Don't Waste The Hate

An ex-girlfriend of mine recently texted me and asked, “Why do you hate me?” I will give you my reply later, but I found myself thinking about the term “hate.”

I have discovered that I do not really hate anything. I think if I did hate something, I would have no choice but to kill or eliminate it from the face of the Earth, if it were within my power. Hate is an incredibly important and intense emotion, and it should not be expended lightly. Hating takes more from the person doing the hating, in an emotional sense, than the one being hated. Hating can be downright exhausting as well.

Hate is, in my opinion, something we should reserve for the most egregious of people and conduct on the planet and we must also have some sort of personal interest or association with the person or conduct to truly hate. I am not sure that there is not a man that served in WWII that does not have an absolute right and basis for hating Adolph Hitler. Certainly there are millions of Jews that have the same right and basis, as well as all sorts of other minorities in Europe at the time. While I can have intensely disapproving emotions about Nazi Germany and the conduct during the war, I was not there and was never personally affected by it, so I am not sure that I can truly reach the level of hate, and am not sure I have the right to do so.

So, back to the ex… I explained that I considered hate a far too great and important an emotion to be wasted. I went on to explain that her problem with me was not that I hated her, but that I did not care at all and one has to care, really care, to hate someone. To hate her was to engage in an active emotional process that required investment of time, thought and effort and I had neither the time, nor the inclination, to hate her, in spite of what I perceived as what she had done to me.

My ex had borrowed several thousands of dollars, which I now see that I will never get back, short of suing her, and even then, she has nothing, so suing would be an exercise in futility. When the economy went down the toilet, so did a lot of my disposable income and, as I should have known, when the money got gone, so did she. No dinner out five nights a week, no trips to the Bahamas and Key West for the weekend and no trips to New York for Thanksgiving. I learned in a very harsh way, it was not me she loved but the lifestyle that came with me.

Now you would think the above was enough, but like so many women (and men) when she decided I was not “providing for her needs” she undertook as her mission to find a replacement that she thought could. When she finally did dump me, unceremoniously during a phone call, she had already been seeing another guy for a month. Her motto appears to be, don’t give up what you got until you have the proper replacement in hand. An interesting side note; the guy dumped her a few months later, which was probably in his best interests.

I am sure there are those that would say I have reason to hate her, but I find that other than four years of wasted time, effort and money with her, it was not an event that calls for the expenditure of the emotional capital necessary to hate. I prefer just to relegate her to that file of my life for the barely notable, move on and save the hate for more worthy people and practices. As for the ex….I just don’t care enough to hate her.