How Love Became Just Another Thing to Optimize

Artwork: Shibbal Fatima
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Forty-two percent of U.S. adults experience loneliness at least once weekly, said the APA recently. This is up from 33% in 2025. And 30% in 2024. So if you still trust institutions in this world you’d likely have to conclude that things are getting worse in this area for some reason.

For the philosopher Erich Fromm this would be hardly surprising. After all, to him, one of the most basic facts about being a human is that we’re fundamentally separate from one another. And there’s a common reaction we have to this reality; as he puts it in his most famous book, The Art of Loving:

“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”

The fundamental problem of human existence being “separateness”. Seeking love from other people being a common strategy to cure a kind of existential dread we face. It’s worked for people in the past, I guess.

We all want that person where when something happens in life, they pop into your head as the one you want to tell about it first. The person who gets you to forget for a moment that the two of you are even a different person.

And if Fromm heard that loneliness had turned into an even bigger problem than it was in his day, then he’d likely point to the strategy most people are taught about how they should go about finding love.

If you want to find love…you need to make yourself into someone more lovable.

Some classic ideas people usually go with:

Work out, get paid more, shoot Botox into your face. Stop leaving your disgusting wet towel on the floor of the bathroom. Improve yourself by learning a foreign language. Further improve yourself by refusing to speak the foreign language as some kind of insecure flex.

To Fromm, it’s implied in modern society that you exist as one profile in something like a “personality market”. Where people learn to treat themselves as products. That your value is constantly being assessed within the market, and that you need to increase your overall worth if you ever want the privilege of being bought, sold and traded once somebody falls in love with you.

Now there’s nothing wrong with improving yourself. The tragedy is that when people start to see love in this narrow way two things happen.

One, a relationship becomes simply a transaction between two needy selves. You provide something that they need, and they provide something for you.

For Erich Fromm, this means you ultimately love what the other person does for your ego, not the other person as they are.

Two, once the other person is seen as just a commodity or a service that’s provided to you, then it’s not shocking that your relationship becomes like every other commodity or service you consume.

You enjoy it at first. Maybe for a few months you use it every day. But then after a while it becomes boring and you want something new. Novelty, use, boredom. Your partner becomes like the sewing machine you just sold on Facebook Marketplace.

For Fromm this is the wrong strategy, and it’s based on a completely mistaken view of what love even is.

Love isn’t something that happens to you when the right person appears in front of you. You don’t fall into it as you stand around passively.

Love is a verb, not a noun. For Erich Fromm, love is a practice. It’s an active striving toward the happiness and freedom of the loved person.

Which means that to say, “I love you.” for him doesn’t mean that you check all the boxes of what I need in life right now.

It means, “I am actively oriented toward your life. Today again I choose to be here with you as you are.”

Love is an activity directed toward something. And you can imagine how you’d be completely cut off from this more active view of love if you bought into all the modern assumptions about how to find it.

A pretty useful way of testing whether you’re viewing other people solely in terms of their exchange value:

Be careful if the only people you ever feel “love” towards happen to be attractive, or profitable to you, or agree with you all the time, or reinforce a picture of yourself you’re invested in. Be careful of only falling in love with how another person flatters your ego.

So, if you wanted a term that really describes the kind of activity that love is, for Erich Fromm the best way to describe it is as an “art”.

Where like art it often takes focus on a single task, and patience towards it. It often takes humility and a kind of faith in the process when you’re faced with obstacles.

Most of all though: great art sometimes requires working from a place of real solitude. Which means for him there’s a kind of sick irony embedded into all this.

To learn how to love others often requires you to first learn to love yourself. And in a much deeper way than the tired cliché of making sure you put on your own oxygen mask first.

It’s a form of existential self-love that isn’t found in any self-improvement routine. It’s a turning of that same active love that we can direct toward other people, and it’s applying it when viewing your own existence.

The same questions become things you apply to yourself now:

Can you get to know yourself, truly, without having to run away from what you find there?

Can you have the same level of care when it comes to your own growth? Respect toward your own life?

So, for Erich Fromm, loving yourself and loving other people are far from opposites.

In fact, it’s only when you can sit with your own life without needing another person to make it bearable, that another person can finally appear to you as more than just a solution to your loneliness.

Fromm would say if you’re looking for love: stop asking only how to become more lovable and start asking whether you’ve become more capable of even loving.

Because a society that teaches people to sell themselves will always struggle to teach them how not to consume each other.

For more on Fromm’s The Art of Loving, listen to Philosophize This! Episode #150, “The Frankfurt School: Erich Fromm on Love,” wherever you get podcasts.