"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.”
—Aldous Huxley
Songwriters and psychologists have often written about the thin line between love and hate. Consistency, even in love, often wavers, and eventually wanes. Love can turn to hate. The tremendous pain felt by someone who has a loved one who now hates him is almost unbearable. Counselors will attest to the fact that the value of consistency in the romantic realm is complex, as emotions are highly sensitive to change. And, hating the one you love is an extreme example of such a seemingly inconsistent behavior.
Hating crosses that thin line of mixed emotions in a marriage. It is so difficult to withstand this strong feeling of dislike because spouses often spend years (decades) building workable, reliable relationships. If real hatred intervenes, all other loving feelings suffer profoundly -- the result is an all-encompassing trap of abuse. Cambridge Dictionary defines the meaning as "more permanent than a single event," often inspiring jealousy, lying, envy, making false accusations and selfishness, and even leading to violence.
Why would someone develop a hatred for a loved one? Consider how much less work goes into hating rather than truly loving someone. Among its many, many requirements, learning to love includes coping with sacrifice, maintaining togetherness, and avoiding negative emotional responses. On the other hand, hate "hates" context -- that means it merely requires a person not to understand or to relate to the hated individual. Avoidance is one of hatred's major components. People can also dislike and resent others for a multitude of reasons -- all of which require no work or much effort. Thus, hating another -- even a trusted love one -- can be spontaneous, often unplanned and unimaginable in its ignition. Soon, it engulfs a marriage and love dissolves.
Then, it stands to reason that hate is pure and simple -- an easy weapon of abuse because spouses lives are so complicated and mixed up. Hatred of unfortunate, struggling souls requires little or no buildup to its tremendous emotional intensity. This leap into hatred may be extremely quick and mightily developed to withstand opposition. If a person is a spouse, or the "enemy," for whatever reason, he is an object for possible ridicule or scorn.
First, a person has to dehumanize another to justify hated for a once-beloved companion. Contemporary psychologists report the dehumanizing people often starts by treating a victim as examples of the categories
they place them in, instead of treating them as individuals. With loss of love in the balance, an aggressive mate most easily scapegoats someone close for any hurt personally suffered, no matter the situation. The object of hate may be described as "stupid, unsympathetic, insensitive," and then pigeonholed into any of a host of cages of derision. Repetition wears down resistance.
The worst outcome? The year-over-year increase in the U.S. murder rate in 2020 was the largest since at least 1905 – and possibly ever, according to provisional date from the CDC. (Final data is not expected to differ much from the provisional data.)
There were 7.8 homicides for every 100,000 people in the United States
in 2020, up from six homicides per 100,000 people the year before. The
rise in the nation’s murder rate last year far exceeded the 20% increase
measured in 2001, which was driven by the terrorist attacks of Sept.
11. Hatred feeds murder as people devalue human life in general.
Love always overcomes? Hardly. Hating people may be baked into our human DNA;
humans and chimpanzees form tribes and attack members of other tribes.
And who gets the best ratings on TV and the most traction on social media these days? Shows and social media featuring people we love to hate. Do we love to mimic our hominid, human cousins? Both homo-sapiens and great apes engage in deadly conflicts.
Although empathy, critical thinking, humor, creativity, and forgiveness top the list of positive human traits, they are seldom employed for quality productions on media of all types. And bad news is so frequent, most of us believe we now live in a vindictive, hateful world, minutes away from total destruction. Division is at an all-time high. Sometimes, I wonder what hate group will ignite a devastating, all-out nuclear war. Ethnic minorities, like unsatisfied spouses, use hate to gain ground in never-ending conflicts.
Improving a situation of spousal love isn’t always possible, and sometimes a couple can simply deal with the matter by working through their own feelings. Just remember, often times, a person who hates someone else has that hatred from their own problems, not yours, like negative feelings and internal struggles, or from snap judgments that they don’t care to rectify. Other times, if a person hates you, improving the situation isn’t worth the effort, such as if you rarely encounter the person in your daily life, or if it would be emotionally unsafe to engage with them about the issue.
How much of our own hatred of spouses is invisible to us? It may be just the tip of the iceberg often disguised as dislike and violence in the name or morality or social justice -- a tactic also used to smuggle our hatred of another onboard. In this manner, our own hate is often invisible to us. To others? It feels like justice, not like hatred.
Is it less serious than promoted in this piece to hate the one you love? Remember that "thin line" described above? Even if temporary or infrequent, it certainly makes
life less comfortable, which in turn can reduce the quality of any
relationship. Love lost can often feel just like familiarity, not abandonment.
It is interesting to note that our desire for exclusivity arises in romantic love, but not in hate. On the contrary, in hate, we want to see our negative attitude shared by others. It seems natural that we want to share our negative fortune with others while wanting to keep the positive part merely to ourselves. In positive emotions, when we are happy, we are more open to being attentive to other people, but we guard the source of our happiness more.
Consider this surprising note from Aaron Ben-Zeev, Ph.D. ...
"Love can become a fertile ground for the emergence of hate. When the intensity and intimacy of love turns sour, hate may be generated. In these circumstances, hate serves as a channel of communication when other paths are blocked, and it functions to preserve the powerful closeness of the relationship, in which both connection and separation are impossible.
"Consider the following testimony of a man convicted of killing his wife (cited in the book, In the Name of Love): 'You don't always kill a woman or feel jealousy about a woman or shout at a woman because you hate her. No. Because you love her, that's love.' No doubt, love can be extremely dangerous, and people have committed the most horrific crimes in the name of love (and religion)."
(Aaron Ben-Zeev, Ph.D. "Hating the One You Love -- I Hate You But I Love You. Psychology Today. April 11, 2008.)
Terrence Real has been a family therapist for two decades and now is the author of the new book Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Real illuminated what he means by “normal marital hatred.”
“There are going to be moments when you look at your partner, and at that moment, there is a part of you that just hates their guts,” Real told the paper. “You’re trapped with this horrible human being. How did you wind up here? What I want to say is, ‘Welcome to marriage. Welcome to long-term relationships.’”
(Brittany Wong. "Is It Really All That Normal To Feel 'Normal Marital Hatred'?" HuffPost. October 4, 2022.)
I believe Real misinterpretes hatred for fairly common disfavors or disagreements. "Hating people's guts" to me is a serious, emotional response, not part of problems arising in long-term relationships. Argument, disagreement, lack of understanding instead? Maybe. But real and dangerous hatred stems from deeper and much darker roots.
But, if marital hatred is relatively common, does that shared view discourage people, particularly women, from leaving? (for self-preservation)? HuffPost Senior Lifestyle Reporter Brittany Wong writes: "Acknowledging hateful feelings can help dis-empower the stigma and shame of how they’re feeling and really explore themselves and the marriage in an honest light without flinching. Wong found that couples who use the word ‘dislike’ vs ‘hate’ are treating their partner the same way. It’s really just semantics.
I believe counseling may help end problems between these who dislike certain aspects of one's behavior, but I doubt any help can be rendered when whatever is termed "dislike" turns into full-fledged "hate." Hatred has no less harmful euphemisms -- it is ugly and never flagging with two possible values. Simply put, hate should cause someone to "get out of Dodge."
Yes, I believe "dislike" of certain human aspects is NOT the same as "hatred" of a spouse. Anger can pass more easily than hatred and with much less residue for the future of the relationship. Semantics does not come into play when "hatred" has a firm hold. Projecting hatred onto a spouse during the admittedly difficult days of the crucible of marriage is not simply "dislike." Hated spouses get blamed for all sorts of nonsense that really is the fault of their partner. Extreme hate, unfortunately is deep seated and cannot be easily overcome.Polarized, trapped, hated people are caught in human bondage if the relationship does not end.
I think envy, humiliation, and other continual attacks on a spouse's self-esteem are appalling and largely unforgivable from an alone/together human relationship. Who would want to live under such conditions -- always being ridiculed and watching his back? In fact hating a person can even cause that victim to internalize the hatred, and can cause significant harm by causing the person to "buy in" and hate himself. Emotional attacks are powerful and destructive weapons, especially when launched continuously by lovers.
"Forgive and forget" situations occur with great frequency in a love relationship. But, hatred remains stable when someone feels so much hatred for the spouse, and he spends much of his time fixating on his own anger, contempt, or dislike of that person.
Hatred can certainly be disproportionate in its application. Oftentimes, People hate when they feel powerless. Rather than turning their anxiety and shame inward, they may project
that negativity onto an external target. In some cases, people who
experience bullying or some other type of mental or physical abuse may grow to hate the person who harmed them. In either case, hate destroys relationships with no conditions guaranteed.
"Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated."
