The other day, a friend of mine asked me what I would be saying to an audience of the young people if I were  invited to speak on the subject of infatuation. Frankly, the question stumped me because at the age of seventy, to be talking of infatuation seemed rather odd and then suddenly I stopped and reflected. Why is it odd? What is odd about it? Don’t I get infatuated even at this age? I had to admit that I do because infatuation was normal phenomena, a normal instinct. I would be worried if we did not get the feeling of infatuation. That is the first thing I would be saying to the young if I were invited. Normal but hang on, don’t mistake infatuations for love as we often do.

“Oh, I am so much in love; I can’t seem to do without her”. “I don’t know where I would be without you darling”  “Where shall we hang out?” Anywhere. “What shall we eat? Anything. This conversation is infatuated conversation where you lose your identity. You want to become one with the other. You want to merge with the other. Your life is incomplete and meaningless without the other. Social scientists will call it co-dependency.  I will describe it in more plain and direct words. Trickery of hormones, that hot feeling, this is what infatuation is all about and as I said earlier, it is a perfectly natural feeling. There is no need whatsoever to have a feeling of guilt about something that is natural.

However, to take it as or mistake it for love and you are in trouble. That is the biggest blunder we commit when we tie our lives together in those proverbial knots, whatever they are called, when the foundation of it all is infatuation. If you were in so much in love, how come you fell out of it? 

When you are blindly in love, you are just that, blind.  You are in a state of emotionality (infatuation), unable to think clearly. The caste, creed, the height, the colour of the skin, waistline, bust line and the religion do not matter. Your personal ego boundaries collapse into each other’s ego boundaries. You merge with the other. You are, to use an expression of South India, one by two coffee. 

Infatuation is in fact love not with the other person but the image of that person, the image of that tall, dark and handsome lad or that beautiful girl but love does not live on images.

Infatuation is generally one sided. A may be infatuated with B who is infatuated with C. Infatuation is surrendering to the other not spiritually but physically. So enjoy it while it lasts but don’t let your life depend on it.

The author is a counsellor