex for the longest time possible. Wait until what you want more than anything is to give them a kiss, and still wait a bit more. Until it's really in you down to your roots. See what I mean? This is a lot of "law of reversed effort". You need the opposite of doing: you need nondoing!

Don't think that will lead to not doing things. It leads to plenty of doing, more perhaps, than you could imagine. But since it's organically rooted in your whole self, it is rooted and receiving nourishment from the world, it connects and can be substantial. You're not being substantial. You are more in flight, almost from yourself, or your idea of yourself is just inadequate.

If you saw a therapist, you don't need to see one for a couple of months; you need to see a good one for a couple of years. Not that you have to see one, but the point is it's about the longer self here, not the quick self, the quick fix, the project or the plan, etc. Those all for you run the risk of separating off from your deeper self which, again, is not just not doing so well, but is not even properly planted, so to speak.

When you learn how to find your slower, deeper, truer self, you can make real friends, have a real girlfriend (or boyfriend or whatever it is you want), have a real life, feel your real heart, feel your real, true, deeper needs in a different way.

Even the fast transition you talk of tells a lot about what was happening: "easy come, easy go" is the saying. You were really trying, but you didn't know how to bring yourself along.

To start to think about this isn't exactly hard, so much as really just takes understand what it is. There can be other things: it may be you are fleeing from your "treeself" and deeper heart because your family relationships have you messed up and you fear them as they aren't working well or something. Or you have a "defense mechanism" against something. That term, "defense mechanism" is standard psychology: psychotherapeutic stuff. People can have defenses and do stuff to avoid some difficult feelings. A therapist can be a big help for this. Plus you can read some psychology about therapeutics, basic relationships, even "object theory" and learn more of the basics about defenses as it's very primary. You'd want to be thinking about defenses, feelings and relationships.

Most of all right now you need to not do anything in a very careful way. I mean if you want to see a counselor or a good therapist, that's a good thing, but I bet they'll do some of that, too: you might be all about how you want to do this or that, and they'd come back with, "I'm thinking about how you are relating to me right now". And that's weird: you may want to go off and do, and they are thinking about your relationship to them. See, therapy is a real, human relationship. It's weird because it's a special one, meant to help you see things and learn things, but it's also still a slower, longer term relationship. They would probably work on how you are feeling about them, as it goes along. That's a real basic in real therapy. A lot of that is to bring you back to your real self, your truer heart, your slower self, and to see how you either are clueless about that or are defending yourself against feelings you have and are in a kind of flight.

Part of that you can do on your own, but a good therapist is helpful.

Anything can help you find this, if you are starting to look for it. Even just reading girls' romance novels can help with this. I knew a guy who did that a lot and he's now married. Reading longer novels can help. Reading poetry. Reading books about feelings. But it's more whether you are tapping into that in the first place. Here you seem so lost from yourself! But if you can realize how lost you are, then that's good, because then you can start to find yourself. You can't find yourself if yoiu don't even realize that you're constantly losing yourself. And it looks a bit constant: like you're always doing it in a way. Always going off, never quite oriented to being your truer self.

Try that on for size.

Absolutely true. My dad gave me this book the first time I went through a break-up. It completely changed my views/approach to loving, relationships, etc. And not just romantic relationships. Friendships as well.

I'm sorry to hear that. I'm glad you're doing alright, but seriously that sucks.

If you've got an extra five bucks I would really recommend checking out The Art of Loving. I read it for the first time in High School and I'm really glad I did.

Games people play by Eric Berne. A fascinating read, very small book with a great way to explain why some people react the way they do. Also Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi . This book is a pain in the ass to read, but once I got through it for the first time, I keep it close, like a bible. http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Loving-Erich-Fromm/dp/0061129739
The Art of Loving, by Eric Fromm, again, amazing lay read book.
Hope you enjoy!

My experience, and my studies, indicate that I am right. I suggest reading Erich Fromm's well-known book The Art of Loving. He says:

>[there is a] confusion between the initial experience of "falling" in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of "standing" in love. If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this: in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being "crazy" about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.

I really adored The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm when I read it a few years back (also after breaking up with someone I cared for). It's philosophy in the era immediately following Freud, so there's lots of talk about ego and drive and energy, and none of that is remotely scientific but it is an interesting and sometimes helpful way of conceptualizing emotions. It's very readable and pretty short, too, and I don't think it requires any kind of background knowledge other than a pop-culture awareness of Freud.