The Art of Loving summary

Love is universal, and it’s often one of the very first things we experience. In loving relationships, two people can become as one and yet remain independent and free. How? By being mutually willing to give love.

Love is all about giving, and it has four key elements: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. Demonstrating each of these elements is what makes your love an active, giving love.

Maternal love and paternal love aren’t the only two forms of love, of course. Love comes in all shapes and sizes. Brotherly love, erotic love, self-love and the love of God are four further manifestations of love. Let’s explore them and see how they compare with maternal love and with each other.

Brotherly love provides the foundation for all other forms of love. It means directing the four key elements – caring, responsibility, respect and knowledge – toward any other human being. Brotherly love is what allows us to feel the human solidarity that is at the heart of many religions. As is written in the New Testament: love thy neighbor as thyself.

In the first blink, we learned how a consumerist culture warps our conception of love. Let’s explore this further and get to the bottom of how Western capitalism harms our ability to give and receive love.

Modern capitalism is defined by its radical division of labor. In large businesses, where employees perform highly specialized tasks, workers become nothing more than small cogs in a huge machine. In the auto industry, for instance, this specialization even limits workers to a single action. One worker may be responsible for mounting car doors on the assembly line, and nothing else.

If you were hoping for an easy-to-apply formula for loving in this final blink – well, sorry! Loving isn’t that simple. But, there are three principles that will guide you as you learn the art of loving, or, for that matter, any other art form!

The first is discipline. As in any art, discipline is crucial, and you’ll need it if you want to love well. We can bring discipline to our life by getting out of bed at a regular hour and devoting a set amount of time each week to activities that help us grow, such as meditation, reading or exercise. And we can try not to indulge too much in escapism, by watching movies or substituting a mystery novel for our real life.