Love doesn’t have a single opposite but many and hated is not in those many opposites. The concept of Love is as old as humanity and yet, describing it is like explaining a beautiful color to someone without vision. Even though Love is felt, seldom are the words found to describe it accurately.
The best of the words can attempt to describe Love and there will still be a substantial difference in how those words feel and how actual love feels. The words usually average at “Love is a beautiful, exotic and amazing feeling” and the debate of the true meaning of Love continues endlessly like its many opinions.
The opposite of Love is just as lesser understood of a concept as love and rarely does one get it right. A practically accurate misconception is when Love is equated as Newton’s third law (Every action has an equal and opposite reaction) and the answer obtained is Hatred because we’ve been told that hate is the opposite reaction of Love.
Although this satisfies the logic, it is not necessarily true and shows us how less understood the concept of Love is. Hatred is but a very tiny part of Love – and not the opposite. The people we hate are, at some point, the people we loved overwhelmingly or maybe people we are going to Love in the future and we just don’t know it yet.
The ferocity and intensity of the feelings in Love and Hate are the same, but the expressions are opposite. If you love someone, you do it wholeheartedly and if you hate someone, you do it wholeheartedly as well.
Fear, on the other hand, could be seen as the worthy opponent of Love, or as the dark side of Love. You fear losing the person you love – it’s as simple as that! It applies to anything and everything one loves – animate or inanimate objects.
Here is how fear is the opposite of Love. Imagine this, someone you Love – probably your younger brother or sister or your child – plays a prank with you saying that he or she has gotten in an accident. What would be your first reaction? Fear. Then you come to know that they are playing a prank and what’s your next reaction? Anger.
Fear is the path that sprouts from the mountain of Love that takes us to the deep dark valleys of destruction. When one is fearful about losing a person or a thing, one is gripped with the idea of possible loss and sadness. The fear of losing a loved one, makes them take drastic measures to avoid the loss, even if it means suffocation of that person or possessiveness or selfishness towards that object. The person, full of fear, becomes selfish and sees everything as an aid to their loss. The lizard of doubt squeaks in their mind. The good person, fearful of loss, now becomes an evil, selfish and possessive person – an abhorrent in society.
Just like Fear, even Anger is yet another part of the dark side of Love. Fear of losing a loved one leads to insecurity and anger. Anger is born from the realization that the one we love may leave us or is already leaving us. The constant anxiety of the fact that our love may be taken from us leads to frequent loss of temper. All of this is triggered by the self-induced belief or sometimes an inevitable fact that the one which we Love may go away forever.
Everything eventually comes to an end. Everything and everyone will sooner or later go away, they will fade into nothingness consumed by Time. This should serve as a constant reminder that everyone, everything – including ourselves – will go away and perish one day and nothing stays forever.
This often provokes either of the two responses. Either the person will love selflessly, which in turn will give rise to the purest form of Love there is, or that person will become an unwanted evil who is not ready to let go of his loved one. The person will show a complete detachment and be impassive and emotionally dry towards everyone.
While the first reaction is desirable, it is very difficult to attain it for the journey towards it is very hard and requires a strong heart and will power and the ability to let go and love without expectations, the later reaction of selfish love is easy and less painless, to bottle up your feelings and turn a cold shoulder towards practically everyone while being possessive and turning into a monster towards the loved one.
The ideal balance, which everyone strives to achieve, is to forgive and forget, help others, and love selflessly by staying detached. A practice that requires substantial effort and courage. Being an average person, it’s impossible to love someone selflessly and expect nothing or to give away something you love without a second thought and since this is what average people do, they tend to suffer, thus making suffering inevitable.
There is no practical solution to this. Being a human, you are bound to fear the loss of your loved one, you are bound to be disheartened when love does not reciprocate and the pain will be inevitable when you lose your love. It’s like falling and getting hurt when you learn to ride a bicycle. It’s okay to fall – rather, it’s mandatory to fall because you are learning to balance. The pain when you fall the tenth time will be less than the pain which you felt the first time. That’s what happens with life – we toughen up.
Life is composed of such tiny lessons if you look at it with a microscopic view. The thing is not to learn to let go all of a sudden or to stop giving a reaction to everything, the thing is to feel bad and then feel bad a little less and little less and so on with being open to the possibility that the road is long and there is a lot to learn.
New learnings will keep coming and you have to adapt and modify yourself accordingly. This way, one day, you won’t feel a lot of pain when the thing or person you love will go away. Because you have learned all along to let go of things and even if you do feel tremendous pain, you have learned to pull yourself up from it.
Expressing your Love when you have the opportunity is another way of feeling less pain after the imminent loss. Express your love whenever you can and express it wholeheartedly so that when it eventually and inevitably goes away, there won’t be regrets or sadness or pain having left things unsaid.
Every tree which is cut grows again. It may not be exactly the way it was before it was cut and the scars and deformities remain, but it grows anyway.
Love fearlessly. That’s the only way to avoid going down the path of fear, the only way to avoid destruction. Love knowing the inevitability of loss, love knowing that one day it will all go away, and love knowing that everything that has a beginning has an end. It takes courage to love fearlessly and only brave venture there knowing that there is an inescapable loss waiting. Be brave and love fearlessly.