love=hate: destructive love myth #4

I don't believe that hate and love are really similar emotions. I know that people say that they are, that the people you love the most are the only people whom you can really hate. This just seems like a mental illness to me. The people you love the most can hurt you, yes. They know you well and they know what you care about. But also, you trust them the most or you wouldn't love them, yes? You trust most of all that they would not intentionally hurt you. And therefore you need to look at what they've done that has hurt you and accept that it isn't intentional and move on.

If someone really does turn out to hate you whom you once loved, doesn't that just mean that you were wrong about that person to begin with and that you should be glad that they are out of your life? Your love for them was misguided.

If you hated someone once and then learned to love them later (a la Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice), all this means is that you were wrong. You misinterpreted things terribly and you will have to accept that your judgment is flawed. Usually, your judgment is flawed because of some flaw in yourself. For Lizzy, there are many flaws in her character. She is prejudiced against a wealthy man to begin with. She is proud of her own beauty and she ends up overhearing someone talk about her to someone else. You can't eavesdrop without getting hurt. It's because you're wrong to do it.

I tend to hate romance novels where the characters hate each other to begin with because:

a) the characters are actually disgusting and I hate them both to begin with and I never come to like them because their flaws are so horrible that they should be burned.
b) the characters are so stupid, so gullible, or so unable to understand normal spoken English that they don't deserve a happy ending in the first place.
c) I don't care because it's too much of a cliché and it just doesn't work for me.If you start with a couple hating each other, you've got a strike against you to begin with as a writer in my book and if you don't do something pretty spectacular in the first ten pages of the book I'm not reading any further.

Someone once used Han Solo and Princess Leia as an example of a great couple who hate each other to begin with and then fall in love. Yeah, OK. It's a misdirection because the audience is supposed to believe that Luke and Leia are the right couple until the author wants to twist the ending. I get that. Authors need suspense to keep readers interested. We need to twist things. But I don't know if I believe they hate each other to begin with. That's not the way I would describe it. I would say that the other person brings out the worst in them because of their pride. Maybe that's the same thing to some of you, but I think it's a useful distinction. Also, I probably wouldn't use Han Solo and Princess Leia as my example of the best love ever written.

Now, if you want to look at Irene and Gen in Queen of Attolia, there's an interesting case. Yes, Irene hates Gen in a way. He has everything she doesn't. That kind of hatred works for me. And it's gradually unfolded so that I sympathize with her. Also, Gen hates Irene because she chops off his hand and threatens to kill him. More clearly, he is terrified of her and also he is in love with her at the same time. This works because Megan Whalen Turner is brilliant and has already set up a world where there are interesting circumstances between the characters. It takes multiple books to pull this off. And then to unravel it because it is really a problem in their relationship, even after they are happily married. She doesn't take short cuts in the beginning or the middle or the end.