In his new book “The Forgotten Art of Love,” Dr. Armin A. Zadeh approaches love through many angles.
When he was a young man living in Germany, Dr. Armin A. Zadeh perused the pages of Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Loving.” Reading the 1956 best seller, Zadeh questioned the German social psychologist’s analytical approach to the subject.
“I felt (Fromm) really identified some key problems about our perception about love … but at the same time, I felt he was missing something,” Zadeh said. “I felt he hit important points, but maybe he shifted the balance too far to a cerebral aspect of love and cannot dauntingly go into the emotional.”
Three decades ago, Zadeh didn’t believe he was in the position to elucidate this psychological and philosophical balance.
But after falling in love, starting a family and practicing medicine for more than 20 years, the cardiologist felt he acquired enough experience with the human heart — professionally and personally — to revisit Fromm’s focus.
In his recently released book “The Forgotten Art of Love: What Love Means and Why It Matters,” Zadeh bridges the scientific and spiritual components of love by viewing it through various lenses, such as religion, sex, health, history, society, human differences, romance, gender, health and self-love.
“I’m a physician, but I’m also a person,” Zadeh said. “And like anybody else, I have thoughts about all life and trying to make sense of it all. We have a few decades of life, if we’re lucky. How do you use them best?”
Zadeh earned his medical degree at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. He eventually ventured to the United States where he finished his residency at Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia. After working at Parkland Memorial, the hospital where J.F.K died in Dallas, Zadeh joined the faculty at John Hopkins University. Aside from treating patients with heart conditions, Zadeh serves at the director of Cardiac Computed Tomography, specializing in coronary heart disease research. Although he practices medicine in Maryland, he resides with his family in Voorhees.
Ironically, Zadeh’s extensive experience with empirical evidence seems to have fostered his emotional grasp on love.
While the book explores love through a medical perspective, with concepts such as blood-hormones and MRIs, it concurrently mirrors those ideas with love as an art.
Since Fromm’s publication, several biological advancements and social revolutions unfolded, further inspiring Zadeh to fill generational voids in his claims, as well.
“Since the 1950s, so much has been happening in terms of our understanding of biology. We have all these insights now on how our brain works,” Zadeh said. “It’s fascinating. Before, love was not a subject of science.”
Although he specializes in cardiology, much of the book’s scientific components are drawn from neurology, specifically brain scans. According to Zadeh, certain parts of the brain are more active in people who have recently fallen in love compared to those in long-term relationships. This is also evident in hormone level changes.
This concept acts as a compass to the book’s premise that love requires active effort, especially since the “falling in love phase” is not necessarily perpetual.
Zadeh says the root of the problem stems from gradual tendencies to rank careers and societal pressure over relationships.
“After the first few years of falling in love, these things tend to come back into focus, and that is why it becomes more difficult,” Zadeh said. “Under the influences of all these competing interests, we don’t make it a priority.”
However, this active effort makes love more accessible and applicable to everyone, which is the ultimate lesson Zadeh illustrates in his publication.
He also stresses the importance of passing these lessons down to children, particularly feeling that schools should dedicate classes solely to the art of love, considering the immense pressures young people are under today.
“The key is for readers to see that love is a very empowering concept, because we have much more control over love than we think,” Zadeh said. “I think knowing you have so much more influence over love, makes it more enticing and significant.”
