I hate coffee. There is no ambiguity on this point, there is nothing about the beverage that I enjoy. I hate the taste, I hate the smell, and I even find the color vaguely unpleasant. If offered, I will politely turn it down, because I personally regard it as the worst beverage known to man.
This opinion is not shared by everyone, and I would never dream of taking coffee away from those who enjoy it. I might not understand them, but they don't understand me either. In an ideal world, the coffee haters and the coffee lovers can live in harmony, because it's normally quite easy to avoid coffee. Shops tend to stock a variety of drinks, and if all else fails water is usually on tap. We should be able to live in a world where it's just as easy for me to avoid the vile liquid as it is for those who enjoy it to get their fix.
Yet, oddly, this is not the case, because people don't seem to understand that there is no grey area here. I am not someone who will enjoy coffee, but many enthusiasts of the beverage remain convinced that I haven't drank the right coffee, or that there is some way to trojan horse coffee into my system and make me see the error of my ways. This will not happen, but they keep trying, and it's beginning to get on my nerves.
There has been an odd increase in people trying to convince me to take a sip of the stuff, even though it's akin to convincing an arachnophobe to visit a spider museum. Realizing that straight up coffee will not work, they have begun to try other, more complicated flavored coffee, or perhaps the iced form of the beverage. Coffee, they are convinced, is universally loved, so clearly there is some form that I must enjoy. When I enjoy none of it, they are inexplicably surprised. Yet, even though I have never enjoyed it, they still make an attempt, repeatedly trying to convince me to take a drink of something I know I will loathe because I absolutely despise one of the key ingredients.
The biggest lie perpetuated in these attempts is "you can't even taste the coffee!" For one, I can taste it, and it's just as awful as it always has been. Two, they assume that because they find any coffee flavor to be a delightful surprise that this will garner a similar reaction from someone who hates it. This is not the case, of course, and every time I've given in to the pressure and tried their coffee-based drink I've had to suppress the urge to vomit. They act surprised that someone who says they hate coffee and has hated coffee for as long as they knew him has continued to hate coffee. It's basic pattern recognition, and not a complicated one at that. I have not liked coffee in any previous permutation, so I will not like coffee in ice, in some sort of complicated caramel latte thing, or even baked into a cake.
My hatred of coffee is like a lot of personality quirks people have, it's just another component of who I am. Instead of trying to change this, people need to realize I'm very happy to hate coffee, and we can move on, each drinking something different. It's like a lot of things in life. Sometimes people just have different views, different desires and different needs. In most cases, there is no harm to these differences, and pressure to change just causes frustration. We don't need to agree on everything to get along.
