About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Love-hate relationship

Encyclopedia : L : LO : LOV : Love-hate relationship

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 may or may not be of a romantic nature.

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. For example, a computer may impress a user with amazing video game graphics one moment, only to give rise to anger when it crashes during the game. 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 or her 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.

A love-hate relationship could also be when (for example) Person A loves or desires Person B, while Person B hates Person A. This could lead Person A to obsession and possibly insanity, as has happened to various fictional characters.

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 substance-abuse addiction.

A related theme is "obligatory friendship", where usually one party feels indebted to another and forges a friendship but still holds a grudge over a particular past disappointment or set of disappointments, while the "creditor" in the relationship agrees to the nature of the relationship often for security reasons, but remains aware of the "debtor"'s grudge and feels counter-indebted until the cause of the grudge is sufficiently overcome.

A love-hate relationship is between two people who refuse to accept the liking of each other or the enjoyment of one another's presence. The couple usually holds a weak grudge 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 society's 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.

On the other hand, 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.

List of famous love-hate relationships in fiction

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: