how can you hate someone you love?

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004)

I was talking with a good friend about a recent break up I was going through and said, “I hate them but I love them”. She asked, “how can you hate someone you love?”

It sounds contradictory at first. As if those two things can’t coexist. The word “love” is as strong as the word “hate”, so how can those two feelings be true at once?

Love creates the capacity for hurt.

There is a reason why the people who hurt us the most are rarely strangers.

A stranger’s words may sting for a brief moment, but they rarely leave lasting scars. Yet, when the words come from someone you love, someone you admire, or someone you look up to — it cuts deeper than we expect. That is because love, at its core, is an act of vulnerability. The moment we let someone into our life, we’re handing them the deadliest weapon of all: the ability to affect us.

Love breaks down our walls. We trust, invest, and imagine a future with someone. We begin to intertwine our lives and tie our happiness and sense of security to their presence. That’s why when the person we love betrays us, the hurt is not just about what happened or what they did. It’s about who it happened with.

The greater the love, the greater potential for pain

The intensity of our hurt often reflects the depth of our attachment. We are not devastated because the person was perfect and they managed to wound us. We’re devastated because they mattered.

And that’s where hate can sometimes emerge where love once flourished. Hate is love wounded’s form. It’s what’s left of you after affection collides with betrayal, when trust meets disappointment, or when hope confronts reality.

The anger is not proof that the love was fake or fleeting. If anything, it’s the evidence of how real the love once was.

Holding two truths

We’re simple creatures. We often want simple answers. We want to decide whether someone was good or bad, whether we should love them or hate them. But emotions rarely work that way. True emotional maturity begins when we find the courage to hold two truths at once: they hurt me, and I still love them. These statements may seem contradictory, but they can coexist. Acknowledging both does not mean excusing the hurt; it means accepting the complexity of what we feel instead of forcing ourselves to choose one side.

Perhaps this is because human beings are inherently contradictory. We are capable of feeling gratitude and resentment, love and anger, longing and acceptance all at the same time.

Love and hate are not always opposites; both are signs that someone mattered deeply. The real challenge is not eliminating one feeling in favour of the other, but making peace with the fact that both can exist.

In the end, healing comes not from resolving every contradiction, but from accepting that some of the most human experiences are the ones that make the least sense.

Love and hate can coexist because they are not the opposite of the other. They are both evidence that someone matters.

The real opposite is indifference — the day their name no longer stirs anything at all.

That’s not the day you stop loving them.

That’s the day you’ve finally let them go.