Mindanao Advice

As a boy, probably around 1960, I read Erich Fromm’s book The Art of Loving in Norwegian. It had been translated from English by Amund Hønningstad, one of the few independent thinkers in Norway, according to my father, who had received a copy as a gift. He passed it on to my mother as an invitation to reconciliation after four years of separation. The gift worked: my parents got back together, and I was allowed to read it.

At the time, many bold ideas were circulating, overwhelming for a boy who had just entered his teens. I was a regular at the library and read Camus, Sartre, Orwell, Huxley, and Arthur Koestler. However, one phrase from Fromm stood out and stayed with me. He wrote about the commercialization of human relationships and introduced the concept of exchange value in the personality market. According to Fromm, our culture’s dominant justification for love is: I love you because I need you. Whereas mature love says: I need you because I love you.

I didn’t fully understand why this subtle difference mattered then, but those two formulations have stayed with me ever since. Over the years, I realized that the first expresses a love rooted in lack, loneliness, perhaps even fear. The second point is richer and more mature: a love that arises from abundance, will, and conscious choice.

Fromm did not write about love as a passive feeling we fall into, but as an art that requires insight, discipline, and personal growth. Love must be learned, he believed. It is about being present for another person without losing oneself. This stood in sharp contrast to the existential darkness found in much of the other literature I read at the time. While Camus, Sartre, and Orwell wrote of meaninglessness and oppression, Fromm offered a way forward—how we might find meaning through human connection while resisting the forces that reduce people to objects in a market system.

“Exchange value on the personality market” is a prophetic phrase. Today, with social media, dating apps, and economic logic infiltrating every corner of life, Fromm appears as a kind of seer. We are taught to present ourselves as products: attractive, efficient, lovable—but often at the cost of losing our authenticity. When love is reduced to a transaction, it loses its transformative power. What happens when the other person no longer meets our needs?

If love is built primarily on desire or dependence alone, it rests on fragile ground. But if I need you because I love you, it expresses something else entirely: that love already exists within me. It doesn’t arise from a void to be filled, but from a desire to give, share, and be close.

Today, the language of love is being diluted. We “like,” “match,” “connect,” and “ghost,” all in a digital flow where our emotions are shaped to fit algorithms. There is more communication than ever, but perhaps less intimacy. I do not judge those who are searching. I acknowledge the vulnerability. But I also see the temptation to make love feel safe by making it superficial.

Fromm understood that real love is unsafe. It demands courage. It requires that we meet ourselves and the other with open eyes, and accept what we see. And yet, even now, we still see traces of Fromm’s hope: in the gaze between two people who have chosen each other through time and hardship, in friendships that survive silence and change, in the desire to be more for another than what we receive in return.

For Fromm, love is not a goal but a way of being. It is not limited to romantic relationships but shapes how we meet the world with care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. It demands that we go against the current and insist on our humanity in an age determined to unteach it.

Perhaps this is what Fromm wanted us to understand: that love is not something we “fall” into but something we create, something we choose again and again in a world that keeps tempting us away from it. And perhaps, if we dare, love can once again become what he believed it was—an art and a path to freedom.

Featured image © Eldar Einarson