Love–hate relationship
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Revision as of 07:05, 22 October 2011
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A love-hate relationship is a personal relationship between humans or organizations, or figuratively between a human and an inanimate object , like a computer, a field of study, a body of ideas, or a profession, involving simultaneous or alternating emotions of love and enmity. This relationship can, but does not have to be of a romantic nature.
This can also be simplified to say the person loves the other person/object, but hates oneself for it.
The term comes from the way one may love the object or person one moment, and yet the next moment feel great rage or hatred for it. As a colloquial expression, if someone says "I have a love-hate relationship with legal studies", what the person is trying to express is a marked ambivalence about his study of the law; parts of it are attractive, while other aspects are personally repellent.
A love-hate relationship often occurs when people have completely lost the intimacy within a loving relationship, yet still retain some passion for, or perhaps some commitment to each other.
An addiction is also a kind of love-hate relationship. Another symptom of a love-hate relationship is one in which there remains a high degree of sexual intimacy, but the emotional intimacy has degraded or vanished altogether. Some in these circumstances have observed that the overall emotional feeling is not wholly unlike an actual drug addiction.
The couple usually holds a weak grudge, resentment or bitterness towards one another creating a feud between emotional depression and happily ever after. The relationship is held together by the hatred each person conjures when feeling incomparable to the other's perfection. This anger is the cover up for the "love" part of the relationship because the couple dislikes social knowledge of the affair. The hate is also powered by the teasing of each person while the frustration reaches its maximum level through the restriction on releasing their sexual tension and intimacy.
However the relationship may be held together entirely by insecurity; the people in the relationship may believe that (for some reason or another) they are "unable to live without" one another, and knowing no other existence but with each other, choose the certainty of staying together over the risk of leaving. The two people in such a relationship are totally incompatible, but believe that they are both with the best person for themselves that they are going to get.
It can be argued that, due to the fact that the subjects love each other despite issues they have, a love hate relationship actually represents a stronger bond than a simple love relationship does. Also since a constant hatred is felt, any new issues which emerge are unlikely to put the relationship in jeopardy.
List of famous love-hate relationships in fiction
- Aristophanes and Euripides -"Frogs and Poet and the women
- Benedick and Beatrice - Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing
- Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy - Pride and Prejudice
- Erik and Christine Daaé - The Phantom of the Opera
- Hamlet and Ophelia - Hamlet
- Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde and Lucy - Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
- Tyler Durden and Marla Singer - Fight Club
- Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Further reading
- Psychoanalytic concepts of love and hate
- The Origins of Love and Hate (1910 - 1965) - Ian Dishart Suttie
- (Per)versions of Love and Hate (1998) - Renata Salecl
See also