I Love You Today. I Hate You Tomorrow

[الشوق عطري]

I Love You Today. I Hate You Tomorrow.

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.

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.

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