Translating "I Hate You."

The door slams hard enough to rattle the pictures in the hallway. Three words hang in the air behind it, still smoking: “I hate you.” If you’re a parent, or if you were ever fifteen, you know this scene. You may have played both roles. Somewhere in the house, a mother or father stands holding a laundry basket or a car key, absorbing a sentence that arrived with all the subtlety of a thrown dish.

We hear about this moment constantly on our Journeys to Love. Ask parents about love and, sooner or later, somebody laughs, shakes their head, and tells us about the year their sweet child turned thirteen and the doors started slamming. The lament is always half grief and half comedy, and it always arrives at some version of the same question: how can a kid who is loved that much say a thing like that? Having taught teenagers for years and interviewed families from coast to coast, I can offer some consolation. “I hate you” is a foreign language. It only sounds like English. Here is the full and faithful translation:

“You won’t do or give me what I want. And since I need what I want - they are exactly the same thing - you aren’t meeting my needs. Therefore, I can, like, only love you once I get what I need. That means I hate you right now because hate is, like, the opposite of love. Anyway, I know you want me to love you, so I’ll trade you - my love in exchange for you doing or giving me what I want. I mean, like, what I need. I need you to do this, but like, I don’t need you. At least, like, not right now. But I think I might still love you anyway, at the same time I hate you and want to not need you. Shit, I’m so confused.”

Every word of that is true in the moment, by the way, especially the last three. The kid isn’t lying, and the kid isn’t broken. The kid is doing something ancient and entirely understandable: confusing two different things that grew up in the same house. One of them is attachment. The other is love.

Attachment is the needy one, and it starts honestly enough. As infants and children, our needs arrive as comfort, care, protection, entertainment, and food, and attachment is the system that gets them met. As adults, the needs become more sexually, financially, and emotionally complicated, but the machinery stays the same: a running ledger of what I require and who’s supplying it. Relationships built mainly on that ledger operate like trades, and they tend to fall apart when one or both partners feel the exchange has gone uneven. Or, perhaps worse, when what’s given becomes routine, taken for granted, and therefore boring. Attachment is a behavior, dependent by its very nature, and often demanding.

Love is another kind of thing entirely, at least as Toni and I have come to understand it in our search for love’s true nature. It’s an essential element of our being rather than a behavior, and it grows and expands from within rather than being collected from outside. It doesn’t rely on emotional or material transactions to start it or to prove it, and it carries no expectations beyond its own existence. A Tibetan Buddhist monk we met at a monastery above Woodstock once gave us the cleanest map of that difference we’ve ever received, using nothing more than the direction of the phone calls between a child and his mother. His whole teaching belongs to the book we’re finishing, so I’ll leave you the trailhead here and save the vista.

Now, run the translation the other direction. A healthy, loving Mom or Dad standing in that hallway understands, somewhere beneath the sting, that no exchange of behavior or goods for love is necessary or even possible. Love for that kid is forever, no matter what. And here’s the quiet part: it’s what they both need. The teenager is conducting a hostage negotiation with someone who was never holding a hostage. The ransom was paid in full before the kid could walk.

Most of us grow out of the confusion, or mostly out of it. For those who never do, the ledger follows them into adulthood, and grown-up relationships come apart over trades gone uneven or the hunger for something novel. And that hurts. Since avoiding danger and pain is among the main jobs of our ancient nervous system, people who keep suffering those endings can quietly assemble a false and negative concept of love, especially the romantic kind, distancing, sabotaging, and belittling relationships to dodge the next wound. Thus are love’s cynics born. And since misery loves company, those private bruises pool into a wider social misconception, until whole rooms full of grown folks are certain that love is just a deal that always goes bad.

Back in the hallway, the door is still shut, and the three words are still smoldering. Take heart. What was said is rarely the whole of what was meant, and much of what was meant is temporary; confusion is doing the talking, and confusion, unlike love, wears off. The kid’s three words took a hundred and thirty-one to translate. The parent’s three need no translation at all.

Say them to the door if you have to. They carry.

Scotte Burns is a writer, speaker, and co-founder, with his wife Toni, of Journeys to Love, a multimedia quest to explore love’s origin, nature, and purpose through more than 100,000 miles of motorcycle travel across America.