The Line Between Love & Hate

It’s not too foreign an idea that strong feelings of love and hate are often close to one another. Rare is it that we loathe someone who didn’t once draw our positive interest and attention. There are exceptions, but that’s not the point. The question for tonight is whether it ever makes sense to act on feelings of hate.

I certainly have. The stronger my feelings are for someone then the more potent are all my opinions of them. But it seems like the line separating these thoughts of both praise and disgust is a blurred one.

Positive sentiment override. Does that mean anything to you? The term refers to our ability to rationalize, overlook, and accept possible flaws in people because we value them for other reasons. A healthy relationship has a lot of positive sentiment override.

But at a certain point we may give up on rationalizing and consider someone’s flaws as what they are. Suddenly it all seems “clear” how “wrong” this person is for us.

From this point onward it’s really easy to look back at this person as either wonderful or wretched. Thinking about someone you know very well is like constructing a quick termpaper where you only pay attention to the data that support your claims.

But like with the termpaper, it’s wrong to think of ideas as black or white. Perhaps it might be nice to wholeheartedly praise someone for their apparent goodness, but acting on your biased feelings of hate is just not right.

If you cared for the person a great deal at one point and used to do a lot for them, then you probably want to continue. But just because you can’t do nice things like you used to does not mean that you need to act on the other side of your feelings.

It’s really easy to shift from a romancer to a pain in the ass, so we need to recognize if and when that shift is taking place in ourselves… and avoid it. We don’t need to play a large role in those with whom relationshipes haven’t worked. Instead we need to calm down and prevent outselves from making the transition from wanting to love to wanting to hurt.

We’ve all had changes in feelings like that, for one reason or another. But hatred doesn’t buy us anything.

I keep falling asleep as I write this. I hope this makes sense. Goodnight.