The Opposite of Love: Hate or Indifference?

We often say today that "The opposite of Love is hate." The four letter word "hate" that destroys relationships, imposes ghastly intentions and abstructs emotions. The truth is "the opposite of love is not hate but indifference." Hatred is an extreme that only destroys a handful of relationships, but indifference destroys millions. Indifference is the most destructive force at work against our relationships with one and another. Indifference destroys all energy and enthusiasm for the great pursuits of life. Where there is indifference there is no sense of purpose. When we become indifferent to the passions and purpose of our lives, we destroy ourselves as well as others. In the "Night Novel" by Elie Wiesel, the Jews are victims of indifference and its toll on people. Indifference meaning soulless living is an accurate definition to fit the work and acts of Hitler, the biggest nightmare during 1940's.Many opposites are not nearly as different as they first appear. For example, as Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel observed, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference; for at a minimum, to love or hate someone is to have intense emotions toward them. We see how the similarities between love and hate often outweigh the differences when one is transformed into the other, a phenomenon that literature — from Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Harlequen Romances — has exploited and explored for millennia.

The psychological proximity of love and hate is part of the hard wiring of the human psyche. Dan Gilbert explains, in his book Stumbling on Happness, that the same neurocircuitry and neurochemistry triggered in response to stressful events ("fight or flight") are also triggered in response to sexual arousal. As a result, when we are stressed in the presence of a person we find sexually attractive, we have a tough time telling what we are responding to: are our passions inflamed (hate) because of a stressor, or are we aroused (love) because of the attractive person?

In the 1994 movie Speed starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, Bullock's character, Annie Porter, appeals to this possible confusion when she notes, upon finding herself in the hero's arms after several near-death experiences, that "relationships that start under intense circumstances, they never last."

Call it an "emotional paradox": two very different dispos