In this presentation, psychologist Leah Spasova explores how love and hate can simultaneously exist within romantic relationships and why recognizing this duality is essential for relational health. She begins by defining passionate love using Hatfield and Pritchard’s multidimensional model—encompassing longing, appraisal, feelings, physiological processes, action tendencies, and behaviors. She then adopts the American Psychological Association’s definition of hate as a hostile emotion combining intense distaste, anger, and a desire to harm, noting that hate is often confused with anger, fear, or disgust. Spasova argues that love and hate are not mutually exclusive but lie on a continuum, with attention acting as the judge that shifts focus from positive to negative aspects over time. She describes the early idealization phase, driven by dopamine and serotonin, where partners overlook flaws, followed by a later stage where neurochemical intensity wanes and negative traits become salient, leading to mixed feelings. The talk emphasizes that individuals rarely love or hate a person 100%; instead, they experience a blend of admiration and aversion toward different traits. Recognizing and openly communicating these mixed emotions is presented as a healthy strategy to maintain balance and avoid cognitive dissonance. The presentation concludes with practical advice: acknowledge both love and hate, monitor where the emotional scale tilts, and engage in honest dialogue to sustain relational well‑being.
Chapters
So in today's session, I'm going to talk about love and hate in relationships and how these can coexist and make a real difference in our lives. In today's presentation, we're going to discuss how we love and hate at the same time, and can we actually do that? What is passionate love? What is hate a composite of? And what are its purposes? What causes hate, and some strategies to consider when we're trying to reduce hate. So as a psychologist, I need to start with all the definitions and make sure that we're on the same page and know what we're discussing. First, beginning with love. So according to Hatfield and Pritchard, love is a state of intense longing for union with another. A complex functional whole including appraisals or appreciations, subjective feelings, expressions, patterned physiological processes, action tendencies, and instrumental behaviors. It sounds complicated, but we'll break it down and it will make sense. The next feeling that we are discussing today is hate. Hate is really difficult to define because psychologists cannot agree on What actually is hate? How do we define it? So I picked the American Psychological Association definition from their dictionary, which is really simple. It says hate is a hostile emotion that combines intense feelings of distaste, detestation, anger, and often a desire to harm. There is a really important thing here. The desire to harm is a big topic in hate, how we understand hate. Hate is difficult to define because psychologists argue that hate can often be confused with anger. It could often be confused with fear and disgust and so much more. But for the time being, we'll just stick with it's a hostile combination and it Involves a motivational aspect to it. So when we think about these feelings, we need to think, can we actually hold these very contrasting feelings and examine how we can do that and how we are not losing our minds in a cognitive dissonance? Because it's— Very frustrating to love and hate at the same time. So love and hate are often seen as those that cannot exist without the other. It's day and night, it's the head and tails. And the problem that many people have in relationships is that they often end up on the end of spectrums. So they don't really love someone and they're just obsessed with them and love them to bits, or they really hate them. And in fact, we cannot love or hate 100% out of a person. We just can't because a person is a composite of so much. So there is the characteristics Their personality traits, what kind of values they hold and beliefs, what they look like, what their ideologies are, how they behave, what their tendencies are, all of that and more. So we need to keep in mind that these change. And you may love a certain thing about someone today, but they may change, you may change, and you may end up hating that thing or hating that they lost that thing. And end up with a conflicting feeling. You love them, but at the same time, there will be things that you don't really like about them, you don't really love about them. So for instance, you may love your partner's sense of humor, but you may really hate how they never help around the house. Or you may really love the values that they hold, but question their beliefs, and you'd be like, no, I don't like the way you put so much belief in this, or whatever. It's so complex. We do not love or hate 100%, but in the beginning, love is blind. And research suggests that people idealize People refuse to see the negative sides of a person in the beginning, and this leads to seeing them down the line when their hormones of dopamine and serotonin, all of these amazing hormones that make us feel in love, lost, totally absorbed by this person, they wear off. And then we start seeing Seeing these other things that we are a little bit like, yeah, I don't like that, I actually hate it. So at least in the beginning, we may be blind. With time, that will wear off, and we may start finding negative things about the other person and give them these, you know, negative points. But the point I'm trying to make is that we should never think that it's just one or the other. These do exist together, and they have to exist together. So love and hate are always on a scale. They're like this. But our attention is the judge. So in the beginning of a relationship, we're just flooded with chemicals, we're on a 7th cloud, And we do not see, we ignore. Our attention is not on how this person is different from us or what kind of things we don't agree with. And it's just a lovely, lovely situation. And at the end of a relationship, it's quite the opposite. We just focus on the negative. So in all relationships, it's really healthy to start From the beginning to the end and beyond, think there are things about this person that I absolutely love, and there are other things that I will or I do absolutely hate. This is healthy. Acknowledging it is healthy. Communicating about it is healthy. So yes, we can hold these emotions, and we should, and we should be more aware of where our tension is and how the scale is pushed. Love, hate, or it's in a balance.
