Can you love someone you dislike?

Picture this, you are walking down the street hand in hand with the person you love, birds are tweeting, puppies yapping, flowers blooming and the breeze rustling the leaves of the trees.  Suddenly, your man hoiks and spits on the sidewalk.  You are disgusted.  At that moment, you decide that you dislike him intensely.  He gives you the creeps.  However, fast forward a few hours, and you are beneath your silk sheets, lying there basking in the afterglow of hot passionate steamy sex, closing your eyes and thinking of how much you love this man.  This man, who earlier in the day, had disgusted and repulsed you.  How could this be possible?

Dislike has nothing to do with love and hate.  There is a fine line between love and hate, both being very powerful emotions, and if you love someone so much, you can easily flip to hate when you are angry, and then back to love when you've calmed down a little.  Hate and love feeds off the same kind of energy, that's why they're so closely aligned.  Dislike however, is not an emotion and isn't very powerful at all.  Dislike is a feeling you get.  If you think about it, it's not the person you dislike, but the behaviour.  You dislike hoiking and spitting, picking one's nose in public, those are all behaviours.  Sometimes, we might associate those behaviours with a person.  But the chemistry, the caring, the deep down emotion you feel, that's love and can make you turn a blind eye to the irritating and annoying behaviours you dislike so much.

Often, the reason why you hate someone so much is because you still love them and they hurt you.  The real opposite to love and hate is indifference.  It's absence of emotion; you don't care either way.  Many relationships move from love and hate to indifference.  Without love to act as the cushion, the protective wall to hide away the behaviours you dislike so much, they become bigger, more annoying, until you can no longer stand to be in that person's company.  That usually signifies the end of the relationship.  Try and avoid saying, "Whatever, I don't care," because that means you are indifferent.

So, can you love someone you dislike?  The answer is most definitely YES!  Dislike is a feeling you have towards a behaviour or mannerism; love is a powerul emotion that people will die for, kill for, invade countries for.  Only a psychopath will kill someone for picking their nose in public.

Cindy Vine has written a self-help book on breaking the cycle of bad relationships in your life, called 'Fear, Phobias and Frozen Feet.'  In addition, she has written three novels, all dealing with abusive relationships or family dramas of some kind.  They are 'Stop the world, I need to pee!'; 'The Case of Billy B' and 'Not Telling.'  All Cindy's books are available on Smashwords as ebooks, and on Amazon as paperbacks or on Kindle.  You can find out more about Cindy Vine by following her blog http://cindy-vine.blogspot.com/; visiting her website http://cindyvine.com/; or following her on Twitter http://twitter.com/cindyvine or Facebook http://facebook.com/cindyvinefanpage.