Love or Hate - There's a fine line....

Have you ever heard about how the feelings behind certain emotions are triggered by the same things? When it comes to how we feel, complete opposites become oddly linked. This is mostly found between the emotions of love and hate. As the famous quote by Francis Smedley says,'All is fair in love and war'.

I think we are often confused by the idea that the people we truly detest and spend our life resenting, being jealous of, or bullied by, we may subconsciously really want to like us. Or maybe we act in a hostile way towards them, because we just don't understand them and haven't taken the time to try.

Most people try to live their life by the rule that hate is a strong word and they should endeavour to avoid using it. By definition, 'hate is an intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.' The confusion comes when we realise that hate is an intense emotion much like love. If we didn't care about the object of our hate in even a small capacity, we wouldn't spend the time and effort hating them in the first place. This is often why little boys tease and playfully hit girls in order to seem macho, when really they just fancy them. It can take years to reach emotional maturity and so we cannot always fully understand what our deep emotions are trying to tell us. Sigmund Freud observed that 'people are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate'.

What happens then, when we start to confuse our emotions and become unsure what we are actually feeling? When it comes to love, people are often scared to admit they are experiencing something that will mean giving away their heart and soul to someone else, as it also gives them the power to crush that heart or give back their love at any moment. I guess our feelings are greatly ruled by fear.

Our emotions usually change with different people. It has been said that you can choose your friends but you cannot choose your family. Obviously we would choose a romantic partner also. I believe that in terms of love and hate it is not necessarily about choice. The family bond we share with our relatives and loved-ones usually means that we vow to forgive and forget most things. As most grudges are overridden by a greater need for them as a person. What happens however when this can't be achieved? Have we failed in a universal necessity? What if sometimes the only emotion we can feel is hate in the form of anger, disappointment or apathy? I guess an example of this would be when someone finds their partner cheating, or when a child feels betrayed by a parent.

Often when we become accustomed to a situation and a person, we end up accepting them as they are and therefore try to ignore their faults and so fail to see when they are truly in the wrong. Once again if we are always the person to compromise and make-amends we are not ever solving the issue just pushing it further under the rug and building up more dust. I find that the main problems created within relationships come down to unfairness and disrespect. There are varying levels of respect expected depending on the relationship. We hope that in a romantic partnrship, respect would be mutual. It sometimes becomes tricky within family relationships as those with age and experience on their side are expected to recieve greater respect. Children are also taught to respect their elders, that means that however old those children get they will still have relatives older. So what happens when those children become adults and their elder is wrong or unreasonable? Are they absolved of this normal disrespectful behaviour, because this generational belief made no stipulations upon its creation? When it comes to family, the stakes are always higher because the love shared in these relationships is always the strongest. Therefore the opinions and judgements of these people will always matter the most.

I think it important to realise that most things in life are linked in one way or another. Love and hate are so similar because we cannot have one without the other. The same with a sickness and it's cure, in this instance that would signify, a disagreement and a solution. Martin Luther King Jr echoes this point, 'Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illumines it. I guess main item that links all these things is passion whether negative or positive, passion is present in everyday life. It it present within us as human beings in the form of an innate desire to live. Passion for love, Passion for hate, Passion for life. The line may be fine but it is intense nonetheless!