Love-hate relationship
Related: ambivalence - love - hate - relation
Scene from Vampyros Lesbos (1971)
The Origins of Love and Hate (1910 - 1965) - Ian Dishart Suttie
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Definition
A love-hate relationship is a personal relationship between humans, or figuratively between a human and an inanimate object, like a computer, 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/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, yet the next moment it crashes at a key point during the game.
It 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.
An addiction is also a kind of love-hate relationship.
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. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love-hate_relationship [Jul 2005]
see also: love - hate - opposition - relation
Crime of passion
Popular opinion, if not courts of law, sometimes view the commission of murder or of grievous bodily harm more sympathetically as a crime of passion—a physical outbreak of intense jealousy responding to presumed or witnessed sexual deception. An important aspect of determining a crime of passion is the immediacy of the response.
Societies in which honor forms a governing principle may react similarly to altercations caused by personal insults or may defer immediate action preferring to consult among family members and act in concert. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_passion [Dec 2004]
(Per)versions of Love and Hate (1998) - Renata Salecl
(Per)versions of Love and Hate (1998) - Renata Salecl
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From Publishers Weekly
In an effort to examine why love and hate are often connected in literature, film and life, Salecl (The Spoils of Freedom) crafts an argument that draws heavily from Lacan and sparingly from her own thoughts. The book is flawed by academic language and frequent dips into the well of indigestible theory. According to Salecl, love and hate are forever interlinked because both emotional states contain elements of attraction and repulsion. She cites such novels as Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (both of which have been turned into films) to strengthen her argument. But she also veers into digressions on multiculturalism, hate speech, body mutilation and Oleg Kulik, a performance artist who acts like a dog and bites members of his audience. Salecl is such an avidly far-ranging cultural critic that she buries her original points in a quagmire of lit crit, obscure quotations and Freudian thought. Navigating from mythological sirens to Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, all on a raft of Lacanian philosophy, Salecl manages to address a dizzying number of topics, ultimately leading not to a clarifying insight but to a theory hangover. Readers interested in the pleasure of cultural criticism grounded in psychoanalytic theory would do much better by turning to Louise Kaplan's Female Perversions.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The Mail on Sunday
The theme was Oscar Wilde's, that each of us kills the thing we love. Through forests of psychoanalytical theory, the East European author pursues it formidably . . . this is challenging, moving and thought-provoking stuff.