If You Hate Men, Read This

Hate is a strong word, an angry word. A word that bends beyond plain dislike to every single cell in your being despising something, every bone in your body being bitter, and every line of your nose wrinkling in disgust.

Hate implies hostility and jaw-clenching, fist-balling frustration. But to truly hate means that you have truly loved, and is hate really any less emotional, less heart-gripping, and less passionate than love?

Men can be terrible, terrifying, painful, heart-breaking creatures. But they can also be beautiful and strong and intoxicating and challenging and tender. They can build us when we are broken; they can love us when we are unlovable. They can see some inner, complex part of us and believe in it when we cannot see it in ourselves. They can grow us, and with us, into something truly magical.

But they can also destroy us.

And this is why you hate men. Or maybe one single man that has altered the way you view the entire sex. You have been hurt, so deeply it feels that it’s beyond repair, and so you hate. You hate with every atom in your body, every muscle, every fiber in your brain, every vein in your heart. You hate so deeply, so passionately, so recklessly.

You hate just as strongly as you once loved.

Trust me, I understand. All of us females—we get it. We’ve had our share of love and loss, our experiences with falling in, falling out. We have all held resentment towards a member of the opposite sex. But when we really look deeply at ourselves, decipher the tangled mess of our emotions, we see that love and hate are more closely tied than we think.

To hate someone is to have loved with enough feeling and passion that we are capable of such extreme emotion on the opposite end. To hate is to still have just as much feeling towards that person. To expend just as much energy.

Loving and hating—they are almost one in the same—so much emotion, so much fervor and intensity. But can we truly hate? Can we truly harbor these feelings for men we have loved? Men we relied on and trusted and needed for a period in our lives? Should we?

What you are feeling right now—your anger, resentment, bitterness, frustration, pain—that is all real. But you cannot go on hating forever. One day you have to let go, forgive, and open to love again.

Men are not terrible. Maybe the one that hurt you was. Maybe that scenario, that breakup, that relationship, those decisions. But not every single man on this earth. So you can’t go on hating men forever.

You cannot let your brokenness weigh you down with negative feelings. You cannot let the man that broke you have so much control over your emotional energy because to hate takes just as much of your heart as to love. And hate doesn’t look good on you, darling. Love looks so much better.