Infatuation

Love versus infatuation

Classically, infatuation is said to be contrasted with love, in a "love versus infatuation" distinction. In this type of distinction, the implication is that infatuation is supposedly "counterfeit", or "often mistaken" for love. Love might be described as "true" love, "mature" love, "real", or "realistic" love.

Features of the two may be presented as dichotomous, for example:

• Infatuation is based in fantasy, whereas love is based in reality.
• Infatuation is shallow, whereas love is deep.
• Infatuation is intense while a relationship is new, whereas love develops over time.
• Infatuation is obsessive, whereas love is not.
• Infatuation is urgent and anxious, whereas love is calm and secure.
• Infatuation is consuming or exhausting, whereas love is energizing or healthy.
• Infatuation makes one a passive victim of its spell, whereas love entails active appreciation.

The "love versus infatuation" distinction (where only one kind or degree of love is supposedly "true") has been critiqued as failing to acknowledge the full possible range of love experiences, and being largely semantic, because infatuation corresponds to passionate love (or being in love), which is regarded as a basic type of love among numerous researchers.

Another type of distinction contrasts being "in love" (as a state one endures) with love as concern for another (loving as an act).

Conceptual research history

In 1949, Albert Ellis published a research survey of young women, which found they reported differences when asked about their experience of infatuation and falling in love. For example, women reported being first infatuated at a younger median age (12) than falling in love (17), reported more adolescent infatuations than loves, and more often reported being infatuated with more than one man at a time (58%) versus being in love (25%). Infatuations were also reportedly shorter than loves, with the median girl reporting infatuation remaining for about six weeks, and being in love for about 36 weeks. Only 3% stated their infatuations lasted more than a year, while 24% stated their loves lasted more than a year.

Ellis concludes that while it is tempting to think that infatuations may therefore be defined as being "relatively brief, light, and varietist" compared to loves, another explanation is that subjects may have consciously or unconsciously thought of their lighter and briefer loves as "infatuations", as an ego defense, while reserving "love" for longer, stronger involvements. Some evidence of this is the fact that subjects tended to identify their more recent involvements as "love" rather than "infatuation". The difference between infatuation and love might therefore be relative to how one's perception changes of past relationships as one gets older.

In 1961, Ellis later wrote than he found this use of "infatuation" among his survey respondents to be "confused" and "quite at variance" with a dictionary definition of infatuation (involving "extravagant passion")—suggesting the word actually came to lose its original meaning. Ellis believes this occurred because monogamy is so enforced through social norms (where "true" love is defined as enduring, and conflated with marriage) that individuals came to label virtually all of their past involvements as "infatuation", to avoid feelings of shame over falling in love as frequently as they did. According to Ellis, this is a conceptual error, and there is no such thing as "true" love. Instead, the experience of love encompasses innumerable differences in kind and degree, all of which are "true" as long as they are still occurring.

On the basis of this observation, that the distinction being made is seemingly semantic, the researcher Elaine Hatfield later argued that infatuation is the same as what she calls "passionate love". Passionate love is "a state of intense longing for union with another", contrasted with companionate love, "the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined". In contrast to infatuation, companionate love is the one sometimes labeled "true love", or compared to secure attachment.

According to Hatfield, in 1978:

The solution to the love-versus-infatuation riddle seems to be, quite simply, that there is no difference. Psychologists have become increasingly skeptical that passionate love and infatuation differ in any way—at the time one is experiencing them.

Hatfield says that "romantic love" might be used by lovers for relationships which are still in progress, and "infatuation" for those which become terminated; the distinction might therefore be only identifiable in hindsight. Furthermore, when parents or friends say somebody is "just infatuated", they are actually just expressing disapproval.

Among researchers, it became generally accepted that passionate and companionate love are the only two important types of love to distinguish, despite subsuming the differences of other, more precise taxonomies. Modern research has often used terms like "infatuation", "passionate love", "being in love" and "limerence" interchangeably, despite their other connotations. "Romantic love" might be a further synonym for this concept, but its cultural history also makes it hard to define.

A further distinction emerged in the 2000s that passionate love (or infatuation) is different from sexual desire. Later research also discovered that love feelings can actually take on a form which lacks the obsessional features of infatuation or limerence, as in the phenomenon of long-term intense romantic love which involved study participants who claimed to be "madly in love" but had been married on average for 21 years.

Youth

Adolescents often make people an object of extravagant, short-lived passion or temporary love.

The possible effects of infatuation and love relationships on the academic behaviour of adolescent students were examined in research. The outcome shows that many participants had distraction, stress, and poor academic performance as a result of love relationships and infatuation. Furthermore, the findings highlighted that this has a detrimental effect on learning behaviour among teenagers who are in romantic or infatuated relationships.

Types

Robert Brown lists three types of infatuation (of which he says there are various):

1. In the first, as in falling in love, a blind desire overtakes the individual, from forces of their own character which the infatuated person is unaware of, overriding their better judgment or insight.
2. In the second, which is related to the first, the infatuated individual is compelled to desire or crave an object of love which they consider unworthy, and prefer not to want or love. In this case, their evaluative judgment may be sound, but the craving is unaffected.
3. In the third, the infatuated individual exhibits poor judgment and evaluation because of ignorance and recklessness.

Other infatuations

Transference

In psychoanalysis, a sign that the method is taking hold is "the initial infatuation to be observed at the beginning of treatment", the beginning of transference. The patient, in Freud's words, "develops a special interest in the person of the doctor ... never tires in his home of praising the doctor and of extolling ever new qualities in him".

What occurs, "it is usually maintained ... is a sort of false love, a shadow of love". However, psychoanalyst Janet Malcolm claims that it is wrong to convince the patient "that their love is an illusion ... that it's not you she loves. Freud was off base when he wrote that. It is you. Who else could it be?"

Intellectual infatuation

For example Jung's initial "'unconditional devotion' to Freud's theories and his 'no less unconditional veneration' of Freud's person" was seen at the time by both men as a "quasi-religious infatuation"; while Freud in turn was "very attracted by Jung's personality", perhaps "saw in Jung an idealized version of himself": they were "intellectually infatuated with one another".

Collective infatuation

But there are also collective infatuations. Thus, for instance, "the recent intellectual infatuation with structuralism and post-structuralism" arguably lasted at least until "September 11 ended intellectual infatuation with postmodernism" as a whole.

Literary depictions

Shakespeare's sonnets have been described by R. P. Blackmur as "a poetics for infatuation", dominated by infatuation as a theme: "its initiation, cultivation, and history, together with its peaks of triumph and devastation".

Ivan Turgenev's novella First Love is based on the trauma of Turgenev's own adolescent infatuation with a neighbor girl, who was slightly older than him—and turned out to be having an affair with his father.