Passion and Commitment #070

Is love really only passion?

Hello and welcome again! I'm Andy, a philosophy lecturer, and here we are at Every Dawn where I try to give you a little bit of philosophy every day, something to think about throughout your day. In the previous video, we just talked about love and about how our modern capitalist understanding of the world converts even love into a kind of commodity and an exchange value. You are thinking of yourself as exchanging your own attractiveness, your own value, for the perceived external value of another person—their attractiveness. And you perhaps don't even approach somebody because you're afraid that your value is not enough for them, for what they have to offer in return.

Love as a Commodity

In the same way, like you wouldn't make a too low offer for a very flashy house, you would try to say, "Okay, if I cannot pay the money that this house is worth, I don't try to offer anything at all. I just go and find another house." But with love, this is wrong because your value that you have to offer, in reality, is your internal qualities and your harmonizing of your personality with the personality of the other person. And these externally perceived values are not what it is about, as opposed to the house.

Erich Fromm's Theory of Love

Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm has a whole theory of love. He has written a book that's very famous about love, a book that is called "The Art of Love." You can find this on the internet; you can buy it easily. And this is a very interesting book because it shows how capitalism has influenced us in our relationships with love and even more nowadays with those apps that emphasize this even more. The exchange value of a person as an object of love rather than the deep connection between people.

Love in the Mode of Being

Now, let me read you something that Fromm says about love in the mode of being, which is the opposite, which is love not as an exchange value but as a connection between fully realized human beings. One thing Fromm emphasizes is that love is always conscious effort. It is not something that we fall into like it's always in the romantic comedies where somebody falls in love, and then you know, magic happens, and some stars and some little hearts fly in the air, and then you have love. But what in reality happens is that you have to work on a relationship to another person, and this is love as conscious effort.

The Misunderstanding of Love

Fromm writes, "Erotic love is often confused with the explosive experience of falling in love, the sudden collapse of the barriers which existed until that moment between two strangers. But as was pointed out before, this experience of sudden intimacy is by its very nature very short-lived. After the stranger has become an intimately known person, there are no more barriers to be overcome; there is no more sudden closeness to be achieved. The love person becomes as well known as oneself."

He says what we find attractive in this idea of suddenly falling in love is this sudden disappearance of the barriers between people, which is very rare in our societies because we always keep people at a distance—even our good friends. Often, we don't tell them everything; we don't, you know, we are not intimate with them in a bodily way. In other societies, sometimes it's different. People, for example, even male friends hold hands or they can embrace, but very often in many societies, this is not encouraged.

The Importance of Connection

So the moment when somebody, you know, takes off their clothes and we can touch their body is a very special moment. It is a moment that is very rare and this suddenly opens us up in a way that we very rarely perceive, that very rarely happens. And so, therefore, it gets this strong special significance. And it is such a great moment when this happens. It's not only the body; I mean, you can take your clothes off in the same way like a prostitute would do, but this is not the point. The point is this opening of your personality that happens in a love relationship. So this is special, even if you know you're more the type who tends to have more sexual adventures, but then these don't have this aspect right, so much.

The Illusion of Falling in Love

Fromm says this seeing love as this is mistaken. It is not going to make you happy again because this momentary feeling of wonder you get when these barriers fall is exactly that: it's a moment. And when this happens the first moment, it's great, but then over time, this excitement wears off. It becomes an everyday occurrence that you are together with your partner, and there is nothing more happening, nothing new happening anymore, and then you're bored. And if your love was based on this special moment, then you need to search for another special moment with another person in order to relive this experience. And this is why we have these consecutive affairs that mean nothing.

Love as a Decision

So what should love be if it is lived in the right way? If love is done in the mode of being rather than in the mode of having, if we don't consume our lover but instead try to be with them in an authentic way, Fromm writes to love somebody is not just a strong feeling. It is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go, but the promise to love each other forever stays because it's a promise, it's a decision, and it's not only a feeling.

The Commitment of Love

And even if the feeling wears off over time, the promise remains, and it binds me together with this person to whom I promised this. And this is, after all, the whole point of being married, right? It's not that it is only good for your taxes, but the point is that you have this promise that you will stay together. And interestingly, this leads Fromm to a conclusion that we would find a little strange today, but it seems to be correct from what I have seen in the literature: arranged marriages sometimes can be happier than love marriages. Just because in an arranged marriage, the importance of this promise is stronger. An arranged marriage is based almost entirely on the promise that I will do what was arranged, and it will not depend on my spontaneous feelings.

The Stability of Arranged Marriages

So when there are no spontaneous feelings in the first place, then they cannot go away. And if they cannot go away, then this situation, this marriage, can be much more stable and perhaps even more fulfilling. And it seems to be true from what I read that arranged marriages have a higher probability of actually being happy because they are based on mutual respect, they are based on this feeling of responsibility, and they are not based so much on this transient feeling that can just go away—this feeling of falling in love, which is very unreliable.

Applying This to Other Areas of Life

But of course, this is all not only applicable to love, but you can also see it as something that applies to other areas in your life. Unfortunately, today we have very much of this falling in love with something, being passionate about something—even things like you know, being passionate about YouTube, falling in love with a piece of equipment, a camera, or something, falling in love with making YouTube videos, falling in love with ancient history, whatever it is. You can fall in love with everything, and people do things out of a sense of this momentary passion, of this falling in love.

The Problem with Momentary Passion

But the problem is with all these things that after a while, this moment is gone of falling in love with whatever it is. And when this moment goes, the only thing that will sustain you to stay with the thing you chose is the commitment to it. It's the realization that this is important, that this gives you value for your life, it gives value to the world, and it does this even if you are not in love with it anymore. And this is why so many people burn out at what they do. Right? You have all these YouTubers who start, you know, buying new big cameras, start filming, and then after a year, they have stopped, and they are gone, and they don't film anymore because it didn't pay out. It didn't, you know, they didn't have the immediate success they wanted, and they fell out of love with it.

The Importance of Long-Term Commitment

You have people who will buy a house, you know, an expensive house, and then after a while, they realize they cannot use it because they're never at home because they have to work so much to afford their house that actually, they never live in their house. And they don't really ever develop a relationship to this house. And so they just will go and buy a bigger house. While the opposite are often people you can find on YouTube that have very small houses—this tiny house movement—where perhaps they just take a container or a trailer, and with great love and care and attention, they build this thing out to be their home. And they enjoy every single moment in it, and they configure every single thing in it, and they make it with their hands. And so they have this deep relationship, this deep commitment to this way of living and to this particular home, which the person who just buys a, you know, 10 million house does not have because they have not done anything for it.

The Difference Between Passion and Commitment

The same applies to pets. You have people who will buy a pet, and then after a few months, they realize that the pet is a pain in the neck, and that it requires care, it requires all kinds of things, going out with it, feeding it, taking care of it, and then abandon the pet. While you know, you have other people who will take care of a pet for the whole life of the pet. And this is the difference between, you know, falling in love with something, doing something spontaneously because now for a moment you are, you know, full of enthusiasm for it, and having a long-term relationship with something that is benefiting you and this thing you're passionate about.

Passion as a Slow Burning Fire

So passion should be much less, you know, like an explosion. It's more a slow-burning fire or perhaps even, you know, some hot coals that keep on giving warmth forever. And so let's think about it. Perhaps where in our lives we have made decisions based on a rash passion that didn't pay off, and where perhaps we can still change these things and try to find something that we are perhaps less immediately explosively passionate about, but where we have a more long-term commitment to something that can actually make us happier and where the passion would go away so quickly. Thank you, and see you next time.