To Despise, To Love

It’s funny how emotions flip flop so easily. For a period of time, we feel that we love this person and after, for another period of time, we are utterly put off and contemptuous of them. Maybe the relationship has run its course. Maybe we see through their pretensions. Or we’ve changed. Or we love them still.

We juggle both love and repulsion. Love buried under the desire to turn away in disgust. Love as memory. How do we honor the present feeling but also keep in mind the beauty of our tie to this person, whether still active now or as it was treasured in the past? What can we do except let go of our idea of what love is supposed to look like or the idea that one must trade one feeling for another in one’s view of a person. It is in letting go of how we want things to be or how we picture it being that we are able to hold seemingly opposing feelings at once and abide in the complexity of human relationships.

One feeling isn’t greater or more significant than the other, although the present feeling will always feel stronger. In the heat of your emotions, they say. The feeling grips us like the whoosh of heat from the flames of a fire that has just been lit. Even as we tap into the present moment and not dwell on the past, the past informs us. We despise now. But we’ve loved before. They are not contradictory.

To love. To fall in love. To hate. To be fed up or annoyed. To look at somebody and be certain of the necessity of their presence in our lives while being viscerally repelled in some moments. We are lucky when we feel this way because this is what is real in true human connection.