Loving Someone You Hate
Like I explained in the Noir and Urban Fantasy blog, I'm a member of the Prose Challenge livejournal community. Challenge 032 was to create a piece of prose about hating someone you love.
The prompt immediately reminded me of IRON KISSED by Patricia Briggs, where Mercy is tricked into drinking from Orfino's Bane (a goblet that lets someone rob the person who drinks from it of their will). In IRON KISSED, the bad guy, Tim, has stolen a bunch of fae artifacts, including bracers that make him very strong and a Druid's Hide, which keeps his enemies from finding or harming him.
One of the things that Tim makes Mercy do is to fall in love with him. It's a very disturbing scene, and it's emotionally wrenching to watch Mercy fight with the compulsion to maintain a sense of self. In the end, though, Mercy is able to beat Tim--precisely because she loves him. She wasn't his enemy because he told her not to be, she says after she attacks and kills him.
This is not, however, a review of IRON KISSED.
It should seem obvious that it is easier to love a good person than a bad one. I'm not speaking of romantic love here, but rather platonic love--the love you have for a friend or relative. However, in my experience, friendships don't grow up because of admiration between two people about the strength of their consciences or the saintliness of their decisions. Most people don't pick their friends based on how much they donate to charity or how many puppies they've saved from the pound. It more usually has to do with things such as time spent together in a school or work environment or compatibility of interests, i.e. liking similar music, movies, sports, etc.
Most of my close friends are people that I've known for over five years. "The girls" I met in high school, and we were in the same extracurricular group. For 9th and 10th grades, we had all of the same classes together, and every year, after school we would stay after for at least an hour every day, and there were days when we were at school until five or ten o'clock at night working on sets, practicing lines. Some years, when we won State competition, we met on weekends to work on fundraising to pay for our trips to Globals in Tennessee. Other people I'm close to, I met in middle school and have been friends with--despite occasional blips where we fell out of touch, like when I went to college--ever since.
Around the time when I went to college, though, my mother got sick, and my college was about 2 hours from home. So I came home on weekends to do housework and spend time with my family, which meant that while I was attending classes, I didn't spend a lot of time socializing. I was friendly with people, but now that I've come back home for law school, there isn't anyone from college who I talk to, other than the occasional e-mail to or from a professor. The same is true of law school; I have acquaintances here, but there are only a handful of people here who I would invite to a party or out to the bar, and of them, I doubt I'll still talk to them after the bar exam.
What does this have to do with the topic?