Class, take out your notebooks and write it fifty times, until it sinks in: infatuation is not love, infatuation is not love, infatuation is n... fine, you get the principle.
You become infatuated with someone who triggers a very strong arousal in you.
You love someone who causes you to go through a very significant process with yourself.
Let's put it another way:
Infatuation is a state where someone gives you something you badly want right now.
Love is a state where someone apparently has the potential to give you something you will badly need in the future.
And wait — before you mutter something rude and give up on this article — I forgot to tell you the most important reason infatuation is not love.
Infatuation can be one-sided. Love usually cannot.
Let me explain.
Someone can be infatuated with you up to her ears — develop red-hot feelings and an almost painful longing — and you will never know. It happens. How many times did it happen to us in high school, while the other person had no idea we felt that way?
Follow that thread, because it points at the sharpest difference between the two states.
Infatuation is something that happens to YOU. Love is something that happens to the TWO OF YOU.
When you are infatuated with someone, the entire relationship takes place inside your head, between you and yourself. Even if she happily welcomes your attention — you are not in love with her. You are in love with an exaggerated, glowing version of her that you built in your mind.
You are running the relationship with the ideal image of your partner, not with the partner herself.
And the connection between those two women is often quite loose — as you discover in the first real lovers' quarrel.
Then the sky falls. You're stunned: "How can he be like this? I was sure he... I was convinced he would never..." (fill in the blanks from your most recent heartbreak)
That moment is a critical junction.
You can take offense and leave.
Or you can take a long, realistic look at the actual person in front of you — and try to build love with them.
So let's end like a good pop song and repeat the chorus:
Infatuation is not love. Sorry.
Enjoy the first. Search for the second.
finally, one for the road:
infatuation is merely evolution's trick of keeping us together long enough so we can really get to know each other [and hopefully develop a genuine loving bond]