Love Quote by Janet Fitch

Hatred is pitched here not as a moral failure but as an ergonomic upgrade: a feeling that finally behaves. Fitch’s speaker sounds almost relieved, like someone who’s spent years trying to appease a skittish animal and has discovered the pleasures of a tool. That’s the first trick of the passage: it steals the language of agency. Love is framed as the unreliable employer - temperamental, tiring, demanding, opportunistic. Hatred, by contrast, is described in the verbs of craft and combat: use, sculpt, wield. It’s intimacy rewritten as control.

The subtext is less “love is bad” than “vulnerability is intolerable.” Love, in this account, humiliates because it exposes need, because it puts another person in position to revise the terms. The resentment isn’t only toward a partner; it’s toward the self that once hoped. Hatred becomes a way to keep the story coherent after betrayal or disappointment: it offers a stable narrative (“I was wronged”) and a stable identity (“I am strong now”). That’s why it can be “hard, or soft, however you need it” - hatred is customizable, which is another way of saying it’s self-centered.

Calling hatred a cradle is the darkest turn. A cradle is for the helpless, the pre-verbal, the not-yet-formed. Fitch suggests that hate can feel like care because it reduces complexity, rocking you back into certainty. The irony is that the very “usefulness” being celebrated is also a confinement: a feeling you can wield is also one you never have to outgrow.