"Love is not
primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an
orientation of character that determines the relatedness of a person to the
world as a whole, not toward one ‘object’ of love. If a person loves only one
other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not
love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people
believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact,
they even believe that it is proof of the intensity of their love when they do
not love anybody except the ‘loved’ person. This is the same fallacy, which we
have already mentioned above. Because one does not see that love is an
activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find
is the right object, and that everything goes by itself afterward. This
attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead
of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and
that he will paint beautifully when he finds it. If I can say to somebody else,
‘I love you,’ I must be able to say, ‘I love in you everybody, I love through
you the world, I love in you also myself.’ "
Erich Fromm, in his book, "The Art of Living."