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.
That’s got to be pretty high up on the list of “statements you really don’t want to see quoted out of context”.
Damn it, Gatopescado, that’s what I was going to say, only I was going to spell it marriage.
1 John 4:18
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?
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:
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?
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.
Defenestration.
??
It’s a joke, the opposite of love is chucking someone out a window.
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.
Wouldn’t you graph cold, temperate, and hot in exactly the same way?
Hate is the correct answer. By definition. QED.
Also accepted – fuck your mother’s mouth with a chainsaw.
Yes.
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.
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*Peanut butter on a breadstick, maybe?
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.
You know what’s sad?
It took me a minute to get that. :smack:
Why the opposite? There can be more than one. Apathy and hate are both different opposites of love.