What is the true opposite of love?

What is the real opposite of love?

The true opposite of love is indifference. 1. With love, emotion is strong, with indifference emotion is not there.

Is hate really the opposite of love?

Love and hate — they aren’t opposites, and it’s not a zero sum game where the more of one means the less of the other. Both feelings can stir, as they inevitably do.

What was the opposite of God’s love?

PHILIPPIANS 2:3-4 NKJ 3 Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. 4 Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others. Selfishness, not hate, is the opposite of divine love.

Is love the opposite of death?

Death has an opposite, but the opposite is not mere living. It is not courage or faith or human will. The opposite of death is love. How had I missed that?

Why is indifference the opposite of love?

To be indifferent means that you have no emotion, no life, no love, no interest in something which another may base their life on by ‘loving’ it. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel prize-winning peace activist wrote: The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

The Opposite of Love Isn’t Hate

What feeling is the opposite of love?

The Opposite of Love is Not Hate, It Is Indifference. Elie Wiesel, prolific writer and Holocaust survivor famously said, “the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference”.

Is the opposite of love selfishness?

The opposite of love isn’t selfishness. It’s indifference. The lack of interest in anyone or anything. The lack of a value system which makes it impossible to love yourself, someone else, or the abstract concept of God.

What is the nearest opposite of love?

antonyms for love

• animosity.
• dislike.
• enmity.
• hate.
• hatred.
• ill will.
• indifference.
• neglect.

What is the opposite of love philosophy?

The Opposite of Love is Indifference.

Who is death in love with?

The two got to know one another at this time and Wade ended up becoming totally infatuated with her. The two bonded closely and eventually, it was revealed that Death had fallen in love with Wade as well. The two would often see one another whenever he came near death and appears to him on several occasions.

Who was God’s girlfriend?

God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshiped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar. God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshipped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar.

What does God say love not?

Scripture. 1 Corinthians 13:4–8a (ESV) Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

What are the 3 types of love in the Bible?

3 Kinds of Love (Session 8 – 1 Corinthians 13:1-13)

• Eros refers to physical or sexual love. The word eros was commonly used in the Greek-speaking world of New Testament times. .
• Philos means warm affection or friendship. .
• Agapē is the sacrificial, unconditional love of God.

How do I stop loving someone?

These tips can help you start the process of moving forward.

1. Acknowledge the truth of the situation. .
2. Identify relationship needs — and deal breakers. .
3. Accept what the love meant to you. .
4. Look to the future. .
5. Prioritize other relationships. .
6. Spend time on yourself. .
7. Give yourself space. .
8. Understand it may take some time.

Why does love turn into hate?

When someone we love hurts us emotionally, love can become infiltrated by hate. This happens more often when a person is close to us. One type of action may trigger hate when committed by a person close to us, whereas the same type of action may only trigger anger or annoyance when a person is not close to us.

Can you love someone you hate?

Is it possible to love someone you don’t even like? Apparently, this is actually quite common. No matter how much you love someone or how long you have been with them, there are times in everyone’s relationship when you just don’t like them or their actions very much.

What are the 4 ways of love?

The Four Types of Love: Some Are Healthy, Some Are Not

• Eros: erotic, passionate love. We might as well get that one out of the way first. .
• Philia: love of friends and equals. .
• Storge: love of parents for children. .
• Agape: love of mankind.

What is the opposite of unconditional love?

This means that your love for another person, or another person’s love for you, is contingent on certain actions, or things going on. See that common word if? That’s a clear indicator of a conditional relationship.

What are the 4 theories of love?

The four types of love described in philosophy include agape, phileo, storge, and eros. Agape is a type of unconditional love that is less common in society but more apparent between individuals and their god. Phileo is a love used to describe friendship between individuals.

What does 143 mean?

143 means I love you. 143 is an internet slang numerical expression that conveys a message of love. Home.

What is a relationship without love called?

A platonic relationship is a type of friendship that involves a close, intimate bond without sex or romance. These relationships tend to be characterized by: Closeness.

What is love made of?

Love is complex. A mix of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs associated with strong feelings of affection, protectiveness, warmth, and respect for another person. Love can also be used to apply to non-human animals, to principles, and to religious beliefs.

Why fear is the opposite of love?

The opposite of love is fear. It is just that basic. For fear is the breeding ground — the simmering cauldron so to speak — of all the resentments, bitterness, anger, and destructive behaviors that constitute and give rise to hate.

What is a unselfish love?

Unselfish loving means loving others, even when it’s difficult to do so—such as when they’re being rude, it’s inconvenient for you, or they need too much from you. Learning this skill will take you a lifetime of work, and it certainly won’t come as easily as loving your like-minded friends or your easy-to-love spouse.

What is the opposite of romantic love?

People who are aromantic, also known as “aro,” don’t develop romantic attractions for other people. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings. Aromantic people do form strong bonds and have loving relationships that have nothing to do with romance.

The Opposite of Love: Fear

It is a simple, straightforward, and often neglected fact: The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is fear.

It is just that basic. For fear is the breeding ground — the simmering cauldron so to speak — of all the resentments, bitterness, anger, and destructive behaviors that constitute and give rise to hate. It doesn’t matter whether our hatred targets others or is turned inward in a form of self-loathing. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is fear.

I believe that it is just that basic. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is fear.

This simple truth is at the core of the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

That narrative is dominated and driven by a range of human fear, and a quick run through of the cast of characters makes the point.

Herod is a king whose power is waning in a rapidly changing political climate. He will do anything necessary to retain whatever power he can. Pilate is a mid-level manager in an unstable region within a vast empire. He fears losing control, failing in his post, and undoubtedly dreads the possibility of being consigned indefinitely to this political backwater of a post. The religious leaders in the story, having long struggled to maintain their position while living in an occupied territory, fear being sidelined, losing the position and privilege, the authority and respect and esteem they crave, which in the end may be more imagined than real. The soldiers inevitably fear losing face, or a promotion, or a paycheck. The multitudes, who in one moment hail Jesus as the king of the Jews but in the next call for his crucifixion, would seem to be carried along by the inertia of popular opinion, would seem to be afraid of the work, the effort, the care, the thought, the time, the will, the courage that it actually takes to be a well-differentiated individual within a community. Their failure? Silence — the inability to stand up for what is right and just in the face of overwhelming power — political, economic, and military. The disciples, of course, fear suffering and death. Who wouldn’t?

Any way you cut it, the story of Jesus’ crucifixion is dominated by fear, and most ironically, all the characters who would otherwise consider themselves to be separated by position or power or class or religion or politics or race or tribe unwittingly find themselves bound together as one. It is a unity of fear — everyone dancing together to the same deadly tune in a conspiracy that in the end accomplishes only one objective — to kill and destroy the very love that is the source of all life.

Most alarmingly, it is not a story that simply took place thousands of years ago in a distant and remote region. The same narrative has been played out over and over again throughout human history, and is, even now, being played out in our own time with disastrous consequences.

It is a fact: the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is fear.

The good news, of course, is the resurrection, an event that reveals that there is more to the story.

What the disciples discover as they begin to encounter the risen Jesus is this — that this fear that leads only to death does not have the final word. The tomb is empty. The shrouds of death have been cast aside. The place in which Jesus’ cold, dead body had been laid is now occupied by angels, beings of divine light. Nothing is as they would have anticipated, and the disciples find their eyes being drawn elsewhere by these heavenly beings so that they can begin to discover a more transcendent reality — that this fear that so dominates their hearts and lives and which leads only to loss and grief and suffering and death need not, and in fact does not and never can, have the final word.

Like most epiphanies, it takes a while for those who would follow Jesus to actually get it — to parse out and to integrate the reality of resurrection into their consciousness.

As they hide in an upper room paralyzed by their own fear, the risen Jesus will breathe the spirit of love into their hearts and lead them out into the world to love. The disciples who labor all night on the Sea of Tiberius and catch nothing will hear the voice of Jesus inviting them to set the nets of their lives in a different way in order to haul in an abundance that will feed not only them but also countless others. The two disciples who would retreat to the simplicity of village life in the small town of Emmaus will meet a stranger along the way and discover that they will have to re-learn their faith from the beginning. They will need, literally, to travel in the opposite direction — retreating not into safety and security, but turning around and walking courageously back into the complexity and ambiguity and violence of life in the big city of Jerusalem. People like Peter will be challenged to break bread with those considered beyond the embrace of God’s love. Paul will find himself stopped in his tracks by the risen Christ, realize dramatically that he is in fact blinded by the rage that is driving him, and discover that his sight can only be recovered by embracing the very people he so fears.

This is resurrection — our awakening to, and our coming to consciousness of, the depth and power of love — for there is no place, no crack, no crevice, no dark nook, in all of this life, where the unfathomable, unconditional, unconquerable love that God does not reach, and there is no place in which we are not already in the love that is God.

I am not naïve. The world is a scary place. Bad things do happen, and bad things happen to good people. There is plenty in this world to fear and there are plenty of people in this world who are more than happy to exploit our fears to gain or maintain their own position and power.

But remember: the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is fear.

The call of Jesus is a call to take heart, to have courage, to stand tall in the name of love. The daily invitation that the risen Christ extends to us is to be a people who refuse, in love, to step to the tune of fear.

Our life’s work is to be those who steadfastly give voice to compassion, who speak and act for what is right and just, and who become instruments of God’s peace in a world that knows no peace.

And we can do this confidently, because as the cross and resurrection of Jesus reveals, love wins — at all times, in all places, in all ways, under every circumstance, without exception.

The Opposite of Love is Indifference

Many opposites are not nearly as different as they first appear. For example, as Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel observed, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference; for at a minimum, to love or hate someone is to have intense emotions toward them. We see how the similarities between love and hate often outweigh the differences when one is transformed into the other, a phenomenon that literature — from Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Harlequen Romances — has exploited and explored for millennia.

The psychological proximity of love and hate is part of the hard wiring of the human psyche. Dan Gilbert explains, in his book Stumbling on Happness, that the same neurocircuitry and neurochemistry triggered in response to stressful events («fight or flight») are also triggered in response to sexual arousal. As a result, when we are stressed in the presence of a person we find sexually attractive, we have a tough time telling what we are responding to: are our passions inflamed (hate) because of a stressor, or are we aroused (love) because of the attractive person?

In the 1994 movie Speed starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, Bullock’s character, Annie Porter, appeals to this possible confusion when she notes, upon finding herself in the hero’s arms after several near-death experiences, that «relationships that start under intense circumstances, they never last.»

Call it an «emotional paradox»: two very different dispositions — loving and hating — can have far more in common with each other than a seemingly intermediate state.

— Michael Raynor in his business book The Strategy Paradox. His thesis is that the strategies with the greatest possibility of success also have the greatest possibility of failure.

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7 comments on “ The Opposite of Love is Indifference ”

Andy McKenzie says:

Hey man, I loved this quote too when I first read about it in “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.” It’s a critical component of my preferred model of what people mean when they say “love” http://andymckenzie.blogspot.com/2010/08/is-love-on-spectrum.html. I also like your “love is something you do” idea and mentally refer to that often. OK good talk, see you out there.

DaveJ says:

“Opposite” assumes a dimension of comparison. Love and hate are opposites on a valence dimension, while love/indifference are opposite in relation to intensity. Similarly, the opposite of success along an intensity dimension is -not trying-.

Folie says:

Thanks for that comment, you killed it, precise and on the point. Now I know why something didn’t feel right while reading this.

Cameron says:

This kind of reminds me of your empty rhetoric post… If an emotion or an idea doesn’t have an obvious and very real counter-point (aka possibility of failure), it’s unlikely to mean anything

Dan says:

Reminds me of the proximity or truth and lies as explored in Harry Frankfurt’s “On Buyllshit.” Liars know the truth a carefully position the lie relative to it. Bulsshit is indifferent to the truth.

Dan says:
Having trouble typing bullshit
Cameron Schaefer says:

Nassim Taleb points out another “opposite is not what you’d think” example by looking at the term “fragile.” You’d think the opposite would be something like sturdy or solid. Not so he says, “Just as a package sent by mail can bear a stamp “fragile”,
“breakable” or “handle with care”, consider the exact opposite: a
package that has stamped on it “please mishandle” or “please handle carelessly”. The contents of such package are not just unbreakable, but benefit from shocks. Let us coin the appellation “antifragile” for such a package; a
neologisms is necessary for there is no simple, noncompound word in the Oxford English Dictionary that expresses the point of reverse fragility.” Another example he uses is “pain” which many people would respond with “pleasure” as the opposite instead of “absence of pain.”

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