It was a hot summer evening in 1953 and my grandfather had a date with the girl of his dreams. He thought about her often before this night had come. He dreamed about how perfect the date would be. The reality of it was the date was not at all perfect…not even close. He took a glance at the clock in the milk house and it read 5:55. He was to pick her up at six. He was late and complete panic set in. All he could think of was that it was over, he blew his chance. He ran to his pick-up truck with his rubber boots and overalls still on and sped off.
The response he was expecting, what we are all expecting, was her slamming the door in his face and him never seeing her again. This seems like a pretty reasonable response due to his attire, late appearance, and the stench wavering off of the manure plastered to his clothing. But, their relationship actually developed greatly on this day. She opened the door and a giggle came out of her mouth and they were on their way. Their intimacy grew and grew and they are now celebrating sixty-one years together.
My grandma chose to accept my grandpa and his manure plastered self. When we choose to accept our significant other along with all their quarks, our relationship grows. For some of us, the quarks become overbearing and we decide to walk out. To get to the ultimate love we all strive for, we must allow our relationship to grow and develop. There are stages of romantic love that are ideal to develop in order to gain a secure relationship with our significant other. With the development of these stages, we find ourselves becoming more truly in love. While in the middle of some of these stages, we may believe we are in love but really, we are not. Many of us fall into this trap. The Infatuation stage, the very first stage of romantic love, is a common stage often mistaken for true love due to how strong and uncontrollable the passion is. Passion alone does not give us complete and total love.
When pondering upon what love truly is, what comes to mind? Respect, trust, physical attraction? The language of love can be difficult. The love we are experiencing could be explained with multiple different words: eros, agape, limerence, or transcendence (Sternberg 65). Of course, there are plenty of different notions of what love is, but to get a good idea of what complete and total love consists of, we can look to Sternberg’s Consummate Love triangle for help. According to Sternberg, to reach complete and total love, or Consummate Love, there are 3 components that are required: Passion, Intimacy, and Commitment (Eastwick and Finkel 844). One alone will not cut it. The component that will be focused on is that part of the triangle that Sternberg signifies as Passion. Passion is defined by “the drives that lead to romance, physical attraction, and most important, sex. One way of describing passion is by calling it erotic love, a compulsion to be around the other person regardless of the consequences” (Anderson 56). The infatuated stage is completely driven by this part of the triangle. But, what drives the passion in our infatuated based relationship?
The passion must start somewhere. According to Barusch, “Infatuation is all about the lover. The beloved is little more than a placeholder – someone who was in the right place at the right time with the right characteristics to trigger this powerful response” (Barusch 69). There is a psychological component that plays a key role in making us completely infatuated with our significant other. The heart of infatuation seems to be Phenylethylamine, or more commonly known as PEA. According to Helen Fisher, an anthropologist and human behavior researcher, “PEA is a natural amphetamine; it revs up the brain” (Fisher 53). It gives us those crazy thoughts about them, makes our heart pound when we see them, and even gives us those “butterflies” in our stomach when being around them. When PEA is pooled in the brain, it gives us a whole wave of different emotions and completely drives our passion. We crave PEA almost like a drug addict would crave heroin. It gives us that natural high and makes us feel wholesome, for the time being (Fisher 52-53). What happens when that high disappears and our significant other walks away? Do we continue to crave that natural amphetamine? The answer is yes. These people are the people that Helen Fisher, in the book Anatomy of Love, would like to call “Romance Junkies”. These people, without noticing, will search and search for that someone that will revive their high. With that being said, sometimes these people make a mistake when choosing their next companion. It’s a constant cycle of chasing that natural high that PEA gives us, therefore these poor souls are constantly stuck in the infatuated state. PEA is in the driver seat of our passion and can clearly make us, sometimes, go a wee bit crazy. Just like a drug, PEA has its countless number of natural effects on us as well.
Physical attraction and, of course, sex seem to be very important when it comes to love as a whole, but 92% of Americans in an internet survey did not feel it defined love (Barusch 27). Realistically, who wants to date a person whom they are not even somewhat physically attracted to? Infatuation seems to be more about outward appearance than anything. The first thing we see is their cute smile, their great hair, and their perfect physic. The outward appearance gets our minds going and that PEA flowing. We start thinking about what life would be like with them and then one day we finally build up the courage to make something happen. Now, what we all hate to admit but know is true, is the role sex plays in our attraction to a specific person. It does, in fact, play a role for some and can dictate whether we continue the relationship or not. Some become so sexually attracted to an individual that we completely mistake it for real love. According to Eric Anderson, author of The Monogamy Gap; Men, Love, and the Reality of Cheating, “Our sexual desires are likely to influence us to think we ‘love’ someone, when we simply want to have sex with that person. Sex acts as a drug to induce or exaggerate emotional love, but it is not in and of itself a form of romantic love” (Anderson 53). We tend to feel more connected after the first time with that special someone, but in reality, we have yet to gain the intimacy with that person that’s needed to actually give the act of sex meaning. Sex stays meaningless until the next stage of the relationship sets in. In the Anatomy of Love, it states clearly that “Ninety-five percent of Tennov’s female informants and Ninety-one percent of her male subjects rejected the statement ‘The best thing about love is sex'” (Fisher 40). These people have let their relationships develop and know that there’s much more to look forward to than just sex.
A natural effect that PEA produces is constant thoughts about that special someone. PEA, along with the combination of many brain structures, gives us these ongoing and outrageous number of thoughts. The cortex deals with higher processing and the limbic system deals with our emotions. With the cortex processing the emotions being generated by the limbic system, it sets off an almost nonstop projection of our significant other in our head. In the Anatomy of Love, Fisher goes on to discuss the amount of time people actually spend thinking about their significant other. She discovered that at first in the beginning of the relationship, “intrusive reveries occur irregularly” (Fisher 39). She then went on to notice that some responses expressed extreme attention once the obsession became stronger: “as the obsession grew, they spent from 85 to almost 100 percent of their days and nights in sustained mental attentiveness” (Fisher 39). Most of the thoughts produced in our mind during the infatuation stage are mostly positive due to the shoving aside of the negative aspects of that person. A common thing for us to do is make the bad seem like a good. We mask the bad by thinking “Oh his hair is messy…that’s cute” or “his clothes stink…that’s just because he works hard”. We make every single thing about them good. Sometimes, we even change ourselves to make them out to be good. A prime example is abusive relationships. We blame ourselves for the abuse and not him or her. We sometimes even end up believing that we deserved it. This would be a situation where infatuation is mistaken for true love. A very common thing for us to do is change and adjust ourselves to be with that person, no matter the consequences.
Who doesn’t love the chase? It’s exhilarating and we are on cloud nine when things finally start to work in our favor. The chase is a key component in the infatuation stage. The difficulty that comes with getting that person or keeping that person keeps things interesting. Things may keep you away but breaking down those barriers and getting through them is exhilarating and keeps us motivated. Fisher states in her book that “obstructions are likely to intensify one’s passion” (Fisher 48). A great love story to relate this to would be Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Family feuds kept them apart which only strengthened their passion for one another. The unknown is, as well, a huge component involved with the chase. We crave to become familiar with the unfamiliar. The mystery of a person feeds the drive to get to know them. What’s so wrong with the people we already know? The problem is that we know them and we know too much about them. Think about it this way: if you have already read a book, do you really want to read that same book again? Especially if you didn’t like it as much as you thought you would? For most people, no, it would be yet another monotonous experience. We want something new, fresh, and exciting. Now, of course, there are always exceptions. For instance, some people can develop a great relationship after being friends for so long, therefore the chase was never there…or was it?
Timing can be crucial when it comes to being infatuated or not. With the release of PEA, which “revs up the brain”, being more susceptible is not uncommon during times of adventure or even loneliness. According to Tennov in the Anatomy of Love, “infatuation occurred only after one had become ready to shower attention on a love object” (Fisher 48). In times of adventure, we are typically out to discover new and exhilarating things, therefore coming across someone we are suddenly attracted to is very likely to happen. During times of loneliness and depression, searching for something or someone to fill that void is not at all uncommon. We have lost hormones and neurotransmitters that make us feel happy, therefore we crave something that will help us regain that happiness again.
The infatuated stage of the relationship is just the beginning of something that could be wonderful or something that could end tragically. These are only some of the components that drive the passion when we are infatuated. The list could go on and on. Almost everyone must experience these components before they move any further in the relationship, but most importantly we must be careful to not mistake this uncontrollable passion for true love. According to Sternberg, the missing components in infatuation are the intimacy and commitment points of the triangle. Once these points are gained, we can finally consider ourselves to be truly in love. Of course, not all these points of the triangle are gained for some. Does this mean the relationship will not work? No, not necessarily, but the relationship may struggle in some areas. The struggle could, at some point, lead to an end. The ultimate goal is to not get the door slammed in our face, but instead a welcoming into the house or a giggle, like my grandfather received. Now, of course, that is not always how the story goes. Like Eric Anderson said: “love is a dynamic emotional state, constantly changing in type, intensity, and meaning” (Anderson 53) and isn’t that the truth.
Works Cited
- Anderson, Eric. The Monogamy Gap: Men, Love, and the Reality of Cheating, Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Barusch, Amanda Smith. Love Stories of Later Life: A Narrative Approach to Understanding Romance. Oxford University Press, 2008. EBSCOhost, bl.opal-libraries.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=220927&site=ehost-live.
- Eastwick, Paul W, and Eli J Finkel. “Infatuation.” Sage Knowledge, sk.sagepub.com/reference/humanrelationships/n271.xml.
- Fisher, Helen E. Anatomy of Love: the Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce. Diane Pub Co, 1998.