Muslim Singlehood

L. O. V. E.

  “Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one "falls into" if one is lucky?”  So begins  “The Art of Loving,” a little book by Erich Fromm which is based on the former premise, while as Fromm states, undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.

I first ran across Fromm’s book which conducting research on the expression and biology of romantic love.  I was interested to see how love is expressed across all human cultures.  Research proved what deep down we all know, that attachment is innate to human kind.  Every culture across the globe expresses some sort of attachment, some sort of “love” for others. We human beings are social beings.  I recently heard a beautiful reminder of this point: Humans are one of the few creations of Allah that cannot survive at birth.  Leave us alone and we will die.  It’s clear that connecting with others is required for our survival.   We know this - but what of love?  

 Why does it appear that love, which is an innate human emotion, is such a complicated act?  In my opinion, we don’t know what true love is.   As the opening question revealed, Love is an art.  Fromm writes,

 “The first thing we have to learn is that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art. Maybe here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power - almost all our energy is used for learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.”

We must get back to loving - fully and deeply.   Think of the number of celebrities and millionaires that commit suicide.  Money obviously isn’t the most important thing in life – it’s love.

But why do we expect that love, and by extension, marriage will be easy as pie, when we expect nothing else in life to flow as effortlessly?   I’m certainly guilty of holding this unrealistic expectation.  In Islam it is said that marriage is “half of our deen (religion/way of life).”  There have been many explanations of this statement but for me, I’ve come to realize that in order to have a successful marriage, you must learn and truly practice the art of love.  It is through this process that we are able to cleanse the soul of negativity, and open our hearts to goodness.  It’s not saying “I DO” that brings  you closer to fulfilling your deen, but rather the daily practice of love for another human being. 

True love is not about wanting to be with someone every moment of the day, it is about being able to put someone else’s needs before your own. It’s about being able to see the goodness is someone even when you do not like them.   Sounds easy, but it takes practice.   I’m practicing.  Are you?

By Zarinah El-Amin Naeem