I can't remember where I heard it, but a couple (I think) months ago I heard a quote which went something along these line, "Humans...what foolish creatures. It amazes me to see how they can go from loving another of their kind, to hating them so quickly". I believe the quote was either from some kind of Sci-Fi movie or game, possibly even an anime. I've tried searching for it but pretty much any search I did with the words '"love" and "hate" together gave me links to those answer sites with questions like "Is it possible to love someone you hate?" or forum posts with "I hate x for loving someone who isn't me". What really made the quote stick in my mind was how true I found it to be.
It's actually not that unusual a scenario when you think about it. Isn't easy to picture a couple who's broken up and hate each other's guts? Why is it that there are plenty of stories about couples that break up and then go on to smash up their ex loved one's car or house. I even encountered a scenario in Fable 2 (a quest based RPG game set in the medieval for the Xbox 360) that I found quite interesting.
You encounter a ghost who tells you his story: He was in love with a woman named Joan and she was in love with him, they both agreed to get married, but on the day of the wedding the bride doesn't show. Grief stricken the man took his own life and due to his regret he remains as a ghost, who gives you the task of exacting revenge. The task is to make Joan fall in love with you, and then when she's ready to marry you hand her a rejection letter that goes something along the lines of "I don't really love you, this was all a trick. P.S. I think you're a dirty cow". Making someone fall in love with you is stupidly easy in Fable 2 (after you meet a person for the first time all you have to do is dance for a minute or so and they're ready for marriage), and so it didn't take long until I was ready to hand Joan the letter.
Upon receiving the letter she runs out of town in distress and you never see her in town again. When you go back to pick up the reward from the ghost man (you get some gold and oddly enough become more renowned as a hero of the world =/ although you also get some evil points), you encounter a conversation between the ghost of the man and the ghost of Joan. She goes on to say that she always loved the man (and never thought she could love again until your dancing seduces her) but just didn't think she was ready for marriage at the time, however she's willing to give it a go with him again as a ghost. This gets interrupted when she realizes that the main character is there and the whole thing was a set up. She gets extremely upset with the male ghost and the main character and runs away for good while cursing your names.
I think this is an almost perfect example of what I'm trying to get at today. I didn't find anything about this scenario particularly out of place (except for you know...the whole ghost thing) and found both the male ghost and Joan's behaviour to be quite reasonable. This actually surprised me quite a bit when I looked back at it. Here you've got a man who loved a woman so much he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her...except now he's out for revenge. The ghost of Joan, upon finding the ghost of her (lost) love is overjoyed that she can be with him again...until she finds out about his plot. Am I the only one who finds it odd that these characters can go from loving someone one minute, to hating their guts the next? Why would you exact revenge on someone that you love? (and if I didn't make it clear before; ghost-man does still love Joan). Despite the fact that ghost Joan clearly loved ghost man - upon learning about his plot not only does she not love him, she hates him!
From my personal experience love is a feeling, not something that you can easily put into words. It doesn't matter that someone did something mean or completely horrible to you, it doesn't mean that the feeling that you had for that person is gone. Sure you might be mad or angry at them at first, but is it really worth forcing yourself to hate someone for the rest of your life (or death in this case I suppose) just because they wronged you? Sure my girlfriend does stuff that makes me angry from time to time but that doesn't mean that I stay angry at her forever. My mum shits me up the wall - sometimes for weeks on end to the point where I feel I'm going to crack, but that doesn't mean that I don't love her, it just means that I'm pissed off at her for the time being. Even just with friends; if a friend does something that mightily embarrasses me or pisses me off I'm not going to stop being their friend, I'm just going to be pissed off at them for a while, but eventually I'll get over it and forgive them.
This brings me to an interesting point my girlfriend said to me once which actually shocked me quite a bit. After getting super crazy 100% mightily pissed off(!!!!) with one of her friends, she decided that she wasn't going to be friends with them anymore. Despite this, within about a week she started wanting to talk to and spend time with her friend again. When I asked her, "why not just talk with her then?" her response was somewhere along the lines of, "because I shouldn't! I'm supposed to be pissed off with her!" and then later down the track she came up with something like, "I'm such a weak person for wanting to spend time with her again, I wish I could hate people more! You know how some people can hate someone and just keep hating them forever? I can't do that, I forgive them too easily."
Hearing her say this really made me think: why is it bad that she wants to forgive her friend? I can understand the feeling that she has, but I have no idea where the pressure of needing to continue to hate someone comes from. This is something I really would like to hear some opinions/theories from others about. Does the idea come from movies, or those drama TV shows were people are like (deep breath here), "I thought I could love you but then you stepped on my grape and squished it and got grape juice on my floor and then took the skin of the grape on the underside of your shoe so now I can't even beat the grape for leaving juice on my floor and so now you're my worst enemy even though I still secretly love you and if I want my character to have more screen time I'll eventually have a second go with you." I can understand how she felt a "pressure" to keep hating her friend, however at the same time it doesn't make sense, and at the very least I really don't agree with it (even if I do act on this "pressure" sometimes). Am I too weak a person because I prefer the idea of forgiving people rather than staying pissed at them forever?
Curiously enough, to me this kind of situation actually gives a +1 to religion. I'm not a particularity religious person (even if I did go to a Anglican school), however I often feel that Christianity has the right idea for the most part. If only it's believers actually focused on the main ideas rather than "Ohh look that man (supposedly) came back from the dead so we should thank him for everything we do, and focus on people who are (apparently) spiritually closer to this guy and listen to what they say". The other alternative seems to be, "I have to follow what was written here by the letter, but I don't agree with that part there, so I'm going to create my own spin-off version of this religion which is going to be exactly the same except for this part which says I can now sleep with lots of women.
Getting back on track...a main guiding principle behind Christianity is forgiveness: humans aren't perfect, we make mistakes and we do things that hurt others or piss them off, so understand that people are like that, forgive them for doing it to you, and understand that you also do it to other people. To me this is actually on the right page. Yes someone you love(d) or your best friend might have done something extremely bad to you or pissed you off but that doesn't mean that you should hate them forever, try to understand them and forgive them for what they did.
I'm exhausted after writing all that, and it took a while too (writing blogs is surprisingly slower than reading them :P), so I'm going to leave the post here for today. I am extremely interested in hearing what people have to say about what I've talked about today. I'm happy to talk about anything related to what I've written about today, but I'll also quickly sum up the main points I'm interested in hearing about below. To talk to me about this stuff either: comment on my blog, send me an email or chat to me on IM (if I don't already have you as a contact send me an email first or you'll be ignored).
Summary:
1) How people can go from loving someone to hating someone so easily, and
2) Why it's not particularly surprising that this happens (i.e. does the Fable 2 scenario seem weird/out of place to you and why?)
3) Is it bad to forgive people so easily, and
4) Why does there seem to be a kind of "pressure" that says it's wrong to forgive others?
5) Is it really bad to want to forgive others?
I think if there is someone in your life that makes you wonder why you are still friends with them as they constantly make you angry at them, you will eventually hit a point at which you have to ask yourself, "Do I really want to stay friends with this person?" It can become really taxing have to always be the one who says you're sorry, especially when you feel like you didn't do anything wrong and you're only apologising because they won't.
ReplyDeleteI tried to go one week without playing games and one week without saying, "Sorry" and guess which one was the hardest for me?
As for love and hate, I think people tend to be a bit fickle. Depending on your level if fickleness, your feelings for someone might fluctuate a lot or a little. Let's imagine that 0 is neutral feeling towards someone (like say someone on the street who is doing nothing to piss you off or impress you), 100 is someone you would die for, and -100 is someone you would torture for hours on end if you were given the chance. Someone you love might have a "base score" of 70, but on any given day, that will have to be adjusted depending on your situational feelings for them. So if you are angry at them right now for leaving the toilet seat up, you might have to adjust -20 for toilet seat anger, and so at that point in time, you still love them, but not as much.
Personally, someone would have to have a pretty high score in my mind before I would consider myself loving them, but not everyone would have the same line. So someone might believe they love someone as soon as they hit 30. So you can imagine things like alcohol (which would probably increase the score) making people temporarily believe they "love" someone, even though their "base score" would indicate that they don't.
If you had someone with a low threshold for considering themselves in love with someone, as well as a fickle personality, you can probably find someone who crosses the border between love and hate quite easily.
Another analogy would be stocks. I guess whether you switch easily can be described by what you would do with a falling stock. Are you the kind of person who holds on to it hoping that it will regain value soon, or do you dump it as son as possible and buy into another stock that you hope will perform better? If you are risk averse, you may find it better to dump the stock or hate the person you love in order to avoid becoming hurt.
The complex one is the other way around - going from hating someone to loving them. What do you think about that?
On the score idea, maybe the number is stable but sign convention isnt :P.
ReplyDeleteI think loving someone is two parts, one part is the subconcious strong feeling, the other is the more concious action of engaging with them etc. If someone rejects you, you could try turning off the concious part, but the subconcious part still likes them. That causes disharmony, which results in anger, then the anger is directed at the person who has your attention.
I also think there is a bit of embarrasment (inconsistancy in your personality, at liking them but now not liking them), anger at rejection (easy enough to understand), and anger at loss of power (they know you liked them, so they have "some" fundemental control over what you feel, they control you a bit), disapointment (you judged them worthy of your feelings, but they let you down, which shows you have bad judgment (embarresment again)), and a desire to get rid of the remaining feelings you have (push them away by seeking conflict where they will hurt you enough that you id will get the point).
I think an ego/id model works well for explaining why i get to console friends who are like "why do i always go for jerks?"
Hmmm.... HMMMMMMMMMM..... interesting topic. I like this! Firstly, about Lex's post:
ReplyDelete1) How people can go from loving someone to hating someone so easily?
I do see people have a tendency to suddenly dislike someone they liked before, and I like the way Fodder put it (the love meter). It probably is, an emotion for THAT specific moment. I think Jeffro's comment about “disharmony” is a good way to explain this spec of the moment feeling. Like, think about it, the person you loved suddenly did something terrible (or just bad) to you. In that specific moment, as a human being, its just a natural reaction to feel angry at them, unless you're Christ or Buddha of course!
2) Why it's not particularly surprising that this happens (i.e. does the Fable 2 scenario seem weird/out of place to you and why?)
Hang on a second, I just answered this! Next~
3) Is it bad to forgive people so easily?
In my view, why would it be so bad? Honestly, I recon it's better to be good at something than being bad at it. Also, I personally think that forgiveness isn't the reason behind people reverting from hating them to loving them. I had one experience with a basketball coach only putting me on for about (what seemed like, I can't remember the exact time) 10 minutes for a 40 minute game. I hated him at that specific point, and I told myself that I'll hate him for a while, but when I met him again at training, I didn't really care about it and I was puzzled at why this was the case. When I think about it, I just couldn't hate my coach even when he put me on for very little time. So what does this tell us? I believe that rather than forgiveness being the reason we love someone after hating them, it's because hate is a reactive feeling and not a permanent one (for most cases). There are the rare case scenario where it is EXTREMELY difficult to forgive someone (for example killing someone that you love the most in the world), but besides this, once you've cooled your head a little, you can see the bigger picture of the whole situation and tell yourself whether you want to keep the person you suddenly hated so much as a friend. For most cases, we go through the act of forgiving the other and go back to our normal rating on the “Fodder meter”. Being able to forgive people so easily isn't an easy thing to do. I'm sure some people would be puzzled at how others are able to forgive people so easily. In the end, I think for Lex's girlfriend's situation, it's wanting something that you don't have :p
This is part 2 of my response... it was too long :p
ReplyDelete4) Why does there seem to be a kind of "pressure" that says it's wrong to forgive others?
This is interesting because I've never (at least not that I'm aware of) come across something like this. This “pressure” that people feel, I'm guessing, is this gut feeling of “whether I should forgive other people so easily”. If we look at a world of GOOD and EVIL, then maybe forgiving others before they repent their sins may not be the best of things. Although... if we look at Jesus, I think he forgave many many people before they repented their sins, but anywayz. Yeah, I don't understand this “pressure” of wronging forgiveness. I'll just leave it as an “internal process of needing more time to forgive someone”.
5) Is it really bad to want to forgive others?
No.
^
I'm sorry I had to do that XD. I don't think it's bad. As I said before, why shouldn't we forgive others, and why not be good at it rather than bad? I'm no Christian, but I think being able to forgive others is an important thing. For example, you live in a world where there is no such thing as “forgiveness”. What would the world be like? I had a little think of it just then, and I ended up in a world of hate and no love. There is ALWAYS, mark my word, ALWAYS a situation where you feel angry at someone you love. If we don't forgive them, what would happen? That human relationship will crumble, be destroyed, and nothing but hate will remain. If that continues and goes on throughout the world, aaaaand no forgiveness is given, yeah, life would suck and everyone would be a loner. I'm thinking extremes but I personally don't think wanting to forgive others is a bad thing.
Fodder → Stocks is a very interesting analogy, but it may be a very simplistic one. “Are you the kind of person who holds on to it hoping that it will regain value soon, or do you dump it as son as possible and buy into another stock that you hope will perform better?” This depends on how you look at stock marketing. If you're someone that I know * cough * BLACK * cough *, you may do something unimaginable, but (as you have stated) if you're the risk taker, you may hold onto it and if you're the risk averse you may dump it and “avoid being hurt”. Now, think about it... can this stock market analogy fit with the “Love, Hate, Forgiveness” story? I'm sure you weren't thinking about too much of it and using this just as an analogy so I think I'll just shut up now XD.