Fear Versus Love
If you can plot Love and Hate on a graph, where does Fear fall?
Bianca Llerena
Passion
I’ve always thought that Love and Hate belonged on some type of graph where Love and Hate, instead of being very far apart, are right next to each other, almost as if being pulled by gravity.
After doing some research, I found someone who had the same exact train of thought that I did. A writer who goes by the name “Team Descartes” (I’m assuming named after the “Father of Modern Philosophy” René Descartes), published an article titled “The Creation of the Circle of Love and Hate.” He takes the time to create a circular graph with the same basic objective; one does not jump from Love to Hate, they circle around.
His graph is more advanced than mine: he has Passion at the very top of the circle and Indifference at the very bottom. It also has parallel scales of "intensity” going from 0 to 10. (Zero meaning Indifference at the bottom, and 10 being Passionate at the top). He uses his article to talk about how rare it is to jump across the circle (one usually goes from Love, to Like, to Dislike, to Hate). But on the other side of the coin, he comments about how, when battling something like addiction, you must go over the top from Loving something to Hating it (or at least, hating what it does to you), so as to let something go.
“It is a battleground where love and hate come together,” Team Descartes writes when explaining how if you flip your view on something, because Hate and Love are such passionate emotions, you tend to go from one to the other. This is seen in things like habits, relationships, and politics. It’s more likely to go from Love to Hate than from Love to Dislike, as they’re closer to each other at the top of the graph.
Donnie Darko
But as always, it’s never that simple. As always, there is a full spectrum of complex human emotions that decide whether you go from one emotion to the next.
As seen in the cult-classic, Gyllenhaal-duo, sci-fi indie film, ‘Donnie Darko’, Donnie, a schizophrenic, psychic, high school student, refuses to participate in a class-activity where his teacher reads out a scenario and he must place it on the “life line” where, at each polar end, you either find Fear (in the negative energy spectrum) or Love (in the positive energy spectrum). Throughout the film, Donnie argues that Love and Fear, two fundamental human emotions, are too simplistic to categorize all human behavior.
‘Donnie Darko’ explores how, while fear is a primal, inescapable emotion, and love is a more complex, positive force, choosing to act out of love despite fear, is key to confronting life's challenges. Donnie learns this when facing death of self and the fear of losing loved ones.
If ‘Donnie Darko’ questions the simplicity of plotting human emotion between Fear and Love, the TV show ‘Girls’ shows what that tension looks like in real life; unfiltered and unresolvable.
Girls
In ‘Girls’, Fear doesn’t just coexist with Love; it fuels it. Season 1, Episode 10 titled “She Did,” Hannah Horvath, the aspiring writer with deep self esteem issues, follows her new boyfriend Adam outside of a party after they get into an argument where he says he wants to live with her, but she finds a new roommate because she assumes he’s only saying that to be nice:
Hannah: “I’m scared, okay? I’m really scared all the time. I'm like very scared all the time.”
Adam: “Join the fucking club!”
Hannah: “No, because I’m more scared than most people are when they say that they're scared. I’m like the most scared person who's alive.”
Adam: “Well, you don't have the right to be!”
Adam sees her fear as self-indulgent, while Hannah experiences it as inescapable. That moment captures the gravitational pull between love and hate that ‘Team Descartes’ describes. Their exchange is charged with passion. Hannah’s fear of being unlovable becomes the very thing that keeps her bound to Adam, even when that relationship hurts her.
Just as ‘Donnie Darko’ argues that no action can be fully explained by fear or love alone, ‘Girls’ reveals that fear often hides within love’s shadow. Fear isn’t outside the circle, it’s the motion that keeps it turning.