Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 14
On the Ability to Love
The Difference Between Love and Symbiotic Relationships
Love is the most misused subject in our society. Love has very little to do with the feelings that we believe to be love, but it is rather an entire orientation toward life. Fromm correctly rebuffs most common conceptions of love including falling in love and being in love. He correctly wrote that there is only the act of loving.
I dealt to some extend with possessive marriages and relationships in the chapter The Essence of Today’s Adaptive Psychology. It critical to add that what most of us experience as love has little to do with the act of loving. Most people experience love as a passive feeling that comes from the symbiotic relationship with another person that generates stability and security. For most people in our society, love is the “stability” of being dependent on other people. It is a submission to another person, or the “security” from dominating or possessing other people; it is the intensity of sexual encounters with others, and the inability to be alone — all presumably prove that a person needs others to love. It is all connected to the having and possessing mode of existence, whereby we control, being controlled by, or are depended on another person such as a partner in a marriage. These symbiotic relationships are experienced as love.
For the market personality a loving orientation boils down to possessing the most attractive package personality on the market for sell, or the best appealing package to get another package — which is confused in our society with love — in particularly when such an appealing package also has the dough. A good “loving” package should have the most attractive dress, attractive intelligence, the best jokes, social prestige, and a successful career.
In our society human relationships are based on possessiveness; relationships in the last analysis derives from having a possessive ego which gets the security from possessing humans and things. Thus, the possessive relationship to others which is called love is only an illusion that eventually falls apart as the partners discover that they never loved each other. A good example of a possessive love is the exclusive romantic love. In such a romantic love the couple exclude the rest of the world, as they “fall” in love. They create a bubble around themselves as they project on each other all these wonderful romantic features that have little to do with the real characters of the couples. Usually each one plays the romantic game, and displays a loving act and persona that he/she is conditioned to believe are the best to produce love in the other. That act of romanticism can come from the dozens of romantic movies that the couple saw, or from a refined performance of love that worked for each of them in previous romantic encounters. As they produce a bubble around them, they believe that the barriers of their egos melted; it seems that two egos were enlarged and became one. After sometime, however, the romantic illusion fractures as they inevitably discover the real personality of each other including all its social contradictions as manifested in insecurities and fears. When they “fall” in love, they normally project their own crippled fantasies into the other person. When they discover some years later the real partner with his/her insecurities and stunned personality, the love turns into hate; the basic separateness that existed under the veneer of the love’s fantasy emerges into the open. At this point they stop projecting on each other the portrait of a prince (or princes) on the white horse. They start projecting on each other their real insecurities from the past and the present. At this point the frequencies of fights increases and they eventually realize that they do not love each other.
Whether we are conscious about it or not, many times what lies underneath such “love” is a naked material interest or the need to soothe fears and insecurities from loneliness:
“What is social convenience, custom, mutual economic interest, shared interest in children, mutual dependency, or mutual hate or fear is consciously experienced as ‘love’ — up to the moment when one or both partners recognize that they do not love each other, and that they never did.”[1]
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[1] Eric Fromm, To Have or To Be, page 33.