When Love Sours |
Why Relationships Matter
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Love can sour when another person’s actions become too closely tied to our own sense of worth and security.
Rejection can turn affection into resentment when it threatens our self-worth.
We can blame others when facing our own choices feels more painful than blaming them.
In an interview with Alvin P. Sanoff for U.S. News & World Report, Elie Wiesel offered a line I now hear repeated often: "The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference." Wiesel’s words capture something important; love and hate keep us emotionally attached, while indifference does not. Yet, I have never found the line entirely satisfying. Love and hate do seem like opposites, even if they share something that indifference doesn’t. Love can motivate us to protect and seek another person’s good. Hatred can direct that same attention in the opposite direction—toward punishment or harm.
A better way to think about the relationship may be to borrow from Aristotle’s golden mean. While the mean is often misunderstood as splitting the difference between extremes, Aristotle does not explain it like a mathematical midpoint. Virtue requires responding to the right thing, for the right reasons, and to the right degree. Vice is when some part of that response is off.
Like Aristotle’s account of virtue, our........