Relationship Radio: Marriage, Sex, Limerence & Avoiding Divorce
Relationship Radio: Marriage, Sex, Limerence & Avoiding Divorce
When Your Spouse Says "I Hate You" (Part 1)
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What happens in a marriage when one spouse says those three devastating words: "I hate you"? This powerful exploration takes us deep into the psychology of hatred in intimate relationships, revealing surprising truths about how love and hate function as parallels rather than opposites.
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Hate. Isn't that such a harsh word? Even if you hear a little girl say it to her sister or her brother, I hate you. And we know they don't really hate them, they're just upset or angry at the moment, it still sounds so harsh. Yet we know that one of the most looked-for things on the Internet when people go to search engines would have to do with the word hate. Like my spouse said, I hate you, or why does my spouse hate me? And so we know it's a big deal in relationships. Now, just as it might be with a little girl saying it to her brother or sister, it could be that sometimes a spouse, wife, husband might say it to the other spouse when they don't really mean that. They're just really angry at the moment. And typically if they say I hate you in that context, it's not long before they're telling you I am so sorry, I didn't mean to use that word, I didn't mean to say that I was just angry, I was acting out, I don't mean that at all, I don't hate you. And yet at other times there are people who will tell their spouses that I hate you and they actually mean it. Well, in that context, what does the word hate mean.
Speaker 1:Before we define it, let's talk about it in the sense of hate really has to do with some of the similar things that love has to do with. Now, sometimes people say, well, aren't love and hate opposites? No, they are not opposites, as a matter of fact, they're parallels, and so hate is not a lack of love and love is not a lack of hate. It has to do with the fact that they're very similar, they're parallels, and that one can turn to the other. Yes, love can turn into hate with the right circumstances, and believe it or not, into hate with the right circumstances, and believe it or not, hate can turn into love with the right circumstances, and we're going to be teaching you about some of those circumstances.
Speaker 1:What leads to a person feeling hate toward another? Or what leads to a person who said and felt genuinely, I hate you, evolving to a point of being able to say I love you, I want to be with you? Well, we can look at hate in all kinds of ways. We can look into the dictionary, we can look into how Sigmund Freud defined it, we can even look into how the neurologists defined it. But basically, I think that you and I would agree that hate has at least three components. We'll be talking about those in a minute. They come from Dr Well, they don't come from Dr Robert Sternberg, but Dr Robert Sternberg has written about them and explained them and, like I said, they're a parallel to love, but they're very negative.
Speaker 1:While some of the same things occur in love, they occur in a positive context, but when they occur with hate, they occur in a negative context, but when they occur with hate, they occur in a negative context. Now, that may sound confusing right now, but give me a few minutes to define that, if I may. But before we go even further into that, let's go back again and say if your spouse has said I hate you, make sure that that's really what they mean and it wasn't just something said in spite or in anger that they later were very sorry about and apologetic about and asking you to forgive them. If that's the case, please do, please forgive them, please be able to move on from that and don't overreact to it. And sometimes people, when we talk to a person well, my spouse didn't actually say I hate you, but I know he does or she does Well, how do you know? Well, you should hear the tone of voice they use when they speak to me. You should hear the names they call me when they talk to me. You should see the anger they manifest toward me and many other negative things like that, or even the fact that they tend to avoid me. They hate me because they won't even talk to me at all and they don't even sleep in the same bed with me anymore.
Speaker 1:And when you're defining hate well, define might be the wrong word here when you're deciding if your spouse hates you and you're doing it based on those kinds of things I just said, the way they're acting towards you, it is possible that you are diagnosing it correctly, but it's also possible you may not pay. Well, let's go ahead and talk about it in terms of what Sternberg said. Now, hate, of course, is an emotion. It's not just a logical thing. There is at least some emotion involved to it. And Dr Sternberg says in his studies and Dr Sternberg is an amazing researcher. In his studies he says you can't hate another person if you're using hate in the sense of I really do have these very strong negative feelings toward you that you can't hate another person unless you've already had some kind of an intense relationship, even if that intense relationship was only momentary. In other words, you don't go from indifference to hate.
Speaker 1:There's going to be some kind of relationship between the two of you to begin with, and in that relationship there is a story. There's a story that led you to fall in love with each other, and if one of you is now hating quote, unquote the other, then there's a story involved in that too. It's how we perceive the other person. That too, it's how we perceive the other person's character. It's how we perceive and interpret their behaviors, their actions. It's how we interpret particularly the way they treat us and whether what they're doing is for our benefit or basically only for their benefit, even when it harms us. And so we're telling ourselves a story about that other person all the time. If you don't believe that, listen to somebody talk about their spouse, because when they do, they'll be telling you stories about let me tell you what she did the other day. Or if, in a positive sense, let me tell you about what she did for me the other day. And it's in that story that we tell other people. That's really giving us insight into what we really think and feel about the other person. And so if we are telling those stories to other people.
Speaker 1:So let's say, let's say I started talking about Alice that way which, by the way, many years ago I did because I did wind up hating Alice and I did wind up divorcing Alice to be with another woman and I was going to live with her forever and ever, happily all that fantasy, fairy tale crap. That's just not true. And it started with me because I wanted to be with the other woman. I started telling other people stories about Alice because they would say, well, your wife is so sweet and she's so wonderful which, by the way, she really is but back then I would say you shouldn't live with her. You'll discover that she's not like what you think at all. And as I told those stories to other people about her and the reason I did that, of course, was because I was already getting deeply emotionally involved with this other woman but as I told those negative stories about Alice to other people, they became the story I believed about Alice. And you say so, you actually did come to hate her. I did.
Speaker 1:Now, in that sense, let's talk about the three elements of hate as described by Dr Sternberg. You see, when he talks about love, he talks about three things. He said, if you're going to measure love between one human being and another, like a man toward a woman, for example, or her toward him, the first thing you're going to measure has to do with intimacy. Now, if you say that, slower you understand what he's talking about there. Into me, see intimacy. Now, if you say that slower you understand what he's talking about there.
Speaker 1:Intimacy it has to do with being open and transparent and vulnerable, so that I let you see my strengths, my weaknesses, my idiosyncrasies. I trust that you're not going to betray me. I trust that you're not going to send me away when you find out that I'm not perfect. Surely you knew that already. But the more I tell you about my flaws, the more I tell you about my experiences in life. The good experiences, these are things that happen that make me happy or that I'm proud of, and these are the experiences in life that make me well feel deep pain, and some of those I'm actually ashamed of because of the role that I played. I look at that and it hurts me to think I could do that thing.
Speaker 1:So intimacy has to do with openness and transparency and vulnerability. And as you do that, then. Then you understand this, that the hate side of intimacy is I want to get away from you in the sense of I don't want you to know anything about me, particularly anything that I might tell you that you'll react negatively to that. You may assassinate my intelligence, like how stupid could you be? Or you might assassinate my character, like you've never been any good, you never will be any good. And so when it comes to beginning to feel hate and this is what Sternberg calls a cool hate I begin to pull back from you very strongly.
Speaker 1:Pull back from you because I don't want to know about you anymore and I don't want you to know about me anymore. And so I actually stop with the intimacy, and so I'll read some of the things that I've written down in notes, having studied Sternberg and others. I can't trust you with my emotions or actions. Therefore I won't. I feel that you don't listen or that if you do listen, even a little, you wind up judging me rather than trying to understand me. And therefore I don't want to be intimate, in the sense of openness and transparency, with you anymore. I feel controlled, I feel I'm not treated as an equal, I feel that you look down at me, and when I tell you what I think, you tell me I should think something differently. When I tell you what I feel, you either say that's not what you feel or you tell me you shouldn't feel that way. You're not trying to understand me. Therefore, I don't want to tell you what I feel and I begin to pursue distance from you emotionally Now, not just distance physically that's not such a big deal when it comes to negation of intimacy but I begin to distance myself from you emotionally because I don't want you judging me.
Speaker 1:Therefore, I don't want you to know anything else about me and I really don't want any more about you because I don't care. And in that sense, you may actually feel some repulsion toward the other person or feel some disgust toward the other person, and so the more I feel disgust for you, the less likely I can envision a future positive relationship with you. In other words, my story is now changing, not just about what our story is now, but about what our story will be in the future. And the story I start telling myself about you is there's no way I can live with you. It'll be this bad or worse if we stay together. And as you tell that story in your mind, envisioning what your future will be. Then you become angrier, you begin to more upset and less and less and less do you want the other person to know about you. Now, this can also happen not just because the other person judges you, or that the other person tries to control you, or the other person says negative things to you. This can also occur because of the fact that you want to be with someone else.
Speaker 1:Now, what I've described so far, if you stay with me, if your spouse says I hate you and they really actually do, it's not just something said in a bit of anger and they really do hate you it could be because of the fact that they don't trust you anymore, in the sense that they feel that you don't love. Now, I'm not trying to beat you up. I'm not trying to make you feel badly. I'm not trying to justify the emotions they feel toward you. I'm just trying to explain them, to say if you pay attention to this, begin to understand what they feel. Because when we start talking in a few minutes about how can you overcome hate If the other person hates you, how can you get past that, you must understand that you need to do some evaluation and find out.
Speaker 1:If your spouse has moved away from you in terms of sharing intimacy, is it because of how you have treated your spouse, especially when he or she is trying to tell you what they feel or what they think or what they believe, or what they do or what they want to do. They believe or what they do or what they want to do. You see, accepting the other person as he or she is is the strongest pull to humanity. I want to be with people who can accept me, warts and all who can accept me with my strengths, my flaws, my idiosyncrasies. And if I become very much aware of the fact by the other person's behavior, either in what they do or sometimes even in what they don't do, when I'm being open and transparent with them, I'll stop doing that. And if I withdraw far enough, I'm going to have this thing called cool hate. Cool in the sense that I'm probably not actively doing things to cause you pain or to attack you or undermine you or anything like that, but it's cool hate in the sense that I don't want intimacy with you. Now here's another reason for that.
Speaker 1:If you have not been rejecting the other person, another reason might be that they don't want you to feel intimacy with them because of what they're involved in them. So let's say they're involved in a lifestyle that they know that you would reject that lifestyle because they expect you to reject them, to reject what they're doing, because of the fact that they know it's completely beyond the lifestyle that you would accept or be part of or even tolerate them being part of. Also and I'm sure you've already reached this conclusion it can be because of the fact they have become involved with another person and because of their involvement with that other person, then they don't want intimacy with you because they don't want to feel this bond of friendship, because that's really what intimacy creates a deeper and deeper friendship and they don't want that with you because they're now doing that with somebody else, either him or her, and as they're doing it with that other person, they actually can begin to feel that they're cheating on them by being open and transparent and vulnerable with you. And so, therefore, they'll begin to feel this cool hate towards you that when you even say such things as how was your day? Oh, leave me alone, don't bother me. And if you say, tell me what you feel, no, I don't care for you to know what I feel. Or maybe you just shut down in a different way, like I'm not wanting to talk about that right now.
Speaker 1:Now, that's what's normally called cool hate in the sense that they're manifesting negative feelings toward you in the sense of intimacy. It's the contradiction to intimacy, it's the negation, he would say, of intimacy and that's one kind of hate. But it's called a cool hate. And when Sternberg measures that these are some of the questions he would have you take on the profile, I think you're disgusting. I can't trust you. I have no sympathy for you. I have no sympathy for you. I have no empathy for you. I don't believe we can meaningfully communicate. I feel that you're different from me and people like me and he would have you rate those on a one to seven Likert type scale, from strongly disagree to strongly agree about what you feel for your spouse. If they were measuring your hate, and if you were measuring your spouse's hate and you've heard what he or she's had to say, you could kind of do that rating it for them. And that's what that cool hate is all about. Now stay with me. We're going to wind up by showing you how to overcome hate. I'm just trying to explain to you there are different kinds of hate, because a person with cool hate probably is not attacking you. They're mostly probably just avoiding you.
Speaker 1:But on Sternberg's love scale, and that's what we're looking at the negative of Sternberg's love scale Because, if you heard me earlier, hate is a parallel to love. It's the negative, it's not the antithesis, it's not the opposite. The opposite of love is indifference. This has to do with the parallel, but rather than a positive, I want you to be open, intimate, that kind of thing. It's like I want you to move away from me. I don't want to be open and honest and transparent and I don't want you to be that way toward me. Now, the second part of that scale would be what Sternberg calls passion. Now, passion has to do with a craving for oneness. But if a person is feeling hate toward you, if we were measuring that, we'd be measuring how much they want to be away from you, because now the craving is no longer, for I want to be one with you. The craving is I want to be away from you because now the craving is no longer, for I want to be one with you. The craving is I want to be distant from you. I'm craving distance.
Speaker 1:Now this one involves a stronger emotion and when he goes through this he'll actually call this hot hate as opposed to the cool hate from the intimacy section, opposed to the Kool-Aid from the intimacy section. And this can come from things like feelings of betrayal, like you've hurt me or you've hurt somebody that I love. So let's suppose your wife is beating mercilessly your child and you ask her to stop, even told her to stop, even said I'll call the cops if you do it again, and she's still abusing your children physically, then you feel betrayed, you're hurting our progeny, you're hurting our children. So it might be that it's you that's being hurt, either by physical ways, like you're being beaten, or it could be physical ways in the sense that I'll cut you off from the money so that you are absolutely being controlled because you don't have enough money to do anything. It can be physical in the sense that I'm going to demand sex all the time from you to the point that you get sick of it.
Speaker 1:I actually talked to a lady one time who still was struggling with hate toward her first husband that she had divorced because he was forcing her to have sex with him several times a day, every day. Her body couldn't even adjust to that. You know arousal, lubrication, those kinds of things, and so it was not only quite painful, it was humiliating, and she felt as if she were a piece of meat that he was using. And in that sense, that sense of violation of self, violation of expectations, violation of privacy, violation of expectations, violation of privacy, violation of trust, respect, violation of my rights all those kinds of things can cause very intense negative emotions toward the other person and it's like no, I don't want to be close to you anymore, I want to be as far away from you as I possibly can because you're causing me pain. And then a person who has this hot hate right, sometimes he'll be asking himself what did I ever see in you to begin with? How did I not notice this a lot sooner than I do now, understanding that maybe they were like that all the time and a Cinderella complex kept you from seeing, or Prince Charming complex kept you from seeing that. Or it may be that they have devolved into it for other reasons, then, or it may be that they have devolved into it for other reasons. And so in this particular situation, this hot tape.
Speaker 1:People in that are longing and looking for another relationship, or they may be longing and looking for a different lifestyle. And so if I want to go out carousing and drinking and partying every night, then I actually will start having negative passion toward Alice because she'll be negative about it. I don't want you to do that. What are you doing to yourself? What are you doing to your body? What are you doing to our family? What are you doing to our children? You can't live like that. You can't do those things. And so I'll start feeling this hot hate toward her, because how dare you try to stop me from doing what I want to do, to stop me from doing what I want to do. And so this hot hate can be because I'm looking for a different lifestyle, I'm looking for a different relationship with a different person, or I have felt violated, or maybe continually feel violated by you against my mind, my body, my soul, my heart, and I can't take that pain anymore. And so, rather than being able to forgive you and move on, this happens enough, and to the depth, that I hate you with a hot hate.
Speaker 1:Now, did you notice in there, just like with intimacy, there's two parts. One is it might be because of something that you actually do. You're betraying me or betraying our children, betraying our family. So it could be based on something you've actually done. But you also heard the second part, just as you did with intimacy. No, it really is not about you. It's about me wanting to do something that I know you'll not be part of, nor will you accept, you won't tolerate, you'll be totally against this. And because I want to be with that person or live that lifestyle, whatever it might be and I see you as a barrier to that I crave moving away from you. But it's not your fault.
Speaker 1:Now you said but what if this person has put up boundaries that are just controlling and dominating, like you can't go anyplace but straight to work and straight back because I'm afraid that you're going to be OK, in that case it would be this person's fault. If you're being unreasonable in the boundaries you're placing out there, then it could be this person's fault over here. Boundaries you're placing out there, then it could be this person's fault over here. But if it's a normal, typical situation where it's just like I'm not going to the sex clubs with you, I'm not going to put up with you coming home drunk every night, et cetera, et cetera, then it's not you that's the cause, because you're standing with what you already believe, as opposed to be trying to control and dominate. I hope you see the difference between those two.
Speaker 1:And in that hot hate, if you feel anger, you'll typically go at them. I'm going to yell at you, I'm going to argue with you. I may even become physical with you in a negative kind of way, because anger tends to lead people to attack. Or I'll start telling other people bad things about you, trying to destroy your relationship, trying to get you fired from your job. Because if anger is now the emotion I feel, rather than this craving for oneness in my craving for distance from you, I feel anger because I feel that you are such a problem for me and I'll try to hurt you. Now, do people always do that? No, I'm talking about a tendency here. But in anger they attack. But if they feel fear, they just try to get further away from you as fast as they can. If I'm afraid he's going to beat me in front of the children again.
Speaker 1:I remember a lady who told me years ago that her husband would take off his belt and beat her with that belt in front of their children, who are old enough to see this and be terrified about it. All she wanted to do was to run. Let me get my children and get out of here. Some women are too afraid to run. If I try to go someplace else, if I try to be away from him to be safe, he's going to track me down and he may kill me. Oh, and hear me well, I'm talking as if men are the only ones who do this. But you understand, there are women who are just as bad that they physically cause such pain to the spouse or to the children. And what I'm saying is, if your spouse says I hate you and they're angry at you, they're probably going to attack you, either directly or to other people. And if they're afraid of you, they're going to run from you and they'll be afraid to tell other people for fear that you'll find out and cause them more pain.
Speaker 1:But the interesting thing about this kind of hate that when it comes through passion, it can change rapidly, very rapidly. The person who just last week said I hate you, I never want to be around you again, I've got to get out of here, I've got to find someplace else to live. This week may be as romantic and passionate in a good way as you have ever witnessed. Like I love you so much, I can't be without you, because passion is the one that changes the fastest. I've actually seen people who, intimacy-wise, have the cool hate in the sense that I don't want to be open with you, I don't want you to be open with me and who have had the hot hate where I am angry at you, want nothing to do with you, get away from me. I have seen these people all of a sudden become, for a week or two I'll never be able to live without you. I'm here, please be with me in the bedroom so we can express our love, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But a couple of weeks later we're right back where they were before, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but a couple of weeks later are right back where they were before.
Speaker 1:So, when it comes to the passionate hate, the hot hate, can it be overcome? Absolutely. We're going to show you how to do all that. But understand that it's mercurial, it's it can move so rapidly. Don't put all your eggs in that basket, don't like. Well, she came home and drug me into the bedroom and she loves me so much. Now it's all over, everything's fine, maybe.
Speaker 1:Maybe we don't trust that because this is based on emotions, and here's the kind of things he would have you to rate on that one to nine, like her top scale, if if Sombra were measuring this. But you say it was like this. I fear you, at least at sometimes. I feel threatened by you. You present a danger to me. Sometimes I feel rage toward you. Thinking about you makes me angry, and other questions like that.
Speaker 1:Now, don't get discouraged. We're only about maybe a little more than halfway through with this. I just wanted you to understand what hate is if we're going to show you how to get past it. But let me repeat now, since we're a little past the halfway mark If your spouse has been treating you in such a way that you think they hate you because they're being distant, or the tone of voice they use, or they have called you some names that are not polite, understand that that might not be indicative of the kind of hate I'm talking about here. Those could be flashes in the pan of anger. They're certainly not good, definitely not right. They can definitely be painful, but they're not the kind of hate we're talking about here. You deal with those in a different way, but now we're talking about Sternberg's triangle again. So there's intimacy at the top and there's passion over here, and if those are positive, then that has to do with contributing to deep love. And here's the third one over here, of course, we're looking at them in the negative sense, and this is commitment.
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