E. Fromm has five kinds of love. He calls productive love for equal brotherly love. It lies at the heart of all other kinds of love. It is understood as the care, responsibility, respect, and understanding of any other person, as well as the desire to help him in his life. Brotherly love is characterized by the lack of exclusivity, it is love for all people, love of equals. In contrast, in the case of maternal love, there is an unequal relationship between partners, because the child depends on the mother. A necessary condition for his or her development is to increase his or her independence from the mother until the moment when he or she ceases to need her.
The third type of love is erotic love. Unlike brotherly love, which concerns all people, as well as maternal love, which is directed at the child and anyone who needs help, erotic love is directed at one person (usually the opposite sex). The object of desire here is unity and confluence with this person. In the absence of brotherly love here and the fact that only the desire to merge as motivation should be talked about the desire without love, which, according to E. Fromm, manifests itself in sadism and masochism.
Sadomasochism is often mixed with love; this is especially true of masochism since it is customary to think that sacrifice and willingness to give up completely for the sake of one's beloved is a model of "great love". The manifestations of sadism under the guise of love are expressed, for example, in the control of another person, when it is claimed that it is done for his own good. The fourth kind of love is love for oneself. It is the opposite of selfishness, which is rooted in the lack of love for yourself. This statement opposes the widespread belief that loving oneself is sinful and loving others is virtuous. Love for one person, including oneself, cannot exist without love for the person as such. Therefore, an egoist, not knowing how to love others, does not know how to love himself.
Love for God as the fifth form of love has many different manifestations with different properties, as well as love for a man. At the heart of the religious form of love, as well as any other, is the feeling of remoteness and the desire to overcome the despair caused by it by unity.
True love is an expression of creativity and implies care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. It is not affected, in terms of exposure, but an active struggle for the development and happiness of a loved one, based on the ability to love. If love is about love for everything, if love is a trait of character, it must be present not only in relationships with family and friends but also with those with whom one comes into contact at work, in one's professional activities, and, in addition, love must be present in relation to the whole world around them, to all manifestations of life. Love is one of the few spheres in which one can feel and experience one's absolute irreplaceability. Here he is the highest value, the highest value. That is why only in love a person can feel the sense of his existence for another person and the sense of existence of another person for himself. Love helps him to manifest himself by revealing, increasing, developing in him good, positive and valuable things.
It should be noted that love is one of the manifestations of human freedom. No one can make us love (we can make us do a lot of things: work, even commit evil, but not love ourselves) - neither the other, nor ourselves. Love is a matter of free initiative, it is the basis of itself. It has no external stimuli, it does not come down to instincts.
Love is the most complex, mysterious and paradoxical reality a person faces. And not because it is usually believed that from love to hatred there is only one step, but because "neither count nor calculate" love is possible! It cannot be calculated - nature will easily overturn any calculations! You can only be sensitive in it to watch its whimsical flow and guess in time with your soul all its bends, elusive for the eye shifts, inexplicably turns sometimes for the mind. It is impossible to be petty and talentless in love - it requires generosity and talent, the sight of the heart, breadth of the soul, kindness, subtlety mind and many other things that nature has endowed us with abundance, and that we unwisely waste and blunt in our bustling life.
Love is many faces and its world is inexhaustible because every person loves in his own way. Love is a personal experience that everyone can experience only for himself and herself; indeed, there is hardly anyone who has not had or does not have this experience at least to a small extent, at least in childhood, youth or adulthood.