Hate isn’t the opposite of love; indifference is. Hate is love gone wrong, and how easily that happens.
D.H. Lawrence once wrote a poem he called History, which reads like this:
The listless beauty of the hour
When snow first fell on the apple trees
And the wood-ash gathered in the fire
And we faced our first miseries.
Then the sweeping sunshine of noon
When the mountains like chariot cars
Were ranked to blue battle-and you, and I
Counted our scars.
And then in a strange, grey hour
We lay mouth to mouth, with your face
Under mine like a star on the lake
And I covered the earth, and all space.
The silent, drifting hours
Of morn after morn
And night drifting up to night
Yet no pathway worn.
Your life, and mine, my love
Passing on and on, the hate
Fusing closer and closer with love
Til at length they mate.
At the beginning of every love, romantic or not, the dream for that love is connected to an ideal of purity, mutuality, and respect. Every real love begins with the idea that this time we’ll get it right, that we won’t make the mistakes we’ve made other times, that this time love will sustain its magic. And in the early stages of love, that ideal is spontaneously respected, as is the other person.
In the stage of attraction, flirtation, and infatuation, love takes its roots in the poetic imagination and enrobes itself, figuratively, in whiteness, in purity, in all that’s best inside us. Figuratively, it puts on a baptismal robe because it senses that here, finally, there will be rebirth.
There’s nothing as potentially life-giving and redeeming as falling in love. It recolors the world completely. As the great novelist, Iris Murdoch once said: “The world can change in fifteen seconds, when you fall in love.”
But the world, as we know, can also turn indifferent, dark, and angry in fifteen seconds, or fifteen years. Most of us won’t die like Romeo and Juliet, still in the grip of that bliss-producing, soul-searing, divine fever we call “falling in love”, where dying for love seems not too high a price to pay.
However, time, familiarity, differences, restlessness, old immaturities, wounded pride, a wandering eye, and simple selfishness soon enough begin to work at dispelling the magic. Where we once couldn’t get enough of each other, where we swallowed our hurts and pride and were willing like Romeo and Juliet to die for each other, we now begin to count our scars, to let things drift, and no longer search habitually for the path towards the other’s door. Hate begins to fuse with love, resentments creep in, and we slowly reclaim our singleness.
What D.H. Lawrence so brilliantly describes in this poem is how gradually and imperceptibly love can lose its purity, its divine fever, and its divine intent, even in its most intense expressions.
And what he is referring to is not that (healthy) innate structure within the very dynamics of love itself, love’s dark night of the soul, where love pressures us toward maturity beyond infatuation, illusion, and selfishness.
He is referring to a disease that can creep into a relationship when, for whatever reason, familiarity begins to breed contempt and disrespect, and the ideal that originally triggered that love is lost. Milan Kundera once said that when the idea that a love was founded on dies, then the love dies too. More accurately, it doesn’t die but it begins to fuse with hate.
Real love is always founded on the ideal of purity, mutuality, and respect. In our heart of hearts, we want what’s right, what’s best; we don’t want to stain what we love. And this implies things far beyond sex.
When we first say the words, “I love you,” and mean them, our hearts are connecting us to an ideal, a dream, a divine form, and a purity that roots itself in what’s best in us. But once we begin to compromise that ideal through any kind of disrespect or infidelity, we begin the slide down that slippery slope that Lawrence describes here and no expression of intimacy, the sexual bed included, will easily redeem the initial dream for that love. Our love then begins imperceptibly to sleep with hate, until we can no longer tell the difference. Our relationship then will produce as much resentment as delight and we will soon find ourselves becoming strangers to each other.
When we are baptized, a white dress is put on us to symbolize purity and words are spoken over us to remind us that this white garment is the outward sign of our inner dignity and our challenge is to bring that dignity unstained into eternal life. But unless we die young, this is not an easy task. Even so, what’s symbolized by our baptismal robes must be the poetic dream for every love in our lives, complete with the challenge of bringing that love home without the stain of hatred.