With the vast range of the human mind, it can be a little difficult to peg an emotion or emotions as the strongest, as each person experiences different levels of the emotions. However, on a broad scale, there are two that generally stand out above the rest; love and hate. While they may seem as though there is no connection, one underlining thing is their similarity; passion.

Without passion, you cannot love. It would be impossible. Love comes from deep within the very fiber of your being. Without having passion for another person or for an ideal, you could never embrace it as a founding thing in your life. You could never be able to make the sacrifices that love calls for.

Hate, like love, requires passion. You can’t hate something that you don’t feel strongly about. Hate devours a person and demands the devotion of thought. Simple disliking or no feelings towards a thing is no where near hatred. Hate requires effort; it’s not an easy thing to actually hate something.

While most will argue that these are rather abstract ideas of the emotions, that’s the thing; the emotions themselves are conceptual. Each definition of love and hate will change from person to person, as each person experiences these emotions differently. There is no one definition or explanation. While many people will attempt to, and some will accept the definitions given, it still will never completely cover every aspect of love and hate.

If there is one thing about love and hate that we can accept as true, it would be the over usage of these words. Many people throw them around on everything and everyone. Perhaps that’s an attempt to lower the severity of the connotation behind the words, or the lightheartedness that the media portraits love and hate to be. Still, it is highly doubtful that someone is willing to give themselves to shoes or shopping.

In my experience as a human, these are the strongest emotions that I have ever encountered and I’m sure that others would agree. With the wide range of emotions that a person can feel, love and hate have no competitors. It’s amazing the range of emotions that passion can cause. From one polar opposite to the other, passion is the common strand.