What is the Difference Between Infatuation and Love?
It can be sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between infatuation and love. This is especially true at the beginning of a relationship. It is easy to think that you have found true love as the intensity of infatuation takes over your life. Love, however, rarely comes on suddenly. It is a slow, gradual process that can only happen after the rush of infatuation starts to ebb.
Infatuation describes the intense range of feelings present at the beginning of most relationships; sweaty palms, rapidly beating heart, butterflies in the stomach. The world is a better, more beautiful place because object of your affection is with you. Every time you touch is thrilling, you remember every conversation, and your thoughts revolve around them. In more common terms, this is a crush. Crushes are a very real, normal part of human life. Everyone experiences at least one crush at some point or another in their lives.
Infatuation is caused by a chemical reaction in the body. The hormones released accounts for some of the feelings of elation. In truth, you are "high" on dopamine. This is an important evolutionary response to meeting a potential future mate. These hormones assure that two people will spend enough time together to possibly produce children, thus ensuring the survival of the species.
Love, on the other hand, is a calmer, more mature feeling. It is a sense of stability. Love is still exciting, at times. It can change day-to-day. Love takes work. The feelings are not supported by the highs of hormones, but by a shared love and respect for each other. Love is what exists after infatuation fades, if you are lucky.
Infatuation and love are different in many ways. While both result in pleasant feelings, the feeling of infatuation is more intense than the feeling of love. Love may not be as intense, but it is usually a much deeper emotion. Relationships that start as infatuation can mature into love.
One of the biggest differences between infatuation and love is how long each can last for. Infatuation can last, at most, several months before it starts to fade. Love, on the other hand, is capable of lasting fifty years or more, if both people in the relationship work for it. Infatuation is almost effortless. Anything put into the relationship is because you want to. Everything you do for the other person brings great pleasure for you, too. This isn’t always the case in love. You do things that you don’t want to do, things that you will get no pleasure from, because it is the fair thing to do. Love is about compromise.
Infatuation and love are both different in the amount of unpleasant tension that is part of the relationship some days. Infatuation discourages any real disagreements from taking place. You both are on your best behavior during all the time you spend together. Anything that could cause a discrepancy to the idea of a perfect relationship is avoided. Everything is perfect, and no one wants to mess that up.
Love allows people to be who they really are. While arguments aren’t encouraged, they happen. Sometimes they happen a lot, especially in times of stress. Love is admitting that your partner has faults, and so do you, but that is okay. You have realistic expectations of each other. Love is accepting.
Infatuation and love are two separate emotions, and there are many differences between them. They are, however, similar in some ways. Infatuation is like a shiny new pair of dress shoes, where as love is the comfy old sneakers you’ve had for years. Infatuation is fun, while it lasts. Eventually, though, the night out ends, and you slip into the sneakers that fit perfectly, even if they are starting to give at the seams and the tread is worn out. This is what happens in relationships. As the brilliance of infatuation fades, couples move into a contented place where, even if there are problems, they know they can depend on one another to provide the love and support they need. That is the difference between infatuation and love.
Why Do They Say You Love from the Heart?
For many modern people, it’s difficult to understand why you would love from the heart, when we are taught from early childhood that the brain is where our essence seems to reside. There are a few reasons why it makes sense to love from the heart, both historical and practical.
As with many of our common beliefs, a better understanding of why we love from the heart requires looking far back in history to our ancestors in Ancient Greece. They believed that the heart was the seat of everything, in much the same way we believe our brain is the seat of everything about us. Aristotle taught that the heart controlled all reason, our emotion, and even our day to day thoughts. So for an ancient Greek like Aristotle, it would only make sense to love from the heart. Loving from the brain for him would have felt much like loving from the kidneys might to us.
From Aristotle, the teaching of the heart as the place of our emotions passed on the Romans. The physician Galen, who laid the groundwork for a great deal of later medicine in the West, had an entire theory of a circulatory system. In this theory, the heart was said to be where emotions took place, while rational thought took place in the brain, and passions originated in the liver.
The Egyptians also placed a great deal of importance on the heart as an organ, and many of them likely would also have understood what it was to love from the heart. In Egyptian mythology, the heart was said to contain some vital essence of the soul, such that at death it was weighed against a feather to decide if a person would go on to paradise.
We have been taught so strongly that the brain is where everything about us takes place, that it’s difficult to imagine, in a literal sense, love from the heart. But when we think about it, most of our emotions are associated with our other organs in common speech. We get butterflies in our stomach when we’re nervous, feel a sense of something in our gut, and deep pain wrenches our hearts from our breasts. This all makes sense, if you look a bit more deeply at physiological responses to emotion, and the fact that we feel them most acutely in organs other than our brains.
Indeed, to understand love from the heart, one need look no further than very basic physiology that most of us have likely experienced personally, and which the Greeks themselves likely based their own beliefs on. The state of excitement, a state definitely connected to both love and sexual attraction, is felt first and foremost in the heart. As the body prepares for something exciting, the heart rate increases to increase blood flow throughout the body. The racing of the heart, more than any thoughts that might cross through the brain, or rumbling in the stomach, is undoubtedly what has forever associated that organ as the organ of love.
What are Love Languages?
Dr. Gary Chapman, a Christian family counselor and author, has developed a relationship-building program called the 5 love languages. Love languages are defined as verbal and non-verbal communications between couples which improve the mental and physical well-being of both partners. These mutual expressions and actions help to build up a nurturing environment in which couples can improve both their emotional and physical intimacy levels.
The first of the five love languages includes words of affirmation. These words go far beyond a perfunctory "I love you" ritual, and include specific recognition of a partner's contributions to the relationship or the household or a career. The point of the exercise is to provide enough positive affirmation of a partner's self-worth to motivate that person towards even more personal growth. By telling a partner or friend or co-worker how much you appreciate his or her efforts, you are speaking in a language he or she can understand.
The second of the five love languages involves spending quality time with a loved one. This means setting aside a meaningful amount of personal time in which the friend or partner receives your complete and undivided attention. The idea is to have substantial conversations with another person, or take the time to indulge in a mutual interest, such as a movie or a hobby. Quality time can build up intimacy and trust in any relationship, romantic or otherwise.
Receiving gifts is the third component of Chapman's love languages. Almost everyone enjoys receiving personalized gifts from loved ones, and a surprise gift can be even more special. The ritual surrounding the presentation of a gift is often as satisfying as the gift itself. Some gifts are not necessarily tangible, but a spouse or friend can contribute a gift of time or a gift of their unique talents.
The fourth of the five love languages involves acts of service. A partner may volunteer to clean the house before the other partner returns home from work. A husband may decide to convert a garage into a craft room so his wife can pursue her interests and hobbies. The most important idea behind an act of services is that it must be unconditional and free of ulterior motives. A quid pro quo arrangement is not considered a true act of service.
The final element of the five love languages is physical touch. This is not limited to intimate touching of a romantic or sexual nature, but basic physical contact between two people. A back rub following a hard day at work would be an example of a positive expression of love language. A spouse may spontaneously scratch the other's back, or a father may give his son an affectionate pat on the shoulder after a good sports play. The point of physical touch is to satisfy the basic human need for close contact with others. People who feel isolated from others physically may begin to feel isolated on other levels as well.
Experiments with prairie voles have shown that, when the gene for oxytocin is removed, this traditionally monogamous species loses its tendency for pair bonding completely. Scientists strongly speculate the same would happen for humans if oxytocin were blocked. Romantic love may be dependent on just a single brain chemical.
In males, vasopressin is also present, playing similar roles to oxytocin. It is thought that the period of oxytocin release is strongest in the first 18 months of romantic love, and trails off afterwards, though never vanishes completely. Sometimes oxytocin is whimsically called "the cuddle hormone".
Besides romantic love, oxytocin has also been implicated in social bonds and trust in general. Synthetic oxytocin is available and some scientists have suggested it could be a sort of "social Viagra," and indeed experiments have shown that people are more trusting while under the influence of nasally administered oxytocin. Because it is implicated in both trust and love, some scientists have cautioned it could be used as a date rape drug. Like other neurotransmitters, oxytocin may be regarded as a "natural drug" — a substance, when released in the brain, which causes us to act differently, but is commonly accepted in human society because it has been around for millions of years.
Oxytocin also causes females to exhibit more mother-like behavior. This has mainly been observed in rats, but it is suspected the psychochemical response is the same in humans. The difference between someone who is considered your "type" for romantic love and someone who isn't is probably that the presence of one person causes the release of oxytocin and one person doesn't. This is the neurochemical basis underlying romantic love.
Dopamine, the neurotransmitter underlying pleasure in general, also plays a part in romantic love, and is released from environmental triggers from a good conversation to a kiss on the lips.
Is love addictive?
Could Shakespeare have had the addictive nature of love in mind when he wrote Romeo and Juliet? It represents love addiction to the extreme. Two teens commit suicide because they assume they cannot live without each other. The idea of love being addictive, so that it results in irrational, unhappy behaviors of a variety of kinds, continues today. There are certainly mental health professionals and organizations like Love Addicts Anonymous that contend love, or rather certain types of relationship behavior, are addictive in nature.
Many psychotherapists suggest that people take a number of unresolved and unconscious issues from early childhood and remake their partners into who they want to see, or require partners to treat them in specific ways to reinforce unconscious ways of doing things. The degree to which deeply unconscious strategies for living were problematic might determine the extent of healthiness in adult relationships. Misguided, hurtful ideas about love may turn into troubled ways of viewing what a relationship must be, and this could be acted out by people many times over.
The love addict may be addicted to sex, to making sure a relationship is stormy and full of argument, to not being able to see that relationships with some people are always harmful, to doing everything for partners in the hopes they will retain them, or to abusive partners. Other love addicts fall in love with inaccessible people to avoid relationships or they might ruin every relationship when it gets to a certain point. All of this may spring from mistaken and probably unconscious ideas about how love is supposed to work and from acting out ways to disguise deep inadequacies, pain, and anger originating from childhood.
Some argue that the term, love, should not be used in this form of addiction. Love implies a mature relational stance with another person: both people are viewed as equal, expectations are for good and bad times, and the couple devotes time to growing and sharing in a relationship. This relationship is not everything in the world, but a part of each partner’s life. Love addicts do not share this mature view and though they may have attachment to partners, the relationship may be out of perspective and the person feels like there can be no life without it, much like Romeo and Juliet. The addict has a relationship that may be based in fear and other unconscious processes, instead of in love, but some people are able to address and amend this while retaining partners.
Methods for pursuing an end to addictive love are to participate in twelve-step or other groups devoted to love addiction or to pursue couples and/or individual therapy. Some people explore both paths, finding methods for uncovering motives that have harmed rather than helped relationships. When successful, such people may be love addicts no longer, but might instead be able to pursue true love relationships.
Many psychotherapists suggest that people take a number of unresolved and unconscious issues from early childhood and remake their partners into who they want to see, or require partners to treat them in specific ways to reinforce unconscious ways of doing things. The degree to which deeply unconscious strategies for living were problematic might determine the extent of healthiness in adult relationships. Misguided, hurtful ideas about love may turn into troubled ways of viewing what a relationship must be, and this could be acted out by people many times over.
The love addict may be addicted to sex, to making sure a relationship is stormy and full of argument, to not being able to see that relationships with some people are always harmful, to doing everything for partners in the hopes they will retain them, or to abusive partners. Other love addicts fall in love with inaccessible people to avoid relationships or they might ruin every relationship when it gets to a certain point. All of this may spring from mistaken and probably unconscious ideas about how love is supposed to work and from acting out ways to disguise deep inadequacies, pain, and anger originating from childhood.
Some argue that the term, love, should not be used in this form of addiction. Love implies a mature relational stance with another person: both people are viewed as equal, expectations are for good and bad times, and the couple devotes time to growing and sharing in a relationship. This relationship is not everything in the world, but a part of each partner’s life. Love addicts do not share this mature view and though they may have attachment to partners, the relationship may be out of perspective and the person feels like there can be no life without it, much like Romeo and Juliet. The addict has a relationship that may be based in fear and other unconscious processes, instead of in love, but some people are able to address and amend this while retaining partners.
Methods for pursuing an end to addictive love are to participate in twelve-step or other groups devoted to love addiction or to pursue couples and/or individual therapy. Some people explore both paths, finding methods for uncovering motives that have harmed rather than helped relationships. When successful, such people may be love addicts no longer, but might instead be able to pursue true love relationships.
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