I am curious.
Indiffence
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.
I would say apathy.
Isn’t hate the opposite of love?
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.
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.
Nope, it’s Indiffence
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.
Whatever. I don’t care.
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.
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.
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.
Another vote for indifference. I’ve heard a few good sermons about hate having the seeds for love.
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?
Indifference to certain traits/behaviors is certainly necessary if you love, say, that jackass I dated a few years back.
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.
Can’t you conclude that the opposite of “hate” is “indifference” as well?