Infatuation or Real Love?

Infatuation is a temporary form of madness. It is also the about the most wonderful, amazing, incredibly good feeling we can have.

Real Love is the 'bundle' of feelings you accumulate by sharing positive, strongly emotional experiences with your partner. Infatuation makes your feelings so intense that a dance, a song, a moment, a touch, a kiss, can all become incredibly powerful memories. Memories of feelings created during experiences that you shared with your partner

Infatuation feels like love, looks like love, and is very commonly mistaken for love — but infatuation isn't love. We know it can't be love, because it always fades away and doesn’t come back — with the same person. Whereas love remains after infatuation disappears.

Infatuation feels so good that some people even become serial infatuators, jumping from partner to partner, always seeking the high that infatuation brings.

(To learn more about real love, read Ridiculously Simple Secrets To A Lasting Relationship.)

Infatuation makes even insignificant things "magical"

Infatuation does powerful, magical things. Infatuation 'magnifies' the intensity of feelings you get from shared experiences with your partner. Real love is the sum of the positive bonds you build up from shared positive experiences with your partner. The size of the good feeling is intensified, or 'magnified' by the madness of infatuation.

Infatuation blinds you to your partners human-ness

Infatuation is a form of madness, because you lose touch with reality. Eventually, you're going to realize that your partner isn't the most perfect, beautiful or handsome, and loving person in the whole world. You'll see that your partner is really just a person with the normal number of flaws and idiosyncrasies. While you're infatuated, however, you're 'blind' to your partner's faults, weaknesses, and failings. It seems your partner is perfect in so many ways.

Infatuation makes you 'dumb' and 'deaf' too

Infatuation makes you 'dumb' because you lose touch with things that are really important to you in your life: things like school, your parents and family, your friends, your career, your goals, your values, and much more. Life becomes temporarily all about your partner and those other things seem to fade in importance. Infatuation makes you 'deaf' to the opinions and observations of family and friends who care a great deal about you.

Infatuation always goes away. While it seems painful at the time, it's a good thing that the madness fades away and reality returns. No one could go through life with the intensity of focus infatuation brings. During infatuation, you could talk all night. You can survive with almost no sleep. You can ignore your responsibilities. You may pay no attention to your health.

Not everybody gets infatuated with their partner. You can have a wonderful life-long, bonded relationship with your partner without ever having been infatuated. If you don't know or realize what infatuation is, you can make some very big mistakes.

Jeanette

Jeanette was happily married, raising a family, but had never felt the madness of infatuation with her husband. So, when she began to feel infatuated with a coworker, she thought that finally, she had found her true love, and she assumed she must have missed this 'wonderful' true love in her marriage.

Poor Jeanette simply didn't understand what infatuation was. She didn't realize that what she had with her husband was true love, and what she had with her coworker was simply infatuation that would soon fade away.

Alicia

Alicia didn't realize that infatuation would fade away, and when it did a few months before her wedding, she thought she had fallen out of love with her fiancé. She got cold feet and canceled her engagement. She had simply begun to see him as a real person, not the unreal person she imagined under the influence of infatuation.

Infatuation and You

May you have the good fortune to experience infatuation with your partner. May you cherish the incredibly intense memories of shared bonding experiences you have while infatuated.

May you wisely accept the return of reality and lovingly accept that your partner is simply a person with all the strengths and failings of any normal human.

While bonded with your partner, may you never experience the madness of infatuation again — with someone else. And, if you do, may you turn away, run with the wind, and know that infatuation with another person is madness gone astray.

May you treasure, nourish and grow the 'bundle' of loving feelings you have for your partner that are the lifelong evidence of real love.

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