Torments of Love

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 358, 19 May 1928, Page 10

Torments of Love

IS IT THE SAME AS HATRED?

Actor Gives His Views

CAN' a man or woman love and liate at the same time? In an interview in the “Sunday Chronicle” the distinguished actor, Robert Loraine, gives many examples of how a desire to inflict pain and suffering often accompanies

intense devotion. Love and hate! These are a strange mixture. It might be said on impulse rhat they cannot exist together with-1 out one or the other triumphing in j the end. Yet. I suppose, there must he thousands ot couples who both love and hate each other without their love ' really suffering. Strange though it seems, one emo- [ tion very often accompanies the other, j I have just been reading a remarkable Police Court case of a man ac- j • used of desertion who told the magis- j trate that while he loved his wife he couldn’t live with her because he hated her so much! Asked to explain this extraordinary statement, he said: "My wife is the sweetest woman in the world and I lover her. At the same time, there are moments when we hate each other with intensity and quarrel incessantly. "The last time we quarrelled,” the; man added, "my wife picked up aj knife from the table ajid threatened [ me with it. Y'et we both love each other, and ordinarily get along happily! together.” When I produced the two Strind-1 berg plays, "The Father” and “The Dance of Death,” I had lettei’s from people who said that Strindberg was a monomaniac obsessed by hatred of w oman. They said that such hatred between the sexes never existed in real life. But every day cases come to light of couples who lead the bickering lives be reveals in his plays. Inconsistent and illogical though it may seem, love and hate appear inseparable in thousands of marriages. Emotion is pitched in the two keys and both are struck in turn. There are men, quite decent, affectionate, and worthy husbands, who positively hate their wives under certain circumstances. Such a one can never, for instance, see his wife lay tlie table without feeling a growing irritation and desire to nag at her. It is the way she has of smoothing the cloth that annoys him. Cruelty of Love A trick of eating, a way of talking, a habit of fussing over trifles —all these things play a part in engendering lovehatred. And just as some men hate their! wives, so also do some women feel the same thing towards their husbands. Sometimes a man’s way of lingering his moustache or sucking at Ilia pipe has made a woman feel positively murderous. But these couples love each other at the same time. If they did not they would not feel so intensely about each other. It is quite common knowledge that couples w hose love for each other cannot be questioned, seem to take a fiendish delight in being cruel and inflicting suffering. In the East End a girl will take a black eye from her lover and boast about it afterwards. She may hate him at the time, but she takes it as a sign that he is not neglecting her. Other methods of love-hatred are more subtle, but they amount to the same thing. It is the very fact of loving each other that leads to strife. How often one reads of a man who kills his wife In a fit of rage and hatred, and then falls upon her body and smothers her face with kisses. It is exactly the same thing in a different degree of intensity. Not long ago I knew a man who seemed to take an unholy joy in giving pain to the woman who shared his life. Some demon ot perversity seemed constantly to urge him on to make her unhappy. That woman led a life of hell, yet her husband loved her and was really devoted to her. One day. after a more than usually violent scene, he told me his feelings. "If I didn’t love her so intensely,” he said. “I shouldn’t hate her as I do at times. All the time I am being cruel I am loving her. I just seem unable to help it.” Jealousy

Everyone knows the form of lovehatred that manifests itself in jealousy. Thousands of men and women

otherwise happily married, squabble incessantly through absurd suspicions. Lots of men hate their wives because they see them talking to other men, while lots of women feel the same hatred towards their husbands because they come home late from the office with a story of having been detained on urgent business. They would not do it if they did not love each other. Jealousy wrecks any amount of marriages and parts any number of young couples. Yet in nine cases out of ■n love continues to survive. That is the tragedy. Strindberg’s theory of life is that we are all fiends placed here to torment each other. There certainly seem to be grounds to support such a view.