Is It Love, or Mere Infatuation?

It seems that every creature has a desire to love, and no doubt we all wish to love; the whole world turns upon love — the songs and the poems, the stories and the novels, one and all, speak with its tongue.

A king may give up his throne for love, or a girl flee her parents' house to find it, or a young man roam the quarters of the inhabited earth in search of it; for love is an essential part of our life. And yet how many people know what love is?... We mix it up with money, with sex, or with outward appearance; and we likewise confuse it with our love of ourselves, so that we can scarcely tell it apart from our inclination toward another person.

At times we cannot tell vanity from love, and so the latter remains obscure, beyond our understanding. You may be graduated from the highest institutes and universities and at the same time know nothing of this emotion which forms the axis of your life.

Love or infatuation??

Many people confuse love with infatuation; how then are we to tell the two apart? If you say to me: "I met him two weeks ago, and I am drowned up to my ears in love of him," I judge at once that this is mere infatuation. For love needs a long time to grow; it needs good soil, and care, and then time, before it comes into being. Neither love nor flowers leap to perfection between one night and its morning.

You feel infatuation for a time, and quickly lose the feeling of it; but love stays with you at every hour, and its growth depends on the harmony of relations between the two persons. It does not live by the roadside, for us to pluck up when we please; it is the fruit of effort, of care, and of self-denial.

Beauty is the secret of infatuation, but it does not suffice for the life of love, which

rests upon many foundations and grows out of things exchanged between the lovers. It is more than a physical attraction, though that be present. For true love to take firm hold, it needs roots of common interests, a completing of the personality, and a capacity for give and take; whereas the whole provision of infatuation rests on physical attraction, and it does not live out the month, while love endures the whole of a lifetime, and the passing of the days only adds to its firmness.

You may persuade yourself that you love a man when in truth you love love! You build with your imagination your castle of dreams, and drape over the first person who happens across your path a splendid new robe of fancy; and here you love only the robe, the person being but a symbol of your longing "for love." One thinker has said: "The lover creates what he worships, then worships what he has created."

Do you love yourself, or the man? A lady said: "I love bananas." But if the poor banana could speak, it would by no means return her the feeling; on the contrary, it would see itself stripped of everything useful to its being, with what remains falling to the refuse basket. Is this love? The truth that lady intends is not love of the banana, but love of the satisfaction the banana provides. And so does infatuation lead us to love a person not for himself, but for what he can give us. True love is fulfilled in the partner's happiness, while infatuation lasts only so long as there is satisfaction, and the moment that is gone, the relation goes its way to the wastebasket.

Now we can make clear the character of love: it is a state between two persons who have many things in common, and exchanged ideas and tastes, and like circumstances; so that when they share in these, they are drawn together by a firm bond of friendship. If you think the matter over well, you will understand why there is no such thing as what they call love at first sight, and you will know what pains must be taken to obtain love; and thereby you will distinguish between ripened love and passing infatuation. For love is a reality we create, and it does not come to us of itself; therefore it is rare, and a firm foundation of the strong personality.