When you’re young and inexperienced you may interpret infatuation as love.

Infatuation may feel like love at the time it happens, but usually it’s a one way street. At least this is how I remember it.

Infatuation is different from attraction.

Attraction can leave you feeling happy and warm inside, but it doesn’t make you ill.

Attraction can be mutual, and sometimes leads to love.

Infatuation however can make you quite ill, literally.

Am I wrong? Or was that just me, at the time, as a young and inexperienced 20-something?

In hindsight, I can now admit it was stupid.

Maybe stupid is too harsh a word. It was more like living in a perpetual fog, not seeing reality, and not caring.

Infatuation is a drug. It makes you high. You just go on thinking, insisting, it has to be this way for the other person too because the feelings are so intense.

You reject the mere idea that it isn’t so for them.

Youth is a hard place to live in.

Sooner or later, most people emerge from youth and retain some of those harsh lessons. You shake your head and wonder, what the hell were you thinking?

The questions remain however:

• Did it help to go through it?
• Did you learn anything that was applicable in future relationships?
• Would you allow it to happen again?

Infatuation is different from love.

Infatuation has a beginning and an end. It does not grow, or evolve like love does. Mainly because infatuation is a one way street.

Love isn’t always perfect, either. Love can be complicated for some.

Sometimes love dies a little.

Sometimes love comes back.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

It’s up to you to define your way of love.

As far as infatuation is concerned, maybe it’s better to just avoid it completely.