The Twenty-Minute Exercise Erich Fromm Recommended Before Trying to Love Better

Erich Fromm didn’t believe love was a talent you’re born with or without. He considered it an art, and like any art, he argued it demands prior training, not just good intentions.

In the final chapter of The Art of Loving (1956), psychoanalyst Erich Fromm shifts gears. After spending nearly the whole book on theory, he asks something more uncomfortable: what can actually be practiced, day to day, to move closer to a more mature love? His answer starts far from love itself.

Three conditions Fromm says every art shares

Fromm argues that any art (carpentry, medicine, music, love) demands three conditions even before you start practicing it:

• Discipline. Not discipline imposed from outside, but the kind that becomes part of your own daily routine, without depending on being “in the mood.”
• Concentration. The ability to devote your full attention to one thing at a time, in a culture Fromm describes as especially scattered: people read, listen, talk, and eat all at once.
• Patience. Accepting that mastering something takes time, in a world that, according to Fromm, values speed above almost everything else.

None of the three, he points out, has anything directly to do with love. They’re general, prior conditions, common to any discipline you want to truly master.

Learning to be alone, before learning to accompany someone

The step Fromm details the most, and the one that might surprise most in a book about love, is this: learning to be alone with yourself, doing nothing else. No reading, no listening to the radio, no smoking, no distraction to fill the silence with.

Fromm argues that this capacity is, paradoxically, a condition for loving well. If someone can’t sustain themselves alone, he argues, they’ll tend to cling to another person like someone clinging to a life raft, and that, by his definition, isn’t love: it’s dependency disguised as love.

The specific exercise he describes in the book

Fromm doesn’t stop at theory. He describes a very specific concentration exercise, inspired by Eastern meditation techniques, which he recommends practicing for about twenty minutes in the morning and another twenty at night:

• Sit in a relaxed position, neither completely rigid nor completely slack.
• Close your eyes and picture a blank screen in front of you, pushing away any image or thought that interrupts it.
• Follow your own breathing without forcing it or actively thinking about it, just noticing it.
• Try to feel your own “self” as the center of your own powers and as the creator of your own world, not as a passive spectator of what happens around you.

Fromm warns that the exercise, at first, feels uncomfortable. It’s common, he writes, to feel restlessness, boredom, or the temptation to give it up as pointless. He compares it to the patience of a child learning to walk: they fall over and over, and keep trying without dramatizing the fall, until one day they walk without thinking about it.

Listening for real, and avoiding the company of “zombies”

Concentration, for Fromm, doesn’t end with the morning exercise. It extends to how you talk with others. He distinguishes between two kinds of conversation:

• Genuine conversation, in which two people talk about something (important or everyday) while really feeling what they say.
• Trivial conversation, in which clichés get repeated, even if the topic discussed is, on the surface, serious or profound.

Fromm even recommends avoiding what he calls, in a striking phrase for 1956, the company of “zombies”: people whose soul seems switched off even though their body stays active, who talk for the sake of talking instead of thinking about what they say. And he makes an interesting point about listening: most people hear others without really listening, and that’s why conversations wear them out. Listening with full attention, he argues, is less tiring in the long run than pretending to listen.

The Zen archer who starts by breathing, not shooting

To explain why you need to train something that seems unrelated to the final art, Fromm draws on an example he takes from the book Zen in the Art of Archery, by the German Eugen Herrigel. A student of that discipline doesn’t start by shooting arrows: they start with breathing exercises, long before ever touching a bow.

In the same way, Fromm argues, anyone who wants to approach the art of loving shouldn’t start by directly searching for the “right” person. They should start with something more basic and less visible: training the capacity to be present, with full attention, in whatever they do, including being alone with themselves.

A foundation, not a shortcut

Fromm is clear that this exercise doesn’t teach you to love by itself, any more than breathing a certain way turns anyone into an archer. He describes it as a foundation: the discipline, concentration, and patience trained in daily life, according to his theory, end up showing later in how someone listens, how they accompany, and how they sustain a bond, much like it shows in the story of Jonah, where loving and actively tending to something are, for Fromm, the same thing.