Mature Love

A state and a capacity—two modes of one word

Andrey Zarinsh & Maria Evilkut · United Wisdom · Inner Transformation · Author series

Archival translator’s note. This translation preserves the essay’s argument, including categorical claims inherited from the Russian original. Its declarations of agreement among ten traditions, fixed timelines for loving-kindness practice, and “70 percent / 30 percent / 100 percent” attachment-and-repair figures have not been verified here. Attachment descriptions are not personal diagnoses. Its invitations to remain, act despite feelings, and repair conflict do not oblige anyone to tolerate abuse or abandon boundaries. Difficulty asking for help does not establish that a person has no close relationships.

State and capacity: two modes of one word. Greek antiquity, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Sufism, Indian bhakti, Celtic tradition, Japanese psychology, Erich Fromm, and attachment theory are brought together here in an authorial comparison around one idea: love is not luck, but a skill.

I. Not an Object, but a Capacity

In 1956, Erich Fromm opened The Art of Loving with an observation that, seventy years later, sounds fresher than most contemporary writing about love. Most people, he wrote, think the problem of love is the problem of being loved. Finding the right object. Developing their attractiveness. Earning affection, pleasing, holding on.

But love does not depend on the object. It depends on the capacity. You can meet the ideal person and fail to love them because you have not learned how. And you can love a difficult person because you have learned. The object is chance. The capacity is years.

The essay compares ten approaches through its central idea: love does not arrive. Love is learned.

II. A State and a Capacity

One distinction runs through everything that follows: love as a state and love as a capacity.

A state is something that happens to you. Falling in love, tenderness, delight, longing. States have a beginning and an end. They arrive as a wave and retreat with the ebb. You can do nothing with them except notice whether they are there.

A capacity is something within you. The skill of attention, the skill of holding, the skill of returning. A capacity can be trained. It has degrees of mastery. It can be lost, and it can be restored.

When the ancients spoke of love, they almost always meant the second. Contemporary mass culture almost always means the first. Mature love begins by understanding that these are different phenomena.

III. Four Greek Words

The Greeks had four words for what Russian rather awkwardly translates as “love.” Each is a genre of its own.

Eros is desire. Aspiration, attraction, admiration of beauty. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates says eros is the soul’s upward movement on the ladder of beauty: from body to soul, from soul to beautiful actions, from actions to beauty itself.

Philia is friendship. Not passion, but mutual goodwill. Aristotle devoted two of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics to philia, more than to any other subject.

Storge is familial affection. A mother’s love for her child, familiarity with loved ones, the warmth of belonging.

Agape is giving. Rare in classical Greek, it is the principal word for love in the New Testament. Not desire, friendship, or warmth, but a decision to wish another well (Britannica, Four Greek Concepts of Love; Wikipedia, Greek words for love).

Four words, four movements of the soul. What Russian “love” heaps into one basket, Greek divides into four grammars.

IV. Aristotle: Three Kinds of Philia

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle divides friendship, philia, into three types—a distinction that has not aged in 2,400 years (Philosophy Break, Aristotle’s 3 Types; Antigone, Aristotle’s Friendship).

The first is friendship for utility. Friends need one another for practical purposes: a partner, colleague, neighbor who lends a car. It works while both benefit. When the benefit ends, the friendship ends.

The second is friendship for pleasure. Friends need one another for enjoyment: they are amusing, witty, easy company. It works while both enjoy it. Mood, circumstances, or age changes, and the bond falls apart.

The third is friendship for virtue. Friends value one another for who each is, not for usefulness or pleasure but for qualities of character. Aristotle writes that such friendship is rare and requires time and maturity, but it alone endures because virtue does not diminish.

This typology applies to every kind of love. Most romantic unions rest on the first two types: the partner brings utility—stability, children, status—and pleasure—sex, conversation, warmth. When those fluctuate, the union shakes. The third type is choosing each other for the person themselves, the only thing that withstands time.

V. Metta: Training Love

In Buddhism the word for love is mettā, loving-kindness. Not passion, attachment, or wishing good for one’s own people. Unconditional goodwill toward all beings without exception.

The Karaniya Metta Sutta, Suttanipāta 1.8, is a short text Theravada monks learn by heart. Its culminating line: “As a mother protects her only child at the cost of her own life, so let a person cultivate boundless love toward all beings” (Wikipedia, Metta Sutta; Buddhist Centre, Metta Sutta).

Metta is not a feeling. Metta is training. In classical practice one begins with oneself—“May I be free from harm”—then moves to a loved one, a neutral person, a difficult person, and all beings. It is an exercise performed daily, twenty minutes at a time, for years. After two or three years, the mind becomes accustomed to goodwill as a background state.

Ask a Westerner how frequently they love, and they will probably say “a few times in my life.” A Buddhist practitioner has a different frequency. They love every minute because they have trained the direction of attention.

VI. The Four Brahmaviharas

Metta has three sisters. Together they form the four brahmaviharas, the four “abodes of Brahma”: metta, loving-kindness; karuna, compassion; mudita, sympathetic joy; and upekkha, equanimity.

Karuna is a response to another’s suffering. Not pity from above, but a movement toward someone in pain. Without it, metta risks becoming sentimentality.

Mudita is joy in another’s happiness. Without it, metta risks becoming condescension: “I generously wish you well, but if things really do go well for you, I will be upset.”

Upekkha is equanimity. The ability to hold love whether another accepts or rejects it, responds or does not. Without it, metta risks becoming attachment that demands a response.

Four dimensions, with love at their intersection. Loving in only one leaves it lopsided. In all four, it holds.

VII. Hesed: Faithfulness Through Time

In Hebrew the principal word for love is hesed. No single Russian word can translate it. “Mercy,” “merciful love,” “faithfulness to the covenant”—all are approximate (Precept Austin, Hesed; BibleProject, Khesed).

Hesed is love proved by faithfulness over time. Not a flash, feeling, or mood. It is a pattern of behavior across years. In Exodus 34:6, God calls himself rav-hesed, “most merciful,” literally “abounding in faithful love.”

Between two people, hesed is what remains when passion has passed, usefulness disappeared, and pleasure given way to routine. After twenty years together, a wife is ill and her husband brings her broth without asking whether he enjoys doing so: that is hesed. The Talmud, Sotah 14a, teaches that the whole Tanakh begins and ends with acts of hesed: at the beginning God clothes Adam and Eve; at the end he buries Moses. Scripture’s structure is framed by faithful love.

Mature love contains this element. Without hesed it fluctuates with feeling. With hesed it becomes a supporting structure of life.

VIII. Agape: Fifteen Characteristics

In chapter 13 of the First Letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul gives world literature’s best-known definition of love. His Greek word is agape, not eros, philia, or storge: the third type, the one that is a decision.

Paul lists fifteen characteristics. They are worth setting down together:

“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not proud or rude, does not seek its own, is not easily angered, keeps no account of wrongs, does not rejoice in injustice but rejoices with the truth; it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” — 1 Corinthians 13:4–8, translated from the archive’s Russian quotation

This is not a description of a feeling. A feeling cannot be prescribed. It is an operational definition of behavior. Paul says: this is how love is recognized—not by what someone says about it, but by how they act (Renner, Love Is Patient and Kind).

The Greek word rendered as “is patient” in the Russian Synodal translation is makrothumia. Literally, “long heat.” A candle’s long wick. A candle that burns a long time. An image of love as endurance: the ability to burn without burning out.

IX. Ishq: Layla and Majnun

In the Islamic world, especially Sufism, the principal word for love is ishq: burning love, passion, ecstasy. Ordinary Muslim writers avoid applying this word to God—it is too strong. Sufis use precisely this word (Sufi Allegory, Layla and Majnun; The Golden Sufi Center, Love Is Fire).

In the twelfth century, Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi wrote Layla and Majnun, a poem that became for Sufi tradition what the Song of Songs became for Christianity. It tells of the young Qays, who falls in love with Layla. Their family forbids them to be together. Qays loses his reason and goes into the desert, hence the nickname Majnun, “madman.”

The Sufi reading: Layla is majaz, metaphor. The earthly beloved is a window through which Majnun sees the divine. When Layla is taken away, the window remains: he has learned to love beyond it. In the desert Majnun has not lost Layla. He has moved from loving a face to loving the light that passed through that face.

Rumi, a student of this tradition, puts it this way: “The beloved is everything; the lover is only a veil.” In mature love, “I love” gradually recedes and “there is love” grows.

Rabia of Basra, the eighth-century mystical poet, gave the most uncompromising formula. She was asked, “Do you love God?” “Yes.” “And do you hate Satan?” “No. My heart is so occupied with love of God that it has no room for hatred.” She also said that loving God for paradise is a merchant’s work, loving for rescue from hell a slave’s work. Loving for love’s own sake is the only worthy way.

X. The Five Rasas of Bhakti

In India, love—prema in Sanskrit—is considered through a system of rasas, “tastes” of emotional relationship. In bhakti there are five.

Shanta-rasa is peace: love as quiet presence, without particular passion but without detachment either.

Dasya-rasa is service: loving as a servant loves a master, devotedly, expecting nothing but the opportunity to serve.

Sakhya-rasa is friendship: loving as one friend loves another, as equals, playing, arguing, trusting.

Vatsalya-rasa is parental: loving as a mother loves a child, with protective tenderness, seeing the beloved as someone needing care.

Madhurya-rasa is conjugal, the lover’s mode: loving as a lover loves the beloved, with eros, passion, a desire for closeness.

Bhakti tradition teaches that mature love does not choose one rasa. It passes through all five. With the same person, at different times or simultaneously, one can experience peace, service, friendship, parental care, and passion. Flexibility among the rasas is a mark of mastery.

XI. Anam Cara: A Soul Friend

The Irish have an expression difficult to translate: anam cara. Anam means soul, cara friend. “Soul friend.”

Its modern interpreter is John O’Donohue, the Irish poet-priest, in Anam Cara (1997). He describes a relationship in which you can be naked in soul without fear of judgment. Before an anam cara, you need not pretend, choose your words, or hide your weaknesses. This person sees you—and stays.

In Celtic tradition, such a bond is not limited by roles. An anam cara may be a spouse, a friend, a teacher, a brother. What matters is that the quality of recognition between two souls allows each to recognize the other as kin.

Mature love contains an element of anam cara. Without it, love remains a social function, a union of roles. With it, love becomes an encounter.

XII. Amae: Allowing Yourself to Need

In 1971, Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi published The Anatomy of Dependence, Amae no Kōzō, posing the issue sharply: Western psychoanalysis and psychology teach that dependence is pathological, while Japanese culture shows that healthy dependence is the foundation of intimacy (Wikipedia, The Anatomy of Dependence; Study.com, Amae; PubMed, Clarification of Amae).

Doi introduced amae: the ability to ask someone close to indulge your weakness, confident it will be accepted. A child who knows without words that their mother will pick them up is an example. So is an adult who can come to his wife and say, “I feel awful. Hold me,” without explaining why.

Doi showed that the Western attitude “I must cope on my own” makes intimacy impossible. If you do not allow yourself to need, you do not allow another person to be needed. Amae is the ability to show vulnerability and thereby give the other person a place.

This overturns the familiar idea of maturity. The mature person is not the one who can do everything alone, but the one who can allow themselves to be in need before someone they trust—and can accept another’s need without withdrawing.

XIII. Fromm: The Art of Loving

The German-American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm published The Art of Loving in 1956, a short text that continues to shape Western discussion of love (Fromm, The Art of Loving, PDF; Tasshin, On The Art of Loving).

Its central thesis: love is an art, and like every art it must be learned. Modern people, Fromm writes, treat love as luck: “If I am lucky enough to meet someone, I will love. If not, I will not.” This is like treating music as “If I am lucky enough to sit at a piano, I will play Beethoven.” Without years of practice, you will not.

Love, for Fromm, is an activity, not a passive affect. “Falling in love” is not love but the release of loneliness. Love is standing in love. An active act.

One more distinction: “Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need you because I love you.” In the first formula the object is a function: they fill my emptiness. In the second, a person: I choose them, and the need arises from that choice.

XIV. Four Elements

Fromm describes four elements without which there is no love, however strongly it is declared.

Care: active participation in the life and growth of the person loved. A mother who declares love for a child but does not care for them does not love. This applies to every form: loving without action is impossible.

Responsibility: from the Latin respondere, “to answer.” The ability to respond to another’s needs, not as an obligation but as a readiness.

Respect: from Latin respicere, “to look at.” Seeing another as they are, rather than as you want them to be. Respect excludes using them. If you “love” another as a function of your needs, you do not see them—and therefore do not respect or love them.

Knowledge: not information about another, but entering their inner reality. Knowledge is possible only with care, responsibility, and respect; each subsequent element rests on the preceding one.

Love without one of these four elements is something else: dependence, use, desire, fear of loneliness. Not love.

XV. Bowlby and Ainsworth

In 1969, British psychiatrist John Bowlby published Attachment, the first volume of a trilogy that transformed developmental psychology. Its thesis: the capacity to love in adulthood forms in the first years of life through relationships with the mother or principal caregiver (Positive Psychology, Attachment Theory; Attachment Project, History).

In the 1970s, Bowlby’s student Mary Ainsworth developed an experimental protocol, the Strange Situation. A one-year-old is briefly left with a stranger; then the mother returns. The child’s response allows their attachment type to be identified.

Ainsworth distinguished three types, later four:

Secure attachment: the child is upset by the mother’s departure, happy at her return, and quickly calms. They know the mother will return. The world is fundamentally reliable.

Anxious, or ambivalent: the child is very distressed by departure but both reaches toward and pushes away the returning mother. They are unsure she will return reliably.

Avoidant: the child shows no distress at departure and does not approach on return. They have learned not to expect a response.

Disorganized: the child behaves contradictorily, freezes, shows fear. This develops through experience in which the caring figure was simultaneously a source of protection and threat.

XVI. Adult Styles

In 1987, Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver showed that the same attachment types appear in adults’ romantic relationships. Securely attached adults trust readily and feel at ease both in closeness and alone. Anxiously attached adults want merging, fear abandonment, feel jealous. Avoidant adults keep their distance, devalue closeness, and leave when intimacy grows.

This is not a diagnosis. It is a map of a starting position. Attachment can change. Through reliable relationships, therapy, and conscious practice, a style can shift.

An important discovery: secure attachment is not the absence of conflict but the ability to restore connection after rupture. One study found that secure attachment develops even when a parent responds correctly to a child’s needs in only 70 percent of cases. Thirty percent miss the mark. What matters is repair afterward: the parent notices they did not hear, returns, and restores connection.

Mature love between adults works the same way. There will be ruptures and misses. What matters is not their absence but the capacity to repair.

XVII. Where the Traditions Converge

Their convergence can be seen at four points.

First: love is action, not a feeling. Hesed, agape, metta, and Fromm’s art all point to one thing: love is confirmed by deeds, not declarations.

Second: love is a skill. Aristotle teaches friendship over years; a Buddhist monk trains metta in meditation; Fromm calls it an art. Not talent, but daily practice.

Third: love requires maturity. A teenager falls in love—eros and storge. Loving in its full scope—agape, virtuous philia, hesed—is possible only for someone who has become themselves. Without an established “I,” love becomes a search for a missing piece.

Fourth: love is not the opposite of freedom. The two are often confused. Attachment from need is unfree. Attachment by choice is a profoundly free act. Hesed is a choice repeated across years. Agape is a decision. Mature love strengthens both people rather than taking away freedom.

XVIII. Where the Traditions Diverge

Their differences are visible too.

Source. In the Abrahamic religions, God loves first and the human being responds: “We love him because he first loved us,” 1 John 4:19. In Buddhism, metta arises from understanding interdependence, not responding to God. Among the Greeks, eros moves upward, from the world toward beauty; agape moves downward. These directions shape different temperaments of love.

Object. Christian agape includes the enemy: “Love your enemies,” Matthew 5:44. Jewish hesed operates within a covenant, among those bound by promises. Aristotle’s virtuous philia is between equals in worth. Buddhist metta extends to all beings without exception. Different geometries of love’s circle.

Relationship to desire. Eros is desire. Agape is unconditional giving. Bhakti is devotion. Sufism is flame. Fromm’s mature love brings these poles together: desire is not suppressed, giving does not humiliate, devotion does not remove freedom. Each tradition looks at this knot from its own side.

XIX. Three False Doubles

Love has false doubles. It helps to recognize them.

The first is merging: two selves fuse into one and each stops being themselves. Outwardly it looks like love—“we are one.” In essence it is the loss of two people. Mature love, for Fromm, preserves both individualities. Two stand beside one another rather than dissolving into each other.

The second is mutual use: “love” as an exchange of functions. I give you a feeling of being needed; you give me a sense of security. Both are satisfied while the bargain works. This is not love but a convenient contract. Love begins where the contract stops working and the bond remains.

The third is idealization: loving not the other person but an image laid over them. Idealization always ends in disappointment; the image cannot withstand reality. Loving requires seeing. For Fromm, respect means seeing the other as they are. No more, no less.

Understanding these three doubles protects mature love from substitution.

XX. Love and Fear

This article continues the conversation begun in “Suffering as a Teacher” and “Gratitude.” Suffering teaches that I am not the world’s center. Gratitude teaches that invisible bonds hold me. Love turns both into a way of living.

Love has a reverse side: fear. Not hatred, as people often think, but fear. All love’s false doubles are its forms in the face of fear: merging from fear of loneliness, using from fear of being unneeded, idealization from fear of seeing the real person.

Mature love therefore requires work with fear. Without it, love contracts into defensive strategies. With it, love opens into a capacity to see the other and remain.

In chapter 4 of his First Letter, John puts it in one line: “Perfect love casts out fear.” Not the reverse. Not “When I stop being afraid, I can love,” but “When I begin to love, fear will recede.” First action, then a change of state.

XXI. What to Do

Train attention. Mature love begins where the other person is visible. For one minute a day, look at someone close as though seeing them for the first time. No tasks, judgments, plans. Simply look. This can be trained.

Act despite feeling. If the feeling of love has weakened, do not wait for it to return. Act as though it were there: call, ask, help. Behavior precedes feeling and often restores it. This is hesed: faithfulness independent of mood.

Repair ruptures. After any quarrel, short or long, repair matters more than victory. Approach first, without waiting to be right. Say “I was wrong” or “I am hurting.” Restore contact. Ainsworth showed that 30 percent misses are normal. One hundred percent repairs are necessary.

Practice metta. Ten minutes a day: “May I be happy; may my loved one be happy; may a neutral person be happy; may a difficult person be happy; may all beings be happy.” Not as an incantation, but a direction of attention. After a month the background changes.

Allow yourself to need. Amae is the ability to come and say, “I am struggling now. Stay with me.” If you cannot do this with anyone, you have no close relationships, only functional ones.

XXII. A Way of Being

We should end where we began.

Love is not luck. Not a discovery. Not a mood. Ten traditions—Greek, Aristotelian, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Sufi, Indian, Celtic, Japanese, psychoanalytic—independently say one thing: love is a capacity, and a capacity can be trained.

This means “Do I love?” is the wrong question. The right question is “Do I know how to love?” Its answer is measured not by the intensity of feeling but by the concreteness of action: do I look, care, respond, respect, know, restore connection after rupture?

Much of humanity spends life waiting for love to arrive. A smaller part learns to love. This article invites you into the second group. Not because the feeling of love is bad or insufficient, but because feeling is a wave, and it passes. Capacity is the shoreline, and it remains.

A day in which someone learns to love is different from a day in which someone waits to be loved. All ten traditions know this. Attachment theory confirms it. All that remains is to begin.

Andrey Zarinsh & Maria Evilkut

United Wisdom · One source—many languages

References Inherited from the Archive

These links accompanied the archived original and have not been newly verified.

• PDF-L001 — source PDF page 3.
• PDF-L002 — source PDF page 3.
• PDF-L003 — source PDF page 3.
• PDF-L004 — source PDF page 3.
• PDF-L005 — source PDF page 4.
• PDF-L006 — source PDF page 4.
• PDF-L007 — source PDF page 5.
• PDF-L008 — source PDF page 5.
• PDF-L009 — source PDF page 6.
• PDF-L010 — source PDF page 6.
• PDF-L011 — source PDF page 6.
• PDF-L012 — source PDF page 6.
• PDF-L013 — source PDF page 8.
• PDF-L014 — source PDF page 8.
• PDF-L015 — source PDF page 8.
• PDF-L016 — source PDF page 9.
• PDF-L017 — source PDF page 9.
• PDF-L018 — source PDF page 10.
• PDF-L019 — source PDF page 10.