I’ve been fairly absent the last few weeks from blogging. The occasional training post, but that’s not what my blog is about. This blog is about purpose and meaning in life. I wrote a few months back about what would make me die happy. The first two things that would make me smile on my death bed focused on love – loving everything meaningful in my life and having a loving relationship with my partner through ups and downs.

But what is love? How could I expect to really know what that was coming from a failed marriage? The last few months, I’ve read up on love and spent a lot of time reflecting about it, talking to others about it, trying to feel it with friends/family, but also committing to it with others. Today, I feel slightly wiser, but experience is something I need in order to feel comfortable with love. The beauty of love is that you can experience this day in, day out with anyone.

I’ve read two great books on love recently: Love by Leo Buscaglia and The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm. Art of loving was a little too philosophical for me but had a lot of great points, particularly related to how we love in a capitalistic society. But if you’re going to read one, read Love. Fantastic book.

These books are old: one is >20 years old and the other >50. But the meaning behind them really hits home, and I realized that when it comes to love, despite the changing environment, there is a lot that never will change.

I learned a lot from these books that will be hard to summarize in a blog post. I did have a few great takeaways though:

1) Love is a commitment. Erich Fromm mentions (and this is how I read it) that love is not a feeling but a commitment. If love were a feeling, then how would marriages work? Can you truly have a feeling for 50-60 years? I think that most people believe love is a feeling, and therefore, when the feeling goes away, the relationship should end. Love is a commitment makes much more sense to me.

I believe that all love starts with a feeling, but it ends with commitment. Love is work, and those who believe otherwise, I believe, are idealistic. To expect to be attracted to someone physically, emotionally, and intellectually for years and years while spending most of your living free time together without constantly working at it is unrealistic. Love takes thought and innovation. Love should not be expected but worked at. If you want to love, then you must commit to making it work and not lose sight of this through ups and downs. And if you’re like me and this is one of the top 3 values in your life, then it better be your top priority.

2) Love has no capacity. We have the ability to love as many people as we want. Just because we love our wife and kids doesn’t mean we don’t have the capacity to love our friends, our extended family, strangers, etc… I think people get caught up in the love has capacity theory because love takes work (see (1) above), and therefore, we may not want to take the time to love everyone. But it’s good to separate here capacity to love and time capacity.

3) Loving everyone changes your mindset. This was an indirect message from Love. I started accepting people for who they were and stopped blurring my image of them with past events that may have given me “beliefs” about their intentions. Once I did this, I was amazed at how much happier I was.

Sidebar here: love is not just about caring for someone. It’s also respecting that person and sharing/receiving knowledge. Love is often way more than we think it is, and that really stood out. I always thought it was caring, but if you only care for someone, then how is it mutually beneficial for extended periods of time? Love must last, and to make it last, you must give to the relationship as well as receive.

4) Capitalism has distorted our priorities. Yup, surprising, but my favorite takeaway from Erich Fromm’s book. Basically, we spend all of our time focusing on work from 8 to whenever that when we get home, we want to do nothing. But we’re now not working hard at the time of our life that is most meaningful – time with friends and family. We take vacations to do nothing. We don’t work at our hobbies. We sit in front of computers and tvs.

5) Different types of love. The books disagreed on this point. Love said there are not types of love. Art of Loving said that there are several types: brotherly love, self love,god love, romantic love (different word, but its escaping me). I believe in different types of love, and I’ve struggled quite a lot with self-love. I do believe they are all inter-related though.

When you think about your best friend and the significant other that you love, is it different? Do you tell your best friend that you love them? If you do or have done it in the past, has it felt comfortable? Love (book) really taught me that it’s ok to love your friends and others even though society hasn’t really accepted “I love you” in everyday vocabulary to each other. If the feeling is there, share it.

What do you think about love? Is it something that you take for granted? Do you work on it? I’m curious because I’ve never thought of it as something as critically important…until now