My Only Love Sprung From My Only Hate

A friend of mine, who has a deep grasp of human psychology, is fond of quoting a line from Shakespeare. Juliet says "My only love sprung from my only hate". Now what on earth does this mean? And what is my friend trying to illustrate by quoting this?

The other day I was walking the beach with a friend. The waves that day were about 3 feet tall and the roiling, back to back breakers were coming onto shore in fairly rapid succession. As we walked at waters edge I found a small stick, a 2 x 3, about 15" long with some white paint on it. It apparently had washed up on shore in the waves. I mindlessly picked it up and threw it into a breaker. To my surprise the wave brought the stick back to me and nearly planted it at my feet. I exclaimed "Oh, its like a boomerang. See! Toss it in and it comes back to you!". My friend was amused. So I threw it again even as we continued walking. Lo and behold, once again the wave returned the stick and planted in on the shore nearly in front of me. I jokingly said "good puppy!". By this time my friends eyes were intently watching this unfold.

By now, we had walked to a section of the beach were the wave action had caused the sand to drop about 24" making a miniature, straight drop little cliff. The crashing waves would hit this area and fly straight up into the air, hardly able to breach the broken sand line and advance any further. I said to my friend, "this would be a very tough place to have the stick return" But once again I threw the stick into the breaking waves and watched it disappear into the foamy white and disappear. The wave came in and hit the "cliff" and rose straight up into the air. I watched to see if I could see the stick anywhere but I could not when just then, almost magically, the stick appeared not more than 10 feet from me, sitting firmly on the top of the little cliff as if waiting for me to pick up.

Now my friend was incredulous, and it showed on her face. She was challenged to make this happen for herself. So before I could get to the stick she rushed over, picked it up and with all determination tossed it into the wave in a manner that dared it to return to her as it had for me. But it was not to be. Instead the stick bobbed and weaved in the frothy waves but would not come back to the shore. The frustration on her face said "you worked for him, why wouldn't you work for me, damn it!!" She immediately gave up and walked away from the scene as I laughed at her silly little ego. But just as she had her back to the scene the stick reappeared in the water near the shore, close enough to wade in ankle deep to get it. I pointed that out to her and she did wade in to get it but then handed it to me. I was really amused at her quiet frustration yet thought it very silly to be so challenged and to be disappointed by so small a thing.

Just then I said I was going to toss the stick in to the water way beyond the breakers so it could go off into uncharted places. My friend said "No!, Don't, don't toss it away" as she protectively, almost motherly, took it from me and actually held it to her heart. I could see that she suddenly had an attachment to the stick she was moments before frustrated at. She actually felt a bit of emotional pain at the idea of me tossing the stick away. She said "no, you can't just throw it away". I said "Are you going to keep it? Isn't that a silly thing to do?". She agreed it was but was under a spell of protectiveness anyway. After walking a bit she saw a small pile of other wood pieces grouped together on the beach. She decided to toss the stick into this pile saying "there, now it won't be lonely". I said "do you know how silly you are? Can you see what just happened here? You got irritated by the stick not behaving as you wanted it to and suddenly you grew a bizarre affection for it. Can you see how silly that is".

She did see how silly it was, and laughed at her own silliness too. I went on to explain exactly what had just occurred, for what had occurred was that a kind of love, a kind of affection for a "thing" that was not there a moment before, had grown immediately out of her frustrated with it. Out of her hate grew her new love. It was a perfect opportunity to show her how it is that love, the lower, egotistical, emotional feeling of attraction for a person, place or thing, that we all have is almost always born out of hate, frustration, irritation or the like with the object of that "love" . I also explained that this kind of love isn't real love at all, but rather an inferior kind that tends to dominate and poison almost every relationship on earth because people always end up hating what they need, but need what they hate. The kind of love, that is really a guilt based "love", with its inherent need to possess comes out of first hating. Real love never possesses but sets free and does not hold.

But the neat part of all this was that my friend was able to immediately see the principle. She was immediately able to see how many of her relationships were based on being first frustrated with someone, or something. That is why I like her friendship. She has an affection for the truth, even at the expense of her own ego.

Rick Hurst
http://rickhur.blogspot.com