Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel is just one person who has said the following: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”. In other words, the opposite of love is not hate, as might have been expected. We’ve all heard this contention and been struck by it. Yes, we’ve thought, it is terrible to be ignored. (Pretty awful being hated too, of course.)
But I’m grateful to Dawn Eden for mentioning another powerful proposition.
Eden, promoting her book ‘The Thrill of the Chaste’, is currently visiting Canadian high schools.
The students seemed interested when I told them what Pope John Paul II called “the opposite of love.” It’s not hate, as some of them guessed when I asked them what they thought it would be, nor is it indifference. It’s use.
“People sometimes use people because they hate them,” I said. “But you don’t have to hate someone to use them. That’s why use is more dangerous than hate. You can use someone while fooling yourself into thinking you love them.”
On reading this I immediately thought of the life stories told at Lovefraud. This concept of love vs use seems to have much promise when it comes to making sense of life with a psychopath. For instance a minor change of the last sentence by Eden goes as follows: “You can use someone while fooling them into thinking you love them”.
Ox Drover
Thank you Free, I appreciate it…on top of that though, my friends from out of town and I went to the local Saturday night auction and WHO SHOULD WALK IN BUT MY X-BF-P OF ALL PEOPLE—he lives 400 miles away—what the HECK WAS HE DOING IN MY NECK OF THE WOODS? This is the jerk that burned the home of his former GF to the ground to “get even with” her after she dis’d him–talk about revenge.
I called home and told son D to lock our gate, and to chain the “bad dogs” out by the aircraft hangar so that no one could get up close without setting them off.
My reaction to seeing his nasty face was…???…. I’m not sure what the feeling is, anger, ? revulsion ? Not sure just what word describes it or if there IS a word.
I hadn’t seen him since a year and a half or two years ago, and at that time seeing him didn’t upset me too much. Tonight I was more upset at seeing his ugly face. He spoke like “old friends” I ignored him. Then he and his two friends sat right in front of us, instead of taking seats which were available across the area. He stayed about an hour or so, then got up and left alone. I was glad that I had called son D and put him on alert.
A year to the day after I had broken up with him, he called me in the middle of the night to gloat over the emotional injury he had done to me—I answered the phone because I was asleep and didn’t check to see who was calling.
As he kept sitting there in front of me I kept thinking of what I would “like to say” to him—tell him off—but I didn’t. I kept physical and verbal NC, but sure didn’t keep emotional NC. I think it might have been the surprise of seeing him in my area, and I am still unsure why he would be up here.
Yesterday and today had been emotionally difficult days anyway, so this was the TOPPING ON THE FRUIT CAKE! (sigh) but I will weather this storm too, but it does seem like it comes in WAVES and then you get paranoid and wait “for the other shoe to drop” I KNOW what this SOB is capable of and how he likes revenge.
When we split up, I told him that I knew he had burned his X’s house and she did too, that we couldn’t prove it, but that if my house was struck by a lightening bolt and I witnessed it, I was still going to assume HE burned my house and take “appropriate” action. I also got “word” to him through a third party that I had installed video surveillance on the place and that I was watching out for him to “try something.”
He knows I am not a shrinking violet as well, so hopefully, it was just a fluke that I ran into him. He and I had gone to that auction when we were dating and it is a regular Saturday night affair. So I hope it was just a fluke and that he had not come here to do something nasty, but with Ps YOU NEVER KNOW what they can get up to….and “just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” LOL
Sunnygal
Very well said.