Our Hatred for Love

Do you know what is the first emotion that a human baby learns, or as a matter of fact, any animal baby learns?
What does an infant do? They cry a lot, right? That's a reaction. Guess the emotion behind this? Fear.

This is the first and foremost of the 5 basic emotions. And these five basic emotions form a thousand of complex emotions. Let's take a closer look at some of the reasons behind our unreasonable emotions.

Could you guess the second emotion that infant learns? It is joy and with it comes the smile. But unfortunately, there's no joy without sadness and as soon as the child learns to smile, it also knows the feeling of lack of joy, that is sadness.

Then comes the two most controversial emotions, that is "Anger" and "Love". Interestingly, anger is a far more complex feeling than love. A child learns to love its mother much earlier than it learns to hate anyone.
From these 5 basic emotions, countless complex emotions are born. For example: Pride, optimism, disgust, envy, regret, relief and so on. We will come back to this in a while.

Now that we are aware of the complexity of the 5 different emotions, could anyone spot a trend here? We humans have a tendency to display the more complex emotions more often than the simpler ones. Maybe the society and human evolution has shaped us in such a way that display of the simpler emotions is considered less attractive. For example, fear, the most basic of the basic emotions is considered shameful and even a sign of weakness? Whereas anger is glorified and seen as a sign of dominance and strength. We can't deny this, but let me remind you one important aspect that we so easily miss : fear is a survival instinct. It helps us stay away from danger and increase our chances of survival. Anger, on the other hand, it gets us involved in fights and potentially damaging circumstances. Yet after all these, we dignify anger and not fear.

Now to address the elephant in the room. The controversy of love. As we have observed, the feeling of "love" is less complex than anger. Hence, obviously it isn't the most preferred emotion to display in the society. But there's another problem. Rememeber I talked about the complex emotions. Apparently there are some complex emotions that are often mistaken with simple emotions and that my friends, is the root cause of all first world, second world and third world problems. What you suppose would happen if I ran out of my room's door right now and told the next 5 people I meet that I "LOVE" them? Maybe a few slaps from the girls and weird looks from the boys? The issue here? There's this emotion called "lust" that we so often mistake as love. Actually in this ultra modern world, where people grow up watching bollywood, or even worse, hollywood, love and lust is considered the one and same. On the other hand, we equally confuse "kindness" with love as well.

Another problem in this intricately arranged emotion system is that some emotions are apparently much stronger than others. From the pages of Anne Frank, "Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones, because regret is stronger than gratitude".

Now I don't have a magical solution to all these problems in the emotional hierarchy that I was discussing. Not there is any ultimate advice to guide as all in this maze. I just have a simple suggestion to put forward here. Don't discriminate between the simple and complex feelings. "Do not be afraid to be afraid, don't feel ashamed to be shy, be angry about being angry, be happy about being happy and love loving".  Before I sign off, let me quickly point it out, the emotion you are experiencing right now after reading the last line, is called confusion.