What is the Opposite of Love - Hatred or Indifference?

Love has a myriad faces, belongs to no one yet touches everyone. We experience love as the rush of wondrous emotions that makes us see all through pink eyeglasses. 

It is the joy of creation when a new life is born. It is the pride of achievement in another's success. Love also becomes life-shattering pain when we love but are not loved in return. 

If love can have so many faces, does love have an opposite?

What is the opposite of love? Is it?

• Hatred
• Anger
• Derision
• Fear
• Indifference 

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Most people when asked; “What is the opposite of love?” will answer hate. The traditional argument given is that love is a positive emotion, while hatred is a negative emotion. They are, however, seen as two sides of the coin. Both evoke strong feelings. Hatred is often love gone wrong. Rather too often people disappointed in love (often due to wrong or excessive expectations) or being unable to deal with unrequited love end up in hatred. 

I hate marmite. Marmite has never done anything bad to me, but I have never liked it and it is not unrequited love. I also hate Amaretto di Saronno liquor, because I have ghastly memories attached to it, which have nothing to do with the taste of the liquor itself.

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Anger is more problematic as an opposite. We can be angry with a person we love, but still love. Parents can often be very angry with their children for something they have done or failed to do yet the love is as strong as before so anger can’t be the opposite of love.

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Derision, where one derides or ridicules, mocks another person, is common. But is derision, really an opposite of love? Can they co-exist? Yes, human relationships are extremely complicated. Sometimes we can observe people who love each other, rather offhandedly ridiculing the other. Other people can be speechless at the insults or jibes some people who have been married long hurl at each other. What used to be wild and passionate earth-shattering sex 30 years ago becomes a constant bickering and razor sharp jibes. An aunt of mine used to lacerate her husband, often in front of others, but if someone else said one word against him, she would defend him valiantly by saying, “Who gave you the right to criticize him, only I can do that!”

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Fear – Fear is a universal emotion. Can we fear and love at the same time? Yes. Sometimes we see people saying something like “Don’t tell him how expensive the curtains were” or “Don’t tell her that we ordered take-away and beer!” though there seems to be no shortage of love. People often love their despotic rulers though they fear them. So, fear and love are not opposites, well not in an ordinary sense.
But if we go beyond the ordinary way of reckoning things and understanding reality fears and tears define reality for most of us. Fear is an emotion that separates us from each other. Fear is the cloud of unknowing that separates the human spirit from finding its way home. Love, on the other hand is the beacon in the night that leads us to where we belong. 

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Indifference – Indifference can be seen as an absence of emotions. It is coldness as a manifestation of negativity. The term whatever, commonly used by many young people, is often cited as a symbol of indifference. 

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.” Elie Wiesel (Jewish-American political activist and Nobel Prize winner) US News & World Report (27 October 1986). Here, the main argument is that, as intense emotions, love and hate are two sides of the same coin while indifference is a deficiency.

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Is There A Typical Hate Personality Type?

We know what lovers are like from literature and poetry, e.g. Rome and Juliet from Shakespeare. 

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But what kind of a person is a typical hater?

It’s hard to be aggressive without strong feelings of hatred. High neuroticism in men (Barnes et al., 1991), while high neuroticism and high extraversion in women (Buss, 1991) may cause them to use psychological aggression in relationships.

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Is there a bell curve of hate? Linking hate to emotional development or rather its problems, in the context of genocide and similar violence, Steven Baum (2007) found that 15-20% were ‘perpetrators’, 60-70% were ‘bystanders’ or ordinary people, while 15-20% ‘altruistic rescuers’ or ‘helpers’.

But how could we predict what ‘kind’ of people belong to which group?

All attempts at producing markers from physical characteristics, education, gender, sexual preference, social status or previous life history tend to fall short as reliable predictors. Clinical tests of psychological evaluation are also not reliable always. 

It wasn’t that long ago when emotional maturation in psychology was seen to have been achieved through vaginal orgasm in a heterosexual intercourse alone, and nothing else was ‘mature’ enough.

Chemical Changes in People Who Fall in Love

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Love and being in love are different. But if we contrast people of both sexes being in love with the ‘opposite’, i.e., not being in love, we can detect behavioural changes as well as hormonal ones too. Levels of some hormones change radically when we fall in love and these changes last, on average, from 18 months to 3 years.

Cortisol levels of people in love are significantly higher meaning they are under huge stress. Testosterone levels are lower in men in love and higher in women. All difference in hormone levels disappear in 12-24 months (Marazziti et al, 2004).

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Hungry For Love - Can’t Tolerate The Absence of Being In Love

People in many cultures have tried to control how individuals are attracted to each others. Fearing social decay, racial impurity, cultural degeneration, unsuitability of the other person or whatever reasons they come up with; they have tried to keep lovers separate. Sometimes the love or attraction surmounts all such attempts but sometimes it destroys them.

The majority of world cultures view marital and conjugal infidelity negatively and actively discourage it through a mixture of shame, guilt and punishment, which may range from mild disapproval to death by stoning e.g., in Saudi Arabia and Somalia.

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Infidelity, however, is rampant. Durex, the condom makers, claim that 22% of global respondents have had extra-marital sex. A whopping 70% of Norwegians in this study admit to having had one-night stands.

60% to 75% of American college students report extradyadic (i.e., with a person outside the romantic relationship dyad) involvement in USA, though infidelity causes self-doubt, anger and depression in the ‘betrayed’ partner (Barta & Klein, 2005).

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Is conjugal infidelity a cause or result of martial dissolution? Research (17-year longitudinal study of 1475 people by Previti & Amato, 2004) claims that sexual fidelity is central in maintaining marital satisfaction and stability.

If hormonal level changes due to falling in love balance out in 12-24 months, does it mean that the risk of infidelity will rise logarithmically? Situational factors fostering infidelity are extremely complicated to understand but it has been shown that self-regulation or self-control is a prime factor. Lack of or depleted self-regulation may increase the likelihood of infidelity (Ciarocco et al., 2012).

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Whether we talk of love, hatred or indifference as qualities and personality traits, it is good to remember that we do not love personality traits, but persons. These traits just make them more or less loveable.

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References:

• Barnes GE, Greenwood L, Sommer R. 1991. Courtship violence within a Canadian sample of male college students. Family Relations 40:34–48.
• Baum, Steven K. (2004): A bell curve of hate?, Journal of Genocide Research, 6:4, 567-577
• Buss DM. 1991. Conflict in married couples: Personality predictors of anger and upset. Journal of Personality 59:663–688.
• Marazzitti, Donatella; Canale, Domenico. Hormonal changes when falling in love. Psychoneuroendocrinology (2004) 29, 931-936.
• Previti, Denise; Amato Paul R. Is Infidelity a Cause or a Consequence of Poor Marital Quality? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 2004 21: 217

The Real Difference Between Men and Women

The difference between men and women are socially defined in most societies. Tradition, culture and religious texts are often used to support the argument that women would be inferior to men. Women have continued to challenge the power imbalance. As a result, a significant number of modern nations have granted men and women equal rights in the legal frameworks. 

But socially, economically, politically and culturally the domination of men seems to continue.

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Do Women Really Have Equal Rights with Men?

It would seem that many men think so. If you ask women, they would rather often tend to disagree. The poll by The Economist 9^th October 1999 shows that on average under 13% of women agree that women have equal rights with men. These are the results in different countries:

• Australia 25%
• Netherlands 20%
• Switzerland 14%
• Belgium 12%
• UK 9%
• USA 8%
• Germany 8%

Should Women Really Have Equal Rights with Men?

Should women have equal rights with men? This very provocative question brings in the influence of culture and upbringing more than any other question.

When the women are asked if women should have equal rights, the same poll gives an average 62.4% (but not 100%) of women saying yes. Notice the great variations among cultures.

• Netherlands 80%
• Australia 77%
• UK 73%
• Belgium 70%
• Germany 70%
• USA 62%
• Switzerland 39%
• Japan 21%

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Are Women Better Achievers than Men?

Yet another extremely provocative question which gets bogged down in the definition of achievement and how one measure it etc.

Women can sometimes be even better achievers in a typically men’s playfield, politics.

• In India, 10% of women candidates won elections while 6% of men did.
• 32% of women MPs had Doctoral or post-graduate degrees while 30% of men did.

This, of course, raises yet another question. Does this kind of result tell more about the candidate or more about the people who choose such candidates?

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Physically and anatomically, the differences between the male and the female of the human species are obvious. 

If you are looking for the lost Neanderthals, you are more likely to find them among the males living nowadays. 

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It is the male who is more robust, thick skulled (beyond metaphors, physically, men’s skulls are typically thicker than women’s) and the males constantly seeks to compete in sports, economics or other activities. 

Male brains are also supposed to be different from female brains.

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Physical Differences Between Male and Female Brains

Two areas in the frontal and temporal lobes (Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) thought to be responsible for language skills show differences. Women have 23% more stuff in Broca’s area and 13% more in Wernicke’s area.

Some researchers claim that male brains have less neurons in the corpus callosum, the part that joins the brain hemispheres, than females, while others dispute it. The cutting edge digital morphometry methods or Diffusion tensor imaging in encephalometric investigations, show that micro-structural and morphological differences are too complex. So, it is extremely difficult to say anything accurate about how brain differences affect how men and women think and behave.

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Is it the Environment or the Anatomy that Dictate Skill Differences?

Could it be that in the dawn of time, men became hunters and gatherers because they had inherently superior navigational skills and being more robust could fight with off animals and enemies? The Society for Neuroscience supports the view that the different roles of males and females made perfect evolutionary sense. Women needed all their communication skills to hold groups together and persuade the men.

Deborah Blum writes in “Sex on the Brain: 

The Biological Differences Between Men and Women” "Morning sickness, for example, which steers some women away from strong tastes and smells, may once have protected babes in utero from toxic items. Infidelity is a way for men to ensure genetic immortality. Interestingly, when we deliberately change sex-role behavior -- say, men become more nurturing or women more aggressive -- our hormones and even our brains respond by changing, too."

During a communication workshop I was giving, each participant had to imagine that s/he was interviewing a celebrity (dead or alive) and the partner had to pretend to be that celebrity. One woman asked her partner to be Eve (Adam & Eve). When asked, 

“Why are you always naked?” 

the elegant and voluptuous Eve replied: 

“Because I can! I have this beautiful body!” 

This answer expresses a core difference between the essential being of a woman from a man.

A woman is while a man needs to do. For her, being is essential and for him doing is expressing himself.

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Why does Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa keep us enthralled? 

• Is she busy doing something, achieving, showing off her litter or standing in front of a table full of her cooking? 
• She is mysterious because she is. 

Doctor Marianus in Goethe’s Faust says in the last lines “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan!” (The eternally female draws us onward!”)

Friedrich Nietzsche, the old male loner sees the interplay between men and women as: 

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything!”

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The folly of men

William Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing hits on the nail

“O, what men dare do! What men may do! What men daily do, not knowing what they do!

A woman has no illusions about a man.

“God made woman beautiful and foolish; beautiful, that man might love her; and foolish, that she might love him.” – Anonymous

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Some women would rather ‘season’ their man.

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“Men are like a fine wine. They all start out like grapes, and it's our job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something you'd like to have dinner with.”

Kathleen Mifsud

Men can also be treacherous, warns a Hollywood actress, Sharon Stone.

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“Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake a whole relationship.”

Do Men and Women Behave Differently in Similar Circumstances?

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“When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It's a whole different way of thinking.”   Elayne Boosler

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How Women of Different Centuries Communicate!

“Where shall I begin? Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”  Writes Jane Austen (1775-1817) to her sister Cassandra. 

"It is better to be unhappy alone than to be unhappy with someone else." Marilyn Monroe. 

"A woman is like a teabag. It's only when she's in hot water that you realise how strong she is". Nancy Reagan. 

“Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, good mother, good looking, good tempered, well groomed and unaggressive”       Leslie McIntyre (contemporary)

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