The grief no one wants to hear
“In the first three months of 2024, the average number of abortions in the United States was 98,990 per month… This is the story of one.”
That’s how DAX opens the video for “I Hate That I Love You” — not with music, but with numbers. One figure. One fact. And then, one story. His.
Released at the end of February, the song cuts through the noise with a kind of emotional clarity that’s hard to ignore. This isn’t a song built for radio. It’s built from pain. From an experience too personal to package, too common to ignore. DAX puts his heart on the table and leaves it there, bruised and beating.
We don’t know all the details. That’s not the point. What we do know is this: somewhere between love and loss, a decision was made, and DAX is left grappling with the aftermath. The grief here is raw — not just about the end of a relationship, but the loss of a child he never got to hold.
“I hate that I love you,” he screams toward the end, the anger and sorrow spilling over, unfiltered. It’s not a polished kind of hurt. It’s messy. Human. He isn't making a political statement — he’s processing trauma in real time.
This song doesn't claim moral high ground or pretend to offer answers. It’s a portrait of someone falling apart privately and choosing to do it publicly, in the only way they know how. The track plays like a journal entry DAX never meant to publish, but had to — because keeping it in was no longer an option.
The line “You took my child away / He was my fucking son too” is a gut-punch. It arrives after verses steeped in confusion, guilt, and self-destruction. There are no accusations in the legal sense. Just a man who feels erased from a story he believed he was part of.
And maybe that’s why it matters. Songs like this don’t come around often — not ones that talk about abortion from the male perspective without demanding sympathy or control. Instead, DAX gives us heartbreak, plain and ugly. And in doing so, he opens up a conversation that rarely happens: about grief that doesn’t fit cleanly into public narratives. About what it means to lose something you never held.
At its core, “I Hate That I Love You” is not about blame. It’s about the unbearable weight of feeling powerless — when love isn’t enough to change the outcome, when pain refuses to fade, and when someone you once called home becomes a stranger on the other end of a memory.
And through all of it, DAX stays vulnerable. Furious, yes — but also deeply wounded. Still hopeful, somehow. Still clinging to love even when it’s poisoned the well.
This is not a song you walk away from unchanged. It leaves a mark. Just like the kind of love he’s mourning.
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