Do you label your emotions?  At least with regards to other people, can you define your emotional response to someone with a single word?

"I like her."

"I hate them."

"I love him."

"I dislike you."

Get the gist?  Are you able to summarize your emotional response to another person through the use of a single word?  Apparently I am unable to do so, and I will readily admit that I am happy with that.

Labeling my emotions with a single phrase is objectionable to me.  I do not believe that what I feel for a person can effectively be summed up in a single, simple phrase flippantly tossed to the masses for consumption as though it ingrained some majestic truth.  Truth is what it does not contain.

"Ah, Jason, but you are a writer.  Such uncomplicated declarations are beyond you."

Verily, that may well be true, but allow me to offer this timid assertion for your consideration.

Love and hate are two sides of the same coin.  I will not quote from The Prophet on this, as many of you would assume I intended.  What I will do is speak from my heart.

If you care about someone enough to hate them, it is equally within your emotional purview to care enough for that person to also feel love.  I know that I have never loved a person who I did not also hate on occasion.  This is true of all forms of love, whether it present itself as familial, platonic or romantic.  The same can be said for all other emotions: like and dislike, admire and loathe, joy and sorrow, anger and calm…  Need I go on?

Whether it be that I notice something within a person that previously I failed to see, they do something out of character which I find to be unexpected, or my own emotions play tricks with my relationships, I never have felt a single emotion about any one person.

No one is perfect.  I therefore find it impossible to summarize how I feel about someone with a single catch phrase.  My emotions are too complex to be simplified in this manner, and my relationships are too multifaceted to be so easily defined.

Am I arguing semantics?  But of course!  I am also stating a truth which is profoundly important to me, something that helps me understand the multifarious sentiments which engulf my mental images of those in my life.

How could I ever be expected to condense my feelings for someone into a one-word answer?  How can I define the Byzantine affects of human interaction with such primitive language?  It seems laughably preposterous even to try.

I am more complex than that.  My relationships are more complex than that.  You ask me how I feel about someone in particular?  How much time do we have?