Love Quote by Rollo May

May’s line cuts against the greeting-card math that treats emotions as neat opposites. Hate, he implies, is still a form of attachment: it keeps the other person psychologically “on the hook.” You don’t spend that kind of energy on someone who doesn’t matter. Apathy is colder and more final because it withdraws the basic ingredient that makes any relationship possible: attention. In that framing, hate and love share a strange intimacy. Both are proof of investment; both can organize a life.

The intent is clinical, not poetic. As a psychologist working in the existential tradition, May was preoccupied with what makes people feel real to each other in an age of numbness, conformity, and self-protective detachment. The mid-20th century backdrop matters here: mass culture, bureaucratic life, and the postwar drift toward “getting by” could flatten feeling into a defensive shrug. Apathy becomes not just an emotion but a strategy for avoiding vulnerability.

Subtext: the real threat to intimacy isn’t conflict; it’s the refusal to be moved. Hate can sometimes be metabolized, redirected, even confessed. Apathy is the emotional equivalent of leaving someone on read forever. It denies the other person the dignity of impact.

The rhetorical trick is the reversal. By redefining the “opposite,” May forces a moral inventory: are you passionately wrong, or are you safely absent? He’s warning that a culture trained to fear intensity will mistake numbness for maturity, when it’s often just abandonment with a calm face.