The Difference Between Love and Infatuation

Infatuation is just where you want to be with the person. You might feel something inside, but it's more of a want not a need, kind of like an addiction.

Love is different, obviously. This is the kind of thing where thinking about the person you care about can not only bring a smile on your face, but seeing that person smile at you can make you feel like you can jump straight up to the moon, or save you from depths of hell with just a glance. It's basically more than just a feeling of affection, like an emotional attachment. I know this isn't a good description, and maybe the only way to get a good definition is for you to experience it yourself, but this is about the best I can come up with.

 

I tend to believe the opposite. Infatuation seems to be where people go on that they 'need' to be with this person and all and it can even be to the point that you are stalking them etc. Love doesn't stalk or try to 'possess' like that.

People who love each other sometimes let each other go. It is an understood thing that things aren't working out, or one has to move etc. Even if upset at one another, people who genuinely had love for one another can generally continue to move on in their life without hating the other person and can work civilly together, become friends because they were great friends any way etc.

You don't see that behavior in someone who is infatuated. The person is irate if broken up with or a friend has to move etc. They are demanding and ticked off and hate the other person. The other person can be saying they have to go etc and the person who is infatuated will be thinking of him/herself instead of the burden on both people. To me, that is one of the signs of division. Love 'wants' and can have, and can share etc. Obsession is the fact you "need this fix now". Of course, if someone has to 'go' and says so etc and the other person is like 'oh well' and moves on without a thought to someone else, that's another issue.

 

Repliku makes a good point, and I agree with it. Sometimes if you love someone you have to let them go, when it is Love, you want the other person to be happy, even if it means you lose them.

Infatuation is selfish and doesn't allow for that (generally speaking).​

 

<.<

This thread can go on forever with piles of sentimental prose and heartfelt explanations that can only attempt to encapsulate each definition, but will continually fail to capture it all.

Furthering my reiteration above:

Love involves commitment and humility, whereas infatuation does not. There is no aspect of sacrifice and perseverance in infatuation. Infatuation does not give up anything for a relationship; it does not accept shortcomings or failures; it's only about taking, seeing and indulging in what it desires most.

A person who loves can accept that their partner will never be perfect.
A person who infatuates can only perceive their partner as being perfect.

 

That's basically it in a nutshell if you think about it, and the list could go on and on with all the things that the others have posted already.

It's sort of like that poem from Francesco Petrarca, It it's not love, then what is it I feel? it's about a man whose wife has died and he loved her to death, but begins to question it asking if he really did love her would he grieve for so badly... It just goes on describing how he's confused about that one emotion, it's a depressing poem.

The majority of people I know think they're in love, it's a confusing emotion and the line becomes so blurred other people have to point it out to you before you can even begin to realize it.

I really don't have anything to add other than the fact that what Soushirei said hit the nail on the head.

 

Yeah, you're right. I forgot a few of those things. Thanks for correcting me.

 

I agree very much with what Soushirei, Repliku, and Catch the Rain has said, but sometimes I wonder about the different forms of infatuation. It's definition, summarized, would be "foolish love". So is it ever possible for infatuation (aside from mean self-gratification, or acting irrational, etc.) to mean loving someone, but knowing it's a foolish desire? For instance, would you call Shakespere's Romeo and Juliet's love, infatuation? As the two were foolish for falling in love, being from different classes, however true that love may be for them. So do you believe infatuation can also mean love, but just not reasonable, or right?

 

That would be a matter of opinion.

I thought Romeo and Juliet were idiots, for one. Their 'words' may have been passionate, but their relationship had no substance. Their relationship was self-destructive and ended up being the death of the both of them.

It's a matter of opinion, but I hardly consider what they had 'love'. More like delusion of grandeur if you ask me.

 

I would say Romeo and Juliet had a love for each other and all but like movies and novels etc, there's was a 'romanticized' love going off also their deep drive to be with each other not just 'despite' diversity, but perhaps because of it. I can't say I am a romantic at heart, though I of course show the persons I care about that I do in fact love them, which includes time with the family, friends, and relationship person, buying gifts and well doing things together. Romantic love seems to be a spruced up notion of adding drama and flavor to a relationship I tend to think, and if you cannot survive without the drama and flare, zeal etc, then I'd have to say that 'love' can die sooner than a love that is where you accept the other person is a real being with flaws just as you are. Romance is like a stage between 'love' and 'infatuation' driving the force of obsession to the heart, but as long as both people are mutual, it is there.

So to me, I guess I'd have this chart of stages really to include Love, Obsession/Romantic Love, and Infatuation as romantic love seems to be between them both and can either evolve to the highest stage of love or can just become a dying infatuation where once the flame dies, it's over. Romeo and Juliet may have, if they had not had to die, gone on for a while with their things and kept together or sooner or later it would have burnt out. It's hard to say since they were doomed from the beginning.

 

Hmm...Repliku and White_Rook, you both have a point...but alright, maybe my example was the wrong choice. What I just want to know is whether love, if it's true, but just considered foolish...would that also be called infatuation? Say, two lovers, unable to be together because one will die of a disease, but if they hadn't caught that illness, they would've been in love, with a flame that would not die (not in a romantic sense though...). Would that be considered foolish love - infatuation - with the fact that one will die?

 

Well our first encounters with those we're attracted to begin as a form of infatuation. We know nothing else about them except what little contact or communication we had. From there much of the association is physiological: we like how they made us feel, how we feel when we think of them, and more often then not we like how they looked. When we get to what some would think of as love, it becomes about liking how they feel, learning to accept their faults, and associating the physiological reactions with things that are less superficial; we don't just like what we feel, we feel what we like in a sense. Over time we've simply built on top of that first attraction and love is learned after the fact eventually.