Love vs. Hate

Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/@martabranco

One of the on-line dating sites I tried has a question that's more nuanced than most people on there seem to realize:

"Is it easier to love or hate?"

Surprisingly, the majority of men answered that loving is easier than hating. And I highly disagree.

As I discussed in my post on empathy, our default animal nature makes it easier for us to hate anything and anyone we find different. The more different something or someone seems, the greater our feeling of dislike and distrust.

Confucius wrote,

"It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve and bad things are very easy to get."

(This quote is sometimes attributed to Rene Descartes. Confucius and Descartes. Different time periods, different countries of origin, albeit both philosophers. Curious juxtaposition of attributions.)

Doing the mental and emotional work required to love someone despite differences is much more difficult than knee-jerk, easy-peasy hatred.

At least when it comes to that dating site, I'm a clear outlier in this opinion (although I have Confucius/Descartes as company, which isn't too shabby). Maybe there's something to this question that I haven't considered.

How would you answer?