God, look at me churning out posts tonight. Hopefully they aren't too wanky - my conversation has recently been afflicted with unnecessarily complicated words and academic concepts. It happens every now and again, and I always feel like a wanker afterwards. I wonder what causes it?

Anyway, onto the post. Had a good conversation the other day about love and hate. It's something I thought about a little while back but had no chance to air the ideas until recently (hopefully it was somewhat relevant to the convo). Basically, my idea is that love and hate are not opposites; love and hate are inextricably linked, and apathy, non-caring is the opposite of the love-hate phenomenon. If you hate someone, you still care about them. It's why it's so easy to shift from love to hate in a failing relationship - it's a lot easier than apathy, a reversion to strangerhood. Taking the idea further, it can explain the whole 'methinks he protests too much' phenomenon. Violent homophobes sometimes secretly long to be gay - they feel an attraction to men, but reject it, flipping the emotional coin to hate, and distributing this widely as a demonstration of how they feel. It's easier for them to go from love (attraction) to hate than from love to apathy. In addition, it goes some way to explaining the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism - suicide bombers and other nutcases look at the increasing prevalence of Western ideas/products in their countries (notable more so in oil-rich countries who have the money to purchase honorary Westernhood) and feel some attraction to it, but reject it violently. The emotion of hate has to overwhelm the previous attraction felt, and is therefore out of proportion to the object.

I don't know how valid the idea is, but I like it at the moment.