Infatuation at First Sight
Ahh… love. That all-consuming, tidal wave of emotion. You anticipate their texts longingly. You can’t eat as you reminisce about how delicious it feels to be in their arms. You can’t focus on anything but them. Nobody “gets” you the way they do. It’s as if you’ve known each other since birth. This is it. You’ve finally found “the one”!
But, with these alluring pleasures comes a ghastly backlash. They forget to call, they’re in a bad mood, they express their doubts about the relationship, and you obsess over whether it’s your fault as you writhe in agony for days. But, in spite of the occasional pain and uncertainty, the sheer magnitude of emotion just proves how much you love each other — or so you believe!
When you’re watching romantic shows or movies, most of what you see is infatuation – people meeting and having an immediate physical attraction. Wrongly, they call it love.
Most children and teens experience infatuation and mistake it for love, and many adults are also guilty of this. Love and infatuation are both intense emotions that one feels for another person. They sound wonderful, but it becomes a big problem when the differences in the actuality of love and final outcome are not understood.
Due to the lexis of the English language, people rarely distinguish between the different kinds of love. In the Greek language, there are numerous individual definitions for the word “love.” The most commonly known are eros, sexual love, and agape, selfless love.
Infatuation (or “lust”) is characterised by urgency, intensity, anxiety, and the reckless abandonment of what was once valued. It usually occurs at the beginning of relationship when attraction is motivated by the other person's physical or mental attributes such as height, beauty, intelligence, and/or money.
Love (or “compatibility”) is an intense feeling of affection, characterised by loyalty, confidence, sacrifice and work. When you truly love someone, you see both the good and the bad, but love them anyway. Real love doesn’t depend on a partner doing something right or approving of you. Love complements each partner’s strengths, accepts the weaknesses, and remains steady in the face of challenges.
Love is about feeling connected with them in a way that doesn’t allow for insecurity. It’s real. It’s deep. It’s mature.
As poet Thomas Merton wrote, “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we only have the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
Infatuation is shallow and selfish. You see your partner through a haze of unrealistic expectation, based entirely on who you imagine them to be. You fall in love with the projection that you made for your partner. If things go less than perfectly, you feel like things have gone very wrong and you don’t know what to do.
Psychologist Robert Sternberg, Professor of Human Development at Cornell University, defines infatuation as passion without intimacy or commitment. Just because feelings are intensely emotional doesn’t mean that they are right. Intense emotion is a deceiver, causing more torment than pleasure. Romeo and Juliet provide the ultimate example of this.
Many relationships break up is because there is no compatibility or commitment. How else can the high divorce rate in Australia be explained? 48, 517 divorces were granted in 2015 – 47.5% of which involved children. This suggests that when a relationship is established through infatuation, it takes compatible commitment to sustain it.
Psychologist and author the book Love and Limerence: the Experience of Being in Love, Dorothy Tennov, shared that the duration of infatuation typically lasts at most “between approximately 18 months and three years.”
Infatuation is short-lived and lusts over immediate gratification, later leaving unannounced. Love doesn’t work that way. Love craves a long-lasting deeper connection, only growing more powerful over time. You enjoy the process of getting to know your partner and building your relationship with him/her one step at a time.
Love doesn’t ask for you to contribute your half into the relationship. Rather, it demands that both partners put in 100%. Only then you can get through almost anything, because there will always be 100% effort put into the relationship.
Sorry, but there’s no such thing as “love at first sight.”
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http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/3310.0