If someone asked most of us “What is the opposite of love?”, we would automatically respond “hate”. Yet I would challenge that assumption. Love is a personal emotion, usually an intense one, based on a variety of experiences and responses to another person or perhaps an animal with which we have so close a bond that we think of it as nearly human. Of course, there are many different types of love. Most of us think of romantic love, but there are so many other kinds!

The love of a parent for a child, of siblings for each other, of a person for his or her pet, the agape of one Christian for another, the platonic love between teacher and student … the list is endless.

Hatred is also personal. We don’t really “hate” inanimate objects. Can you hate meatloaf or a china pattern? No. We may prefer a different food or pattern of china, but to become so emotionally involved with a meatloaf as to “hate” it is beneath us. You can’t really personally hate someone or a group of people that you don’t know, either. Sure, we can cite Hitler’s “hatred” of the Jews. But I would question whether that was actually hatred. Hitler did not believe that the Jews were essentially anything equal to himself any more than a meatloaf would have been. He had dehumanized them so far that he could treat them as subhuman without emotional response. Therefore, he couldn’t hate them because he didn’t know them or relate to them as equals. “Hatred” isn’t a term you can use for something that is not essentially your own equal.

What is more, it is very unusual to hate someone whom you have not first loved. To dislike a person, envy him, despise him, feel jealousy or intense anger towards him, yes. But real hatred starts with intense love, and the person who comes to hate has to feel that his love has been betrayed for that love to turn to hatred. Therefore, hatred is not the opposite of love, but it is something very closely related to it; it is the inverse of love -- love turned inside out. One can respect someone for whom he nonetheless feels intense hatred. He may still acknowledge the qualities that caused him to love in the first place: “She is amazingly smart. If she hadn’t been, she never would have gotten past my defenses. She’s a really good writer. You should see the stuff she wrote in our divorce papers; it makes me sound like a serial killer. And she could sell freezers to eskimos. People don’t even see it coming and she’s got them eating out of her hand.” The respect may be grudging, and phrased in terms of criticism, but it’s there.

I would argue, instead, that the opposite of love is pity. Love is personal; pity need not be a personal emotion. One can pity a single person or a group. One can pity the old spinster down the block who doesn’t quite remember who she is anymore; “Poor thing, they say she was quite beautiful in her day.” Or one may pity the Cherokee nation on the Trail of Tears without knowing anyone who is Cherokee. Perhaps we respect them for trying to make the walk across the nation, losing most of their tribe along the way. Or perhaps we merely feel anger at the American government for requiring it of them. One can see pictures of children with birth defects because of the meltdown at Chernobyl in the 1980’s, and pity them because their government has done nothing but cover up the causes of that accident and deny that it has any relationship to their partial and missing limbs, which can never be replaced and for which there are not even the resources for prosthetics. We don’t have to know the individual children to pity them, or to feel justified anger towards their government. We may wish to help them; we may send in donations to a fund.

But in none of these cases do we have to have a relationship with the person or people in question, nor do we have to have personal respect for them, the two hallmarks of both love and hate. And that is what makes pity the cruelest of emotions -- far crueler than hatred: it leaves no room for respect. One can forgive whatever caused love to turn to hate and love again; one cannot forgive the cause of pity for the person or people one pities has done nothing to us to need forgiveness. Therefore, there is no way for the pitied person to redeem himself. He remains without our respect, without our love or even our hatred. Our forgiveness is unnecessary. He cannot redeem himself from this lowest of positions. This is truly the opposite of love.