At the end of the Super Bowl halftime show 2026, as the stadium is still saturated with noise and light, a simple, almost disarming sentence appears: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love”
It is one of those statements that feel obvious, even comforting. And for that very reason, it risks being filed away quickly—as a closing slogan, rather than an invitation to think.
And yet, perhaps the point is not to decide which feeling is more powerful. Perhaps the more interesting question is another one: how far apart are love and hate, really?
Our culture likes to keep them neatly separated, as if there were two kinds of people: those who choose love and those who choose hate. But this reassuring division does not hold up under closer inspection. In real life, hate rarely emerges from a void. It almost always emerges in relation.
Those who hate are not people who have never loved. More often, they are people who have loved traumatically—through a bond that wounded them, that went unrecognized, that left behind a loss without language. Hate does not come first. It comes later. As rigidity. As reaction.
And yet we continue to read it as strength. It is blunt, visible, decisive. In a society that struggles to tolerate vulnerability, this hardness is mistaken for character, for power, even for leadership. Fear and injury, by contrast, remain uncomfortable emotions—ones to be hidden.
Seen up close, however, hate is not an original force. It is a defense. It does not speak of an absence of love, but of a love that never found a safe place to stay.
Perhaps, then, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.
And perhaps saying that love is more powerful than hate means this: not that it is kinder, but that it has a greater capacity to hold injury without turning it into hardness.
In a society that continues to mistake hate for strength, perhaps the most radical gesture is not choosing love as an abstract ideal.
It is learning to read hate for what it is: a fear that has not yet found a better language.
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Eirini Lavrentiadou is an actress and singer, born in Thessaloniki in 1992. She lives in Florence, where she trained at the city’s Theatre Academy and the Fiesole School of Music. She has performed in classical Greek and European plays, worked with international directors and companies, and appeared in concerts ranging from opera to jazz. She contributes to Florence Daily News as a writer.