What is the opposite of love?

[Indian]

I am curious.

[Typo Negative]

Indiffence

[Indian]

Indiffence

Did you miss an r?

[Toucanna]

Did you miss an r?
And an "e". But jokes aside, that's what I was gong to post: "Indifference". To love is care deeply about the other person's well-being and welfare. The opposite is to not care what happens to them. Starved? Froze? Robbed and beaten? Don't care, not my problem.

[Kolga]

I would say apathy.

[YaraMateo]

Isn't hate the opposite of love?

[Kamino Neko]

The chaplain at my high school was fond of saying 'the opposite of love is fear'.

Unfortunately, I can't remember just what the logic of this was.

[Hippy Hollow]

Isn't hate the opposite of love?

Nope. Hate is very similar to love in the respect that you can fall deeply into it; it can be an obsession, and ultimately, it means that you are very concerned, perhaps obsessively so, about someone's well being.

In fact, some have been inclined to perform songs about this similarity (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pCCdclkdLY).

[Typo Negative]

Nope, it's Indiffence

[YaraMateo]

Nope. Hate is very similar to love in the respect that you can fall deeply into it; it can be an obsession, and ultimately, it means that you are very concerned, perhaps obsessively so, about someone's well being.

In fact, some have been inclined to perform songs about this similarity (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pCCdclkdLY).

I don't understand how a feeling that makes you want to protect someone isn't the opposite of the feeling that you wish someone would die a horrible death (for example).

Birth and death are very similar. Also have very similar rituals and feelings involved. They're still the opposites of each other.

[Toucanna]

Nope, it's Indiffence
Whatever. I don't care.







;)

[The Flying Dutchman]

Isn't hate the opposite of love?

I believe that love and hate can occur simultaneously which rules out the one as opposite of the other. Love and indifference on the other hand .............well thats easy to figure out.

[YaraMateo]

I believe that love and hate can occur simultaneously which rules out the one as opposite of the other. Love and indifference on the other hand .............well thats easy to figure out.

I seen some parents who loved their children to the point of being indifferent to their bad behavior.

[Toucanna]

Hate is a passionate feeling. A negative passion, but a passionate feeling nonetheless. When you hate something you actively invest (negative) emotional energy in it. Apathy or indifference is dispassionate.

Many people confuse infatuation with love. I would say that hate and infatuation are opposites.

[YaraMateo]

Hate is a passionate feeling. A negative passion, but a passionate feeling nonetheless. When you hate something you actively invest (negative) emotional energy in it. Apathy or indifference is dispassionate.

Many people confuse infatuation with love. I would say that hate and infatuation are opposites.

I think you truly love something or someone (I think this would be more of like the love one has for a child) than hate is the opposite. Just because two things are "equal" doesn't mean they're not opposites. Isn't that like the first rule of gravity?

Love can have indifference and apathy. I think sometimes to LOVE someone you have to be indifferent to certain traits or behaviors. (As in a grown up relationship.)

I feel love has to have some indifference and hate doesn't.

[Hippy Hollow]

I don't think it's a coincidence that the manifestations of love and hate are often similar. It's about the passion. Hate, like love, compels one to act. I'm probably as invested in educating and fighting against things I hate (I can't think of anyone that I personally know whom I hate) as I am in doing the same about people and things I love.

So yeah, for me the opposite of love is indifference.

[Autolycus]

Another vote for indifference. I've heard a few good sermons about hate having the seeds for love.

[uuaschbaer]

The opposite of hatred is love; the opposite of tyranny is love; the opposite of censorship is love; the opposite of evil is love; the opposite of politics is love; the opposite of war is love; the opposite of God is love.
– Salman Rushdie

Technically I don't think there is an opposite, it doesn't seem to make evolutionary sense to spend so much energy on someone you dislike. Why is everyone assuming that there is at all an opposite; are we being poetic here or do we really think that everything we give a name must have some inverted counterpart to balance out reality?

[KinkiNipponTourist]

Love can have indifference and apathy. I think sometimes to LOVE someone you have to be indifferent to certain traits or behaviors. (As in a grown up relationship.)

I feel love has to have some indifference and hate doesn't.

Indifference to certain traits/behaviors is certainly necessary if you love, say, that jackass I dated a few years back.:D

But it seems to me you're changing the object here. To love someone, you have to be indifferent to certain traits, right?

Using your logic, but keeping the object the same, we'd end up with "to love someone, you have to be indifferent to them." But that's not what you're saying, right?

If you're indifferent to someone, you don't even know/care that they exist. In the context of animals or small children, indifference/neglect seem to me to be the opposite of love. Heartbreaking, really.

[YamatoTwinkie]

Nope. Hate is very similar to love in the respect that you can fall deeply into it; it can be an obsession, and ultimately, it means that you are very concerned, perhaps obsessively so, about someone's well being.


Can't you conclude that the opposite of "hate" is "indifference" as well?

[olivesmarch4th]

I came in to say apathy. Looks like I'm not alone.

[antonio107]

Celibacy. ;)

[Gatopescado]

Marraige?

[pulykamell]

My initial thought was "apathy," but that doesn't work for me. For me, the simple answer, "hate," is the one. It depends on how you define opposite. For me the opposite of "great positive feelings" towards a person is "great negative feelings towards a person," which is "hate." For me the opposite of "apathy" is "interest."

That's my answer, and I'm sticking to it.

[Grapefruit]

Another vote for indifference too.

[Thudlow Boink]

Hate is very similar to love in the respect that you can fall deeply into it; it can be an obsession, and ultimately, it means that you are very concerned, perhaps obsessively so, about someone's well being.Having similar qualities doesn't preclude something from being an opposite.

"What's the opposite of hot?"

"Cold."

"No, cold is very similar to hot: They're both temperatures; both of them can kill you if they get too extreme; they're both found as labels on sink faucets..."

Or, to take a mathematical example, the opposite of 1 is -1, not 0 or i.

So, I vote for hate as the opposite of love.

[Bosstone]

It really does depend on what continuum you're talking about.

If it's positive-negative feeling, then love and hate are opposites.

If it's intensity of feeling, then love and hate are similar and indifference is the opposite of both.

[fifty-six]

I am going with spite. If there was a coin spite would be on the other side. Both are some of the most motivating and long lasting emotions. Deep, piercing and require us to tap into our insecurities and vunverabilities to be effective. For something to be oppisite it must have many similarities. Not just mostly different. Indiference i os juat in the middle, hardly opposite.

[thatguyjeff]

I say fear.

Hate is rooted in fear, as are most negative emotions.

I think fear fits as a better true opposite than indifference. Indifference is a total lack of love, but not its opposite.

[Telperion]

Science.

[Keweenaw]

Science.

Atheism

[Der Trihs]

It really does depend on what continuum you're talking about.

If it's positive-negative feeling, then love and hate are opposites.

If it's intensity of feeling, then love and hate are similar and indifference is the opposite of both.There's also the question of focus. Love is focused on one or a few people, so its opposite in that sense should be aimed indiscriminately. Malice; greed; some kind of indiscriminate desire to harm or exploit others regardless of who they are.

[MeanOldLady]

Can't you conclude that the opposite of "hate" is "indifference" as well?Yes.

YaraMateo, have you ever had someone you've loved entirely shatter your heart into so many pieces that neither the king's horses nor his men could do anything to put it back together? Remember when you stopped feeling sad and just felt angry? Have you ever encountered the person in public after the split, or had the name mentioned in a conversation, and felt a flash of anger course through your body? Do you remember regarding that person with hostility, and if ever a tale of that person's ill-fortune passed by you, you couldn't help but to have the corners of your mouth turn involuntarily upward? Then do you remember the day, a long while later, when you ceased to think about that person at all? And if the topic ever came up, you regarded it the same way you would a friend telling you about some sale she took advantage of? "Oh, that's nice," you would think, and that would be it. That's the opposite of love, when you just do not feel a single thing for that person anymore. If you feel even the slightest pang of animosity, you still care.

[YaraMateo]

My initial thought was "apathy," but that doesn't work for me. For me, the simple answer, "hate," is the one. It depends on how you define opposite. For me the opposite of "great positive feelings" towards a person is "great negative feelings towards a person," which is "hate." For me the opposite of "apathy" is "interest."

That's my answer, and I'm sticking to it.

What he said.

[YaraMateo]

Yes.

YaraMateo, have you ever had someone you've loved entirely shatter your heart into so many pieces that neither the king's horses nor his men could do anything to put it back together? Remember when you stopped feeling sad and just felt angry? Have you ever encountered the person in public after the split, or had the name mentioned in a conversation, and felt a flash of anger course through your body? Do you remember regarding that person with hostility, and if ever a tale of that person's ill-fortune passed by you, you couldn't help but to have the corners of your mouth turn involuntarily upward? Then do you remember the day, a long while later, when you ceased to think about that person at all? And if the topic ever came up, you regarded it the same way you would a friend telling you about some sale she took advantage of? "Oh, that's nice," you would think, and that would be it. That's the opposite of love, when you just do not feel a single thing for that person anymore. If you feel even the slightest pang of animosity, you still care.

Good post. To answer you, yes. I'm a strange person. I don't feel much indifference. I tend to either like or dislike things. Usually, loving or hating things. So, while I can see why it's indifference. I see it as hate. Both answers are valid now that I think about it.

[Elret]

The opposite of caring is indifference. Love is caring about something in a positive way, and the opposite of that is caring about something in a negative way, which is hate.

[Two Many Cats]

I am curious.

So, is the opposite of curious bored?

[Indian]

So, is the opposite of curious bored?

:):D

I am enjoying the responses and the thought processes behind them.

[CalMeacham]

EVOL




Which is EVIL spelled badly.

[Fuzzy Dunlop]

Having similar qualities doesn't preclude something from being an opposite.

"What's the opposite of hot?"

"Cold."

"No, cold is very similar to hot: They're both temperatures; both of them can kill you if they get too extreme; they're both found as labels on sink faucets..."

Or, to take a mathematical example, the opposite of 1 is -1, not 0 or i.

So, I vote for hate as the opposite of love.

Yes, I agree with Thudlow Boink completely. This 'indifference' argument seems downright silly to me.

Is the 'big''s opposite 'average'? Is the opposite of 'winning' a tie? Is the opposite of 'profit' to break even? Is the opposite of 'extreme success' 'abject mediocrity'?

I'm pretty sure the actual answers are 'small', 'losing', 'loss', and 'miserable failure'.

[Dinaroozie]

I've got to side with the pro-hate side of this argument. The opposite of 'obese' isn't 'healthy weight', it's 'underweight', even though I could name some things that being obese and being underweight have in common. I've always thought the conventional wisdom of "hate isn't the opposite of love - indifference is" confuses love with passion.

On review: What Fuzzy Dunlop said.

[Der Trihs]

I've got to side with the pro-hate side of this argument.
That's got to be pretty high up on the list of "statements you really don't want to see quoted out of context".

[Arrendajo]

Marraige?

Damn it, Gatopescado, that's what I was going to say, only I was going to spell it marriage.

[robert_columbia]

The chaplain at my high school was fond of saying 'the opposite of love is fear'.

Unfortunately, I can't remember just what the logic of this was.

1 John 4:18

[MeanOldLady]

Good post. To answer you, yes. I'm a strange person. I don't feel much indifference. I tend to either like or dislike things. Usually, loving or hating things. So, while I can see why it's indifference. I see it as hate. Both answers are valid now that I think about it.Strange indeed. How can you not be indifferent toward anyone? I'm going to assume strangers are the exception. Imagine regarding someone you loved the way you do a stranger. Or is that not possible for you?

[Snifit]

1 John 4:18

I'm not sure that that bible passage says love is the opposite of fear.
I've seen the idea that fear is the opposite of love expressed in a book called The Gates of Fire, which is a dramatic narrative of the battle of Thermopylae. I think it was in the context of the warriors forming strong bonds with eachother; their love for eachother would overcome their fear of the coming battle and death.
Now that I've typed that out, I realize that the idea is exactly what the bible passage says. Hah. :) Moving on!

ETA: Looks like Herodotus wrote about it. Deinekes, one of the 300:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dienekes

[Indygrrl]

Apathy and indifference are as close to opposites as love has, IMO.

Hate is so close to love, and they are so interconnected, that I have a hard time seeing them as opposite at all.

[Elret]

Apathy and indifference are as close to opposites as love has, IMO.

Hate is so close to love, and they are so interconnected, that I have a hard time seeing them as opposite at all.This does seem to be the majority view, but I'm still not getting it, at all. It has never been my experience that "hate is so close to love" and I can't figure out what is meant by that. I do understand that both are passionate feelings, but that doesn't preclude them from being opposites of each other, just as hot and cold are both intense feelings but still opposites. The opposite of cold is not temperate, even though hot and cold are close in a lot of ways.

I love the smell of lilacs, and I hate the smell of skunks. How is that interconnected? How is it not opposite? I am indifferent to the smell of rocks, how is that the opposite of how I feel about the smell of lilacs?

I love my children, I hate Hitler. I am indifferent to the lady that reads the news on channel six. She is seriously the opposite of how I feel about my children?

I'm not trying to be argumentative, I really do want to get my head around where people are coming from with this. Can you explain this interconnectedness for me?

[Thudlow Boink]

Apathy and indifference are as close to opposites as love has, IMO.

Hate is so close to love, and they are so interconnected, that I have a hard time seeing them as opposite at all.This sounds like the kind of thing a person would say whose relationships were all shouty and fighty and drama-filled and who didn't realize that some people have, and prefer, true love without all the drama.

[Rigamarole]

Defenestration.

[Indian]

Defenestration.

??

[Elret]

??It's a joke, the opposite of love is chucking someone out a window.

[pulykamell]

I'm not trying to be argumentative, I really do want to get my head around where people are coming from with this.

I think it's a little bit of Dopers tying to be clever and going for the non-obvious answer, but it does make sense, if you're judging "love" on the intensity of emotion scale rather than on the "positive" scale. Personally, if I were making a continuum, I would have love on one side, apathy in the middle, hate on the other. But there's more than one way to graph the continuum.

[Elret]

Wouldn't you graph cold, temperate, and hot in exactly the same way?

[Jaledin]

Hate is the correct answer. By definition. QED.

Also accepted -- fuck your mother's mouth with a chainsaw.

[pulykamell]

Wouldn't you graph cold, temperate, and hot in exactly the same way?

Yes.

[Ura-Maru]

Hate and indifference/apathy are the two traditional answers. Niether is satisfactory.

You can't love something and be indifferent to it at the same time, true . . . but by the same logic, indifference is also the opposite of hate. And amusement. And mild discomfort. If our working definition of 'Being in a state of X makes Y impossible,' than liquid is the opposite of pencil. Though it's a workable answer if asked the question in a romantic context.

Hate works better on the visceral level. For example, I love breasts. I approve of their existence, wish them to prosper, and they make me feel happy. Additionally, I hate Hitler. I despise him and all he stands for, and he makes me angry. The problem is, when examining relationships more complicated than the emotional response to breasts and/or Hitler, not only is it possible to love and hate the same thing simultaneously, it's quite common. This one only works if we reduce love and hate so far down that they lose their meaning. Boolean Love is not an adequate representation of love in any important context.

So, either works for some arbitrary values of love. The real problem is with the question. It's like asking, 'What's the opposite of sandwich?'* Emotions don't have 'opposites' any more than flavors or recipes do, unless we want to wander into Seinfeld-esque definition trees.

xkcd already tried this approach. It failed. (http://xkcd.com/55/)

--
*Peanut butter on a breadstick, maybe?

[Carmady]

Opposites don't have to be that different. Up and down are both directions, hot and cold may both refer to temperatures. That makes them similar. Same with love and hate. One is a strong positive emotion, the other is a strong negative emotion, but both are strong emotions and they are opposites.

Apathy is more like a negation of love than an opposite. Negations are not the same thing as opposites.

[Typo Negative]

Whatever. I don't care.







;)

You know what's sad?

It took me a minute to get that. :smack:

[Strinka]

Why the opposite? There can be more than one. Apathy and hate are both different opposites of love.

[Nava]

Yesterday I was walking down the street, searching for the apartment I was going to see, saw an ad...

apparently I can't walk, look at the map and laugh at the same time. There's a romcom coming out this week here in Spain called, you guessed it, "The Opposite of Love" (well, it's a Spanish movie so it's actually called lo contrario al amor (http://sites.sonypicturesreleasing.es/sites/locontrarioalamor_site/)).

Therefore, I posit that the opposite of love is a romcom.

[Hogfather65]

What is the opposite of love?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am curious.
.

Marriage!

[SCSimmons]

Evol.

[Indian]

Yesterday I was walking down the street, searching for the apartment I was going to see, saw an ad...

apparently I can't walk, look at the map and laugh at the same time. There's a romcom coming out this week here in Spain called, you guessed it, "The Opposite of Love" (well, it's a Spanish movie so it's actually called lo contrario al amor (http://sites.sonypicturesreleasing.es/sites/locontrarioalamor_site/)).

Therefore, I posit that the opposite of love is a romcom.

funny.;)

[Malthus]

I'm going to buck the trend and say "greed" or "selfishness".

Reason: "love" (as an idealised emotion, as opposed to say lust or infatuation) is focused on the other - wanting the wellbeing of the loved one, whether this is romantic love, love for country, love for humanity, love for one's children, etc.

"Indifference" is unsatisfactory as an opposite, because it is opposite to many other emotional states as well - indeed, all other emotional states relative to others.

In contrast, "greed" or "selfishness" is a focus on the wellbeing of the self to the exclusion of others, and makes a good opposite for "love".

[Indian]

Some very insightful responses in this thread.

:)