“Honestly it would’ve been better if they just hated me instead of being indifferent—if they hated me, at least that meant they felt something towards me.”
The above quote is from a close friend of mine, talking about the abuse he faced from his parents. These words stuck with me, as at the time, it was a confusing statement. When he initially said this to me, I didn’t quite understand what he meant. I was young, only about fourteen, and I couldn’t wrap my head around why someone would prefer to be hated by the people who were supposed to love him the most. But now, years later, I completely understand where he was coming from and why what he said made perfect sense.
Love and Hate are very much two sides of the same coin—I know I’m not the first to say this, but it’s very much a concept that rings true. If anything, the opposite of love is indifference, a lack of emotion. I think the phrase, “love is stronger than hate,” bothers me in part because it isn’t—they are equals in a sense. One cannot exist without the other.
Hate is a term that gets thrown around a lot—however, it is often thrown around at concepts of people rather than the individual—whether the concept be neo-Nazis, homophobes hating “the gays”, etc etc. Because, frankly, they don’t actually personally know every individual who falls under whatever system of beliefs they oppose, or who act in ways they oppose. I’d argue that people don’t even truly hate those who have done awful things to them or someone they care for, if the perpetrator is someone they did not personally know prior to the incident. They hate the idea of the person based on specific actions the person committed, not the person in their entirety.
To clarify, this is not saying that, in reality, people who are bigoted or who do awful things are actually decent people, and do not deserve the anger directed at them. Rather, what I mean is you can’t truly hate someone on a fundamental level unless you truly know them, something I’m all too familiar with due to my own personal experiences.
This is what I mean by Love and Hate are two sides of the same coin. After all, the ones you care about the most are the ones that can wound you most deeply, who can take your trust in them and use and abuse it. I find that time and time again that the deepest kind of hatred is formed at those that, at one point, we used to love deeply. The hate is so deep because the object of our now negative emotions is someone we knew and understood on a deep and personal level: the true them, not the idea of them. Or at least as true an image of another person we can get, as we can never know everything that goes on in another person’s head.
I used to not take the phrase, “hate is a strong word” seriously. But now that I’m older and have more life experience under my belt, I very much agree with that statement. While there are a multitude of people I strongly dislike, and concepts of people like neo-Nazis, racists, sexists, homophobes, etc. that I hate, there are few people I genuinely hate on a personal level. I’d say there are really only two people that I actually would say I truly hate at this point in my life. People I personally knew.
Seven years later, I finally understand now why my friend said what he did, because perhaps if he were hated, at some level, there would be love underneath that hate.