TheBanyanTree: Drawing a Line

[B Drummond]

"There's a thin line between love and hate."

I've heard it all my life, usually when someone's explaining how "X"
left "Y", after bitter words exchanged, or violence occurs between a
couple, or to offer and explanation of how a split up was imminent
between two former love birds who now fight like cats and dogs.

But could anything be further from the truth?  Is there a thin line
between love and hate, or rather, is there not instead a huge chasm
between them?

In what way are they that close that only a thin line separates them?

They are diametrically opposed. They are more dissimilar than night and
day, than black and white, than high and low. But yet a only thin line
separates them?

What hate does love abhors, what love does leaves hate utterly
befuddled. What hate demands, love pleads against.  Hate says destroy,
love says preserve.

Of course, the meaning of "There's a thin line . . ." couldn't signify
that there's truly a thin line between the two, only that they're both
strong emotions; one, at its worst, capable of rendering death,
mutilation and genocide, the other only capable of giving and preserving
life, emotions that change sides too many times in a relationship when
the new is so quickly worn off and both sides are exposed to the full
range of each others human frailties.

Could it be that "There's a thin line . . ." is only a homespun solace,
a cheap psychology for the bewildered, the perplexed, the confused among
us when we contemplate those that a short time back said, "I love her"
(or him) and now say the opposite?  Could it be that love turned to
hate, our minds reason, could only be explained by believing that as
almost as easily as one can feel deep love for another, one, under the
right circumstances, can feel true hatred?

Now we're getting somewhere.

Yes, it seems there is a line between love and hate as wide as the 
universe and as narrow as the space between us all.