Love and Hate

On one of those nights when I was lying on the bed, waiting for sleep to come and embrace me this thought struck me. "Can we love the one we hate and can we hate the one we love?" I kept on thinking and talking to myself and then slept off. The next morning I remembered some points which I pondered over while some were incoherent. But still if I had to find my answer to this question it would be "No".


How one answers this question (don't know whether this question really needs to be answered...) depends on the experiences of their own life. I feel that both "love" and "hatred" are extreme emotions. Anything less than the extreme would have another name but not these. And if I imagine a scale from minus-infinity to plus-infinity, I would label the minus-infinity point as "Hate/Hatred", Zero point as "Indifference or Absence of any emotion" and plus-infinity point as "Love". Normally our emotions fall somewhere in between this scale and sometimes it touches the extreme points. Now, visualising the same scale, is it possible to jump from one extreme to the other?

I don't think it is possible. The distance and the journey between the two ends is two big to be traversed by a normal individual. You might start disliking the person you once loved, but you will never reach the other infinite end. And if you really feel that you have reached the minus-infinity end, then it means you were never at the plus-infinity end to start with.

Another point I would like to mention is that we can be at the 'Zero' point of the scale only for people we don't know. We sometimes say, "I really don't care about ABC". That's not true. Truth is "I will never own that I do care about ABC". Anybody we know occupies the scale either on the positive or the negative side.

Hmmm...enough. If any of you have thought about this either before or after reading this post please do share your thought. I would like to know other views. May be my approach to answer this question is too simplistic as I might be ignoring many factors.

P.S. Paul Ekman, a psychologist classified emotions as basic and complex. Examples of basic emotions are sadness, happiness and anger. A complex emotion is a mixture of 2 or more of basic emotions. Love and hatred both are complex emotions, so ideally they cannot be put on the same scale. According to this my approach and the answer are flawed. Nevertheless, still we can discuss it.