Q. Is it possible to really hate the person you love?
A. Are you kidding? In my thousands of years with my partner, believe me, I have some stories!
We all seem to think that Love is a pure, static emotion; that it is as faithful as a puppy. Nope. Emotions fluctuate wildly, and the wilder the love, the wilder and more painful and enraging the fluctuations. Some people thrive on these fluctuations as though they’re proof of love….and some feel the fluctuations as betrayals of their “real” feelings. I’m of the theory that we have endless permutations of emotions, and they’re all bound to come out sometime. But feelings are feelings, my dearest ones, not facts. So you just let ’em rip and know they’ll arrive in some other form in a few hours or days, and don’t decide that the worst of them is the only one.
Some people don’t feel the wild fluctuations of love and hate, but rather a more simmering, low-level kind of fluctuation…like, say, a resentment toward their beloveds that isn’t experienced as real hatred. And some other people feel pretty consistently one way–don’t fluctuate too much. It depends on so many things-both what goes inside you alone, and what goes on inside the dynamic you have with your partner.
If your lover is your characterological opposite–a person whose personality is vastly different; whose upbringing, expressive style, emotional process, way of showing affection and anger, was vastly different from yours; you may be in heaven part of the time (when all that differentness feels like the perfect complement to all that you are), and hell the other part. Or, if you’re with someone very much like yourself, you can “hate” your lover for exhibiting the very things you most hate in yourself. I won’t go into psychoanalytic theory here, nor into various theories of what happens internally when we choose certain types for ourselves, but in every dynamic there’s potential trouble. EVERY dynamic. Some have it easier than others, but hate is there, somewhere, even in the best of us.
I believe, as do many relationship theorists and experts, that we choose people to be with who are most likely to help us work out issues we wouldn’t be able to work out alone-and some of these issues aren’t so pleasant. And our choices may not feel like the easiest ones for that reason. So we all, in some way, are like two emery boards living together, rubbing each other down a bit, but trying not to file each other down too far to the core.
My best advice: When the two of you are at your worst, keep your sharp cutlery drawer closed.
Goddess, you are so right!
I think of it this way: a passionate feeling, whether love or hate, is still feeling. It is when we feel indifference when the relationship is really in trouble.