I hate love

I hate love.

Not REALLY, but I made a statement to this effect on another social media website that I'm on. I made it pretty casually, too - I was talking about why I dislike Valentine's Day and why I was happy that Caustic Soda (my favorite morbid podcast) had made an episode about love just in time for Valentine's, "because I hate love and this makes everything better" - and someone asked me to expound upon what I meant when I said "I hate love".

My response got very long and I figured I'd share it on this blog because I think it has some value.

Firstly: I don't actually hate love. When I say "I hate love", it's a case of both hyperbole and incorrect word usage. I don't hate love; I hate cruelty, I hate bigotry, I hate abuse. Those are examples of things I actually hate. I don't even "hate" love in the same way that I "hate", say, spiders or hot weather or grape-flavored candy. Those are things I strongly and unambiguously dislike, albeit not to the deep, profound extent to which I hate the aforementioned Actually Hated things.

When I say "love", I don't mean just romantic love, either. As most of you know, I'm aromantic, and I therefore feel alienated in the face of statements and sentiments that consider romantic love to be universal or necessary on an individual level as well as in the face of romantic love itself. Honestly, romantic love itself just. Alienates me for some reason or another. It's not even romance repulsion per se, in that I'm not like "ew romance get it away from me" - sometimes I'm like that but not always or even most of the time. It's more like "what is this even, does not compute" and my computer brain just sort of crashes in the face of something it can't process but is trying to process nonetheless. (Does that mean I have a weak mind? Probably.)

Love is a really really weird thing to me. The lie I tell most often is "I love you", and I tell it to family and friends alike. (I don't tell it to romantic partners because I don't have any, which is a good thing for everybody, but if I had them, rest assured I'd tell them that lie, too.) I say it often just as a social thing (a means of making people feel better in the face of certain situations, of maintaining a social structure others view as being held together by love, something that makes people happy, et cetera). I say it so often that it means anything outside of the ways in which I use it. But honestly, love doesn't make sense to me. No forms of love make sense to me. I like people, sure, but I like them the same way I like my favorite books, or English Breakfast tea, or overcast days. 

Sometimes I like them so much you could almost say I love them - not actual love but a specific kind of not-actual-love that's comparable to the previously-discussed not-actual-hate. 

Sometimes I love people like I love the Voynich Manuscript - I'm so fascinated with them and I think they're so beautiful that I have intense and consistent feelings of appreciation and fascination and happy feelings for them. Sometimes I love people like I love this one pen I have - someone once summarized my feelings towards that pen as, "This is my pen; there are many like it, but this one is mine", and I get like that about people, too. Sometimes I love people like I love the place near my house where the library and the taco shop are - they're deeply familiar and I feel comfortable and relaxed around them, like nothing bad could ever happen when I'm in their presence. Sometimes I love people like I love my anti-anxiety pills - they keep me sane and frankly I need them.

The thing is, even though I've described me having Real Feelings towards people, these feelings are still comparable to those I feel towards objects. To be honest, they're not just comparable - they're almost exactly the same. And the only reason I say "almost exactly" is because I don't believe it's possible to have the EXACT same emotions towards two different things, but they're so similar they may as WELL be exactly the same. I've been told by therapist and layman alike that I see people as objects, and I agree. I don't experience empathy, and I don't see others as People the way I'm a "People". I can care about them in a way but only in the way you'd care about an object you really cared about. Is that love? Maybe. But maybe it isn't. It's certainly not the kind of love people are talking about when they say "love makes us human" or "love conquers all" or "all you need is love" or "there is no greater thing than love". Regardless of whether or not these statements are true (and regardless of whether or not the people saying them are talking exclusively about romantic love or not), I personally believe they're all talking about something that really exists, in much the same way that it's possible to say false things about something that's real. I don't experience the real thing they're talking about. 

And I hate that. Not in the real-hate way, but I hate that I can't experience the thing they're talking about, and I hate that I live in a world where the thing they're talking about is so prized, and I hate that love - romantic, platonic, familial, whatever - truly is a common human experience (in that it's an experience that humans, regardless of (a)romanticism, commonly experience), and I hate that my lack of real love is one of the things that detracts from my humanity, and I hate that any statements about love just remind me (consciously or unconsciously) of how inhuman I am, and I hate that love exists.

When I say "I hate love", what I really mean is "my experiences with and ability and lack thereof to experience love - platonic, romantic, familial, and otherwise - are such so that I am alienated and made unhappy by discussions of love, and, indeed, the existence of love itself".

But of course it's easier to say "I hate love".