Dating Blurb

Psychologist Erich Fromm says, “Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality.” In this kind of love, he says we “have an active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.”

The key word in addiction is “self-centeredness.” To love we need to transcend our own selfish desires, and that’s difficult work. When we elevate ourselves from the regime of selfishness to a regime of unselfishness where we can connect to other people, w can b sure that we are in love. After all, during the honeymoon period of a relationship we become consumed by our own wish to achieve happiness with the other person. And we can’t imagine this unity including such realities as fundamental differences in values, disagreement, conflict, and separation of one kind or another. But then why doesn’t this honeymoon period last till eternity. It is only when it does that we can be sure to have a happily ever after relationship.

Describing infatuation, Erich Fromm says that two passionately attracted people “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.” When we’re infatuated our inner emotional seascape is a whirlpool of possessiveness, eroticism, and fear. It certainly isn’t a calm cove of contentment. It is when we confuse our this feeling of infatuation with feelings of love, that we fall prey to addictive relationships whom we cling on to not for spiritual and emotional well being but to fend off our own feelings of insecurity.