Mature Love Analysis

6. Describe the concept of immature versus mature love using Rilke and Fromm among other sources for elaboration. How does immature love relate to the concept of completing oneself through another? Draw from the Plato's myth of Aristophanes and other sources to illustrate your thoughts. Rilke and Fromm, fascinating authors who are passionate about love in its various forms, both use their gifts of words to enlighten readers about the difference between immature and mature love. Immature love is one that lacks a genuine emotional connection and is likely shared out of convenience. Fromm argues they might as well “be called symbiotic union” (Fromm, 18). Mature love, however, holds a deeper value that is harder to attain and far more worth

Fromm describes the value of secure attachment, explaining that to a baby, “mother is warmth, mother is food, mother is euphoric state of satisfaction and security” (Fromm, 38). As they grow, children learn how to love and be loved through this relationship. The experience of being loved as a baby is described as a “passive one” because “there is nothing I [the baby] has to do in order to be loved” (Fromm, 39). Love, as a child may have learned about it, can only be received and “cannot be acquired, produced, controlled”, but the “capacity to love” can be developed; this is usually displayed in children starting at age eight (Fromm, 40). In a healthy learning journey, children come to learn that “love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love” (Fromm, 46). Children will seriously struggle - especially in regards to their ability to love and be loved - if they are deprived a comforting, present caretaker in their early years of