A love–hate relationship is an interpersonal relationship involving simultaneous or alternating emotions of love and hate—something particularly common when emotions are intense.
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The term is used frequently in psychology, popular writing, and journalism. It can be applied to relationships with inanimate objects, or even concepts, as well as those of a romantic nature or between siblings and parents/children.
Psychological roots
A love–hate relationship has been linked to the occurrence of emotional ambivalence in early childhood; to conflicting responses by different ego states within the same person; or to the inevitable co-existence of egoistic conflicts with the object of love.
Narcissists have been seen as particularly prone to aggressive reactions towards love objects, not least when issues of self-identity are involved: in extreme instances, hate at the very existence of the other may be the only emotion felt, until love breaks through behind it.
Research from Yale University suggests love–hate relationships may be the result of poor self-esteem.
Celebrities
The term is sometimes employed by writers to refer to relationships between celebrity couples who have been divorced, then who reunite (notably Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, or Eminem and Kimberly Scott), as well as to their relationship with fame itself.
Development
A love–hate relationship may develop when people have completely lost the intimacy within a loving relationship, yet still retain some passion for, or perhaps some commitment to, each other, before degenerating into a hate–love relationship leading to divorce.
Friendship
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's political friendship took on at times all the characteristics of a love–hate relationship, if one between friends and allies. Sigmund Freud said of himself that “an intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional life...not infrequently…friend and enemy have coincided in the same person”.
Aristotle warned of the conflicts that can arise from conflicting claims within friendships.