Isn't strange how alive we feel when we are in love?  It's a dangerous place. It's a world in which you are vulnerable.  I look back on words I wrote as a boy.  An innocent boy with a mind for love clean and pure like a untouched glittering star in the night sky.  I recall laying in bed listening to music in a bunk bed as an only child.  I was ripe for the picking, waiting to be plucked.  Enter love. 

Love... what is love?  Ask a hundred people and you'll be buried in confusion.  It is like asking people to define what God is to them.   The world we live in is so self-absorbed that defining love isn't worth the wasted breath invested in speaking those words.  It's better to express it through actions or states of being.

But one thing we can all agree on.  There is a fine line between love and hate. 

How can that be?  If what I wrote above is true, then the answers come easy.  So many of us don't know what love is.  We don't know how to love.  We don't know any other love than self love.   So many of us make love what want it to be for our-self.  We put demands on others we wouldn't expect from our self.  So when we don't get what we want the way we want it, we can be self-righteous and attack the very thing we desired.    It can be as simple as a means to combat rejection or as complicated as giving up on yourself.

Either way you shift the blame of your own failure towards the one you once desired.  It's why little girls in elementary school talk nasty about little boys that don't like them.   It's why men who are lazy and won't work for love hit their women the don't know enough to cherish.

But these are not the only examples of love turning to hate.  People that no longer need each other find it easier to see each other for what they really are.  From what you were once blind to, you now see.  And the emotions that tied you to that person are no longer restraining your logic.  With your rationale restored, objectionable decision making is possible.  And what we see now in the person we were with is somehow transformed into a truth we refused to see before.  You can stand back and see things in a context unknown when you were standing right beside it.  

Even in a loving relationship we must learn to accept things in our spouse we would not normally tolerate in someone we were not that close to.  It is if resentment bubbles up just under the surface but never really boils.  Remove the love and that close proximity to resentment becomes contempt.  It becomes hate.

Love is such a wonderful thing.  It clouds your mind and judgment.   You'd think conversely that hate gives you a clear mind to see things for what they really are.  That is a fools mistake that I'm sure every reader of this article is intelligent enough to never to consider.

No, hate is not the pendulum swinging the other direction, nor is hate pulling in the opposing direction.  Hate is a partner to love.  Hate is an "emotion" that clouds our judgment.  Love and Hate are both at fault in this arena.    Perhaps that is why there is such a fine line between them.  They are not and opposite ends of the spectrum.  Love and hate share the same space.

Oh... and for those of you wondering if this is a condemnation of love.  No. Never....  I still believe in time love won't let you down.   You just need to understand what love really is.  That's an article for another time and place.