I Love You Today. I Hate You Tomorrow.
May 5, 2006
I was watching TV tonight and having the usual problem of finding anything worth a damn to give my attention to. While repeatedly pressing the channel button I stumbled upon a dialog between two characters, one male and one female, who I can only assume had quarreled shortly before I made their acquaintance. I have no idea what show I was watching, who the people were, or what had or was going to happen. But something in the dialog caught my attention for a brief moment.
The male character insisted that the female character loved him. The female character refuted his insistence by telling him that not only did she not love him, she, in fact, hated him. He then told her that she only hated him because she had once loved him… and that the real reason we end up hating another person is because we let them get close… we let them get in… and they somehow violate our trust.
Forget what you’ve been told about the word “hate”. Pretend for a moment that you were never told “it’s wrong to hate”. Consider the fact that, regardless of what we’re told, most people do in fact use the word hate and mean it. Is what this anonymous character said true? Do we really only hate those that we at one time loved?
You’ve probably heard of a love-hate relationship. You’ve probably heard the idea that there is but a thin line between love and hate. Maybe you know someone that you love to hate. Borderline personality disorder commonly comes complete with something called “I hate you, don’t leave me” syndrome. All of these seem to signify some sort of connection between love and hate. Do the two really have much in common?
According to the dictionary, love is an intense feeling of deep affection. The same dictionary defines hate as intense or passionate dislike. So from a dictionary definition alone we’ve got the common bond of intense feeling. But we already knew that, right? As common as that knowledge may be, I think it holds the key to the connection between the two.
Different emotions are experienced on different spectrums of intensity. You can feel jealous. Or you can feel REALLY jealous. You can feel happy. Or you can feel elation. But can you feel jealousy as intensely as elation? Perhaps. But I’m not so sure. Few emotions, if any, can come close to the level of intensity as love. As we’ve seen, by definition, love is intense. But real love is very intense. It overrides reason, rationale, and in some cases, the survival instinct. I mean… think about it. People have died in the name of love!
If any emotion could complete head to head with love in an intensity battle, it’d probably be hate. Not only because it is also by definition intense, but also because hate is something that is normally bred and fed and honed over a period of time. Most people don’t just roll over and hate someone or something. It takes time to build a dislike to the point of hatred.
But wait. It also takes time to build an affection to the point of love, right? Well. It’s supposed to, anyway. So it would seem we have two commonalities between love and hate. Intense feelings. And a building of feeling over a period of time. So if you start with intense feelings of love, and the feeling changes due to some unforeseen unpleasant event, the resulting feeling would also have to be intense, right? Emotions are like physics: they are never destroyed… they only change form (either by being vented or expressed, or by changing into some other emotion). And since hate is really the only opposite emotion that is anywhere near the intensity of love, it makes sense that it would be the natural replacement… should the love go awry.
This is but one side of the equation. The character in the dialog I mentioned before was also right. Way back in 2004, I wrote this about love and friendship:
“We expect our friends to be human and have faults. But we expect our lovers to be perfect… and to treat us perfectly. If a friend pisses you off, it’s easier to forgive and forget because they’re allowed to be flawed. Lovers aren’t.”
The point I was shooting for then is very much in sync with what I’m talking about now. Friends are easier to forgive because, while they’re inside our personal wall, they’re usually not completely in. Lovers aren’t allowed to be flawed or treat us badly because they’re inside the wall we put up around our heart… which is arguably the tallest wall of them all.
When you let someone in, you become vulnerable and exposed. What’s worse… having someone walk into your room while you’re asleep… or having someone walk into your room while you’re asleep on top of the covers… naked? If you expose your inner self to another person, and they take advantage of that inner self, you feel as betrayed as if they’d walked in on your sleeping in the buff. Betrayal can fluctuate on a continuum just like most other emotions. But it can only go so far. When it’s too intense to be contained within it’s own confines, it must change form. What does it change in to? Yep… you guessed it. Hate. See how the earlier stuff is connected?
So I guess there’s some truth to the saying about the line between love and hate. I guess my television inspiration was correct. And it’s not a far stretch to say there’s a little bit of the borderline personality “I hate you don’t leave me” in us all. Or at least the potential for it to be there. If love and hate really are this close and easily exchanged, it makes me wonder why so many people are looking so hard for love. Haha.
I guess the idea is to get as close to the line as possible… without crossing over…
Part 4 of The Emotional Roller Coaster: Taking the Track Apart. Please visit the Series page for a complete index of all related posts.
Posted in Emotions, Human Nature, Noteworthy, Relationships, Series
June 29th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
[...] I Love You Today. I Hate You Tomorrow. [...]
October 7th, 2006 at 11:05 am
[...] Once you’ve taken ownership of your emotion and you’ve started to understand it’s cause, the easy part is over. Now we have to find a constructive and appropriate way to express that emotion. Why do we even have to express anger? Because if we don’t, the regulator will end up blowing off the pot in the future. I’ve said it before… I’ll say it again: emotions are like matter… they aren’t really destroyed… they only change form. We have to let anger out in short, controlled bursts or it will find a way to explode at some point. [...]
December 17th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
This is one of my favorites. You wrote it so well!
It’s funny because one time at work my boss and I were talking about that book series by Dave Pelzer where he was talking about his life as a child…and we were talking about how horrible his mother did him when he was little, and she goes “What I don’t understand is why she chose him and not his siblings…because in the beginning of the book it talked about how he was favored the most out of all of his brothers and sisters up until she started abusing him.” and I was like “Yeah…I remember that…” and then I thought back to this post (I think you had just written it around this time) and I was like “Well maybe she chose him because at one time he was the one she LOVED the most at one time. Think about it…love and hate are basically the same definition and you can only hate things that have, at one time, loved.” and she sat there and thought for a minute..and she goes “Wow…that’s so true..it makes a lot of sense..I’ve never really thought of it that way!”
haha I was like yeah, I have a friend who is a psychologist and he has a really jacked up way of thinking :) j/k
December 17th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
Jacked up??? Haha. And here I thought I’d carefully examined the question at hand and made a fairly rational argument.
Little did I know it was jacked up. :P
January 8th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Congrats D!!!
January 8th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
p.s. your thinking is not jacked up! I was kidding :)
January 12th, 2007 at 10:28 am
This blog is highly intelligent and thought-provoking… well written and insightful. Someone in my family sent me to the voting page to automatically vote for THEIR blog, but I read them all. I am voting for YOURS, instead. That being said, I wish to add my own opinion.
Rather than a fine line existing between Love and Hate, I believe they are on the far opposite ends of an emotional “teeter-totter”… just like “the agony and the ecstacy”. Our capacity to feel the one increases our capacity to feel the other.
I had to laugh about the comparison between emotional betrayal after exposing one’s INNER self, to the exposure of one’s naked body. We are TAUGHT the sort of physical shame that causes us to conceal our naked bodies… but to me there is no comparison between mere physical nakedness and the deep sense of emotional exposure that comes from revealing our inner selves. When we have trusted someone with our inner selves, and they wound us with that information, or betray our trust, or humiliate us with that intimacy, there is a profound woundedness that compares to nothing else. Nothing.
When that happens a little at a time, the teeter-totter begins to tip from unabashed love, toward hurt… then mistrust… then dislike… and if the betrayal continues, it tips all the way over to hate. It’s as if the hate is required to be of equal intensity as the original love in order to cancel out that love. The teeter-totter eventually (hopefully) returns to a neutral position as regards that damaged relationship.
Then there might be an opportunity for the healing balm of FORGIVENESS.
Namaste.
January 14th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Peace Worker: First of all, thanks for the nice words about my blog. I appreciate it.
And I enjoyed reading your response very much. I agree that the feeling of being seen in the buff isn’t of the same intensity as being betrayed by someone we’ve let in. I guess I should have worded that a little differently. The point I was shooting for was more along the lines of comparing the different between just being walked in on versus being walked in on naked and the difference between being betrayed by someone we care nothing for versus someone we care a great deal for.
I like the teeter-totter analogy, too. The only thing that I, personally, would add to it is the idea that both love and hate can co-exist in the same person at the same time and both be directed toward the same person. Perhaps not to the degree that they exist in their individual states, but the line is so close that I think it doesn’t have to be as black and white as one or the other. And that is something I left out of my original post as well.
What can I say? It was written 9 months ago… I’ve had more time to think about it. Haha.
Thanks again for the nice comment and the vote!
April 1st, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Wow, Derick! This post really makes a lot of sense. (Another pat on the back for you!) Thinking back, I can see a lot of situations where this love/hate explanation fits in, even for my own self. What an eye opener this is. :)
April 2nd, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Thanks :) I’m glad you got something out of it. This is one of my personal favorites as well.
April 22nd, 2007 at 10:00 pm
[...] street, and eating a grape… all of which might kill us. It’s saying hi to a stranger, love & hate, stepping on slugs, fighting and making up with friends, and watching Olympic figure skating. All [...]
August 14th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I met my wife 2 years ago. The beginning was intense and we got married after 7 months. What I now to be BPD quickly became a problem. I moved out after 3 months. She found a new man overnight. a friend of mine. What is the best way to divorce a BPD and stay sane. I let her plaz games with my emotions. She will agree to reconcile then change her mind. I am going to have to end all communication with her. What else can I expect to happen!?