When we meet someone that we are attracted to for the first time our brain releases all the feel good chemicals, dopamine (addictive), oxytocin (bonding) and serotonin (fantasy) and we can ‘fall in love’.
This is referred to as the ‘honeymoon phase,’ we tend to see all of the positive aspects of this new person and we can be blind to the negatives.
When we see more positives then negatives we are attracted to them and we become infatuated, evolutionarily speaking this initial infatuation stage is essential for finding a mate and the continuation of the species.
When we meet someone in this way we tend to put them up on a pedestal and in comparison we minimise ourselves and act juvenile around them and we tend to fear the loss of them if they were to walk away.
Because of this we are inclined to try to change ourselves in order to please them because we don’t want to lose what we are infatuated with.
We pay extra attention to our physical appearance, we do activities that they want to do even though we don’t really enjoy those activities and we hold in our farts.
When we are doing these things and sacrificing ourselves and what is important to us in order to be more like them, we start to become ungrateful for who we are and we can start to build up unconscious resentment towards them.
We now have a situation where we are minimising ourselves and exaggerating them and anytime we exaggerate or minimise we are not seeing what is, we are ignoring half of our reality.
If we stay with them for any length of time we will inevitably discover that they are not what we thought.
We start to realize that they are also a human being and they also have 2 sides to them as well, things we like and things that we dislike.
Once we are with the person for a while ‘hedonic adaptation’ starts to kick in as well meaning that the things that we once found enticing we have gotten used to and they now become our ‘normal’.
The initial chemical rush of the infatuation stage served a purpose in creating the initial attraction but once this dies down if we are not careful we can find ourselves comparing the initial high of the one-sided fantasy person that we built up in our mind to the more mundane reality of a human being with 2 sides and we start to question whether we still love this person.
If we truly love someone we embrace both sides of them, the side we like and the side we dislike, because true love is a balance of the two. True love is unconditional love, we see their ‘flaws’ and we embrace them for them.
Infatuation is often confused with love, infatuation is the addiction to a one-sided fantasy that we imagined in our mind that our real life partner can never live up to.
It is wiser to seek true love because that is where we can create authentic connections with people.
True unconditional love for someone is far greater than any fantasy person we have on a pedestal because as long as we have someone on a pedestal, we can’t be ourselves around them and we can’t truly connect.
If you are feeling like you are at a stage in your current relationship where the infatuation has died down and you are starting to see both sides of your partner and you are starting to question the relationship, the following will help.
1. Make a list of all the things you have in common with your partner
2. List all of the benefits to the things you dislike about your partner
3. Remember the initial challenges and frustrations when you first got together.
As long as you are looking back at a one-sided fantasy of all positive and no negative your current reality is going to suck by comparison and you can become depressed. It is wiser to balance your past.
If we love people for who they are and not the illusions we expect them to be, they will turn into who we love because at the end of the day everyone wants to be loved and appreciated for who they are.
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