What is the difference between love, lust, infatuation and infatuation?
Personally, I feel like I have all this for one person: my wife. I’m a church pastor and counsel many couples, married and dating, and I’ve found that the most successful relationships have all of these elements. My wife loves that I fall in love with her, that I am in love with her, that I want her and that I love her deeply.
But there are differences.
LOVE
Love is not an emotion. It’s not a warm fuzzy feeling you get. Your ability to love is based on you, not on anyone else. I love for who I am. My wife doesn’t have to earn my love. She doesn’t have to maintain it either. If I stop loving my wife, that shows a problem with me, not with her.
Love is the sacrificial placing of someone else ahead of your own needs, longings, and longings. When you can give your life, so to speak, for another person, you will understand love.
The Bible says that there is no greater love than when one lays down his life for his friends.
LUST
Lust is the absolute selfish desire to satisfy a physical or emotional need or desire. Relationships based on this and nothing else always end and most of the time they end badly.
God created us to have physical urges, desires, and needs. These in themselves are not wrong or bad. But when we surrender to them and build a relationship solely around them, they can be destructive and hurtful.
It’s one of the reasons I recommend, preach, and can prove from the Bible that a couple should wait until marriage before having sex. Get to know someone mentally, emotionally and spiritually first. Lust can overwhelm and dominate a relationship and when lust is the main factor, I have never seen a successful or meaningful relationship.
OBSESSION
Falling in love is often a mental obsession. This is a person who will daydream, create fantasies, and if she is married, commit mental adultery. This person may never act on their fantasies, but more often than not they create an unrealistic impression of the person you are fantasizing about.
Many people discover that what they imagined the other person to be is not the actual truth of that person. They can lose interest very quickly. Many people, who have fallen in love with others, never get very, very close. Once a comparison is made of the person with their fantasy, they become disillusioned and disillusioned.
Now if you can fall in love with someone you know very well, particularly if you are married to him or her, this can only strengthen your relationship. I have fantasies of my wife when we are apart. How can that be a bad thing? I am in love with her!
A CRUSH
Possibly, a crush is simply the attraction that one person feels for another person. Most relationships start with some kind of attraction. You see someone you like or you see things about a person you like and you are attracted to them. Many confuse this with love, but attraction is a powerful force.
We often think of a crush as a person being attracted to someone who is unwilling or unable to be reciprocated. It would be like a guy who is attracted to her married teacher, or a girl who is attracted to a guy who is already dating another girl or at least not interested in her.
A crush can be cute or it can also be dangerous. They are known to lead to trouble, and we often write them off as temporary emotional outbursts. But that is not always wise.