Love-hate relationship

A love-hate relationship is a personal relationship involving simultaneous or alternating emotions of love and enmity. Sometimes the person may love the other person/object, but hate oneself for it. This relationship can, but does not have to be of a romantic nature.

A love-hate relationship often occurs when people have completely lost the intimacy within a loving relationship, yet still retain some passion for, or perhaps some commitment to each other.

An addiction is also a kind of love-hate relationship. Another symptom of a love-hate relationship is one in which there remains a high degree of sexual intimacy, but the emotional intimacy has degraded or vanished altogether. Some in these circumstances have observed that the overall emotional feeling is not wholly unlike an actual drug addiction.

A related theme is "obligatory friendship", where usually one party feels indebted to another and forges a friendship but still holds a grudge over a particular past disappointment or set of disappointments, while the "creditor" in the relationship agrees to the nature of the relationship often for security reasons, but remains aware of the "debtor"'s grudge and feels counter-indebted until the cause of the grudge is sufficiently overcome.