Discerning Between Love & Infatuation

[Forum Administrator]

12 Tests to Discern Between Love and Infatuation
From the book Love, Sex & Lasting Relationships
by Chip Ingram


1. The Test of Time
Love benefits and grows through time; infatuation ebbs and diminishes with time. Infatuation may come suddenly. We find ourselves thinking, "Boom! I'm in love." That's actually infatuation. We probably ought to make an effort to avoid speaking about "falling in love." We can fall into infatuation, we can fall into lust, but we most truthfully grow into love. Love develops out of relationship and caring and core personal character traits, not our instant impression or perception of another person. Infatuation can explode at any moment, but real love takes time. More than one wise person has advised not to declare love until a reasonable amount of time has passed.

2. The Test of Knowledge
Love grows out of an appraisal of all the known characteristics of the other person. Infatuation may grow out of an acquaintance with only one of these characteristics known about the other person. Something about the way that person looks or the way he or she functions in a certain role may give you a very distorted idea of their full character. You may not even know the other person. Frankly, a glance or a chance meeting can act as a kind of trigger that sets off the chemicals.
Infatuation lives in a make-believe world where the object of our affection is perfect, flawless, and completely devoted to us. Infatuation is happy to know very little. Love longs to know well. Love wants to study the other person's needs, desires, dreams, and hopes because it wants to do everything to make them a reality. Love is interested, not in what it can get, but in what it can give. The development of a relationship ought to be like an undergraduate degree in which the other person becomes a multifaceted and fascinating study. Marriage, then, becomes a lifelong pursuit of a Ph.D. in knowing and understanding your spouse.

3. The Test of Focus
Genuine love is other-person centered. Infatuation is self-centered. You know what infatuated people are all caught up with? Themselves. I watched a roommate in college discover the power of infatuation for the first time. The Greeks were right - he went a little insane.
Every time we talked it was about how he was going to look, how he was going to come off, what kind of impression he was going to make. I admit I had my own set of relational dysfunctions, but even I could see (infatuation is almost always more obvious in someone else's life) that he was suffering from some kind of fever or virus. What was his focus? Himself. That's not love; that's chemical exchanges of the brain. Infatuation.
In your most important relationships, to what degree is your attention focused on what you are receiving from them and to what degree is your attention focused on meeting the other's needs? Do you think about how you're going to look and feel in the relationship, or about what you can do to make that person look and feel great?

4. The Test of Singularity
Genuine love is focused on only one person. An infatuated individual may be "in love" with two or more persons simultaneously. The great majority of affairs rarely occur solely on the basis of physical attraction. They usually start out with a little chemistry during a time of vulnerability. But families break up because very good, godly people simply haven't learned what to do in a situation where it suddenly feels so good to get some of the eros out. They confuse infatuation with love and make foolish decisions.
The life cycle of infatuation is nine to eighteen months. Then all those breathless and wonderful feelings leave, and you're stuck with another person with the same kinds of needs that you have. That person knows you can't be trusted because you left your last mate. You know you can't really trust them because, down deep, you're afraid of experiencing the kind of betrayal that you inflicted on someone else. What's left are two unhappy people struggling with character flaws. If you don't know the difference between infatuation and love, you'll destroy others' loves and your own.

5. The Test of Security
Genuine love requires and fosters a sense of security and feelings of trust. An infatuated individual seems to have a blind sense of security, based upon wishful thinking rather than careful consideration; infatuation is blind to problems. Or he or she may have a sense of insecurity that is sometimes expressed as jealousy. Security grows and flows out of deep awareness of the other person's character, values, and track record. You know who he or she really is. And when you know who they really are, you trust them. You are not jealous because you know their heart is yours. Jealousy is often a sign of a lack of trust, and a lack of trust is a sign of infatuation in real life.

6. The Test of Work
An individual in love works for the other person, for his or her mutual benefit. By contrast, an infatuated person loses his or her ambition, appetite, and interest in everyday affairs. A woman in love may study to make her husband proud. A man in love may have his ambitions spurred on by planning and saving for the future together. Partners in genuine love may daydream about the potential of their relationship, but their daydreams are reasonably attained. People in infatuation only think of their own misery. They often daydream of unrealistic objectives and ideals that neither they nor their partner could ever actually attain. Sometimes the dreams become substitutes for reality and each individual lives in a world of his or her own imagination.

7. The Test of Problem Solving
A couple in love faces problems frankly and tries to solve them. Infatuated people tend to disregard or try to ignore problems. If there are barriers to getting married for a couple in love, those barriers are approached and removed. The barriers that cannot be removed may be circumvented with knowledge. They do not go into marriage blindly. They handle problems with clear, shared decisions. On the other hand, friends and family may be astonished at the foolishness and blindness of infatuated people.
Genuine love, contrary to popular belief, isn't blind. It sees very clearly. Infatuation, on the other side, exists almost completely in the dark.

8. The Test of Distance
Love knows the importance of distance. Infatuation imagines love to be intense closeness, 24/7, all the time. I often counsel those who are dating to go on a short-term mission trip or take on a project that will require them to work alone. If circumstances require you to be temporarily separated from the one you love, that will teach you a lot about the quality of your relationship. In terms of distance, if you're in a long-term relationship right now and you call each other three, four, or five times a day, or you just have to see each other every day, that's not a good sign. That means you're trying to keep the chemicals alive. If there is not a sense of separateness, a distinct life, relationships with other people, and healthy balance, then the relationship is probably a lot more infatuation than it is love.

9. The Test of Physical Attraction
Physical attraction is a relatively small part of genuine love, but it is the central focus of infatuation. Now don't read "small part" to mean "not a part" in what I just stated. If your heart doesn't skip a beat now and then and you don't feel real attraction for you mate or the person you plan to marry, I'd call that a problem. Let's not make genuine love so spiritual that we deny reality and God's Word. Sexual attraction definitely has a part in love.
In contrast, I've noticed an important characteristic about couples in genuine love. For them, any physical contract they have tends to have special meaning as well as pleasure. Couples often communicate volumes through looks. These tend to express what they feel toward each other. In infatuation, direct, continual physical contact tends to be an end in and of itself. Time together requires only pleasurable experiences. Infatuation tends to produce a relationship that attempts to exist on the emotional equivalent of a continual sugar rush.

10. The Test of Affection
In love affection is expressed later in the relationship, involving the external expression of the physical attraction we just described. In infatuation affection is expressed earlier, sometimes at the very beginning. Affection tends to push toward greater and greater physical intimacy. Without the control of the other aspects of genuine love, affection spends itself quickly. It gives the appearance of making the relationship "close," but the closeness is artificial and fragile. When affection flows out of deep understanding and growing friendship, it gains in meaning and value.

11. The Test of Stability
Love tends to endure. Infatuation may change suddenly and unpredictably. In infatuation the wind blows here and you're in love. The wind blows there and you're in love. Not so with real love. Real love is stable. There is commitment. The test of stability can hardly be applied to a relationship measured in days or weeks. So how do you test stability? Society suggests we test it by living together: For reasons we will look at later, living together actually promotes instability rather than stability.
The best way to test stability in a new relationship comes through knowing that person in the context of his or her other relationships. Frankly, someone who has been married more than once ought to expect to be calmly and seriously tested when it comes to the question of stability.

12. The Test of Delayed Gratification.
A couple in genuine love is not indifferent to the timing to the timing of their wedding, but they do not feel an irresistible drive toward it. An infatuated couple tends to feel an urge to get married - instantly. Postponement for the infatuated is intolerable. Why is this? Why wouldn't a couple wait and do it at the right time in the right way? Why wouldn't a couple want to deal with the real issues so they could have a solid marriage? These questions reveal the difference between love and infatuation.

As you enter into a potentially serious relationship, ask yourself if your pace is based in fear or faith. Is your pace based on anxiety over deprivation and physical drives, or is your pace the result of a desire for careful and thorough preparation for marriage?