Anyone and everyone who has ever searched for romance to complete them will know that there's nothing like the real thing.
However, in our search for true love that lasts, some might stumble into that fake feeling called infatuation.
Infatuation may appear like love at the surface, but it's very different in many ways. The greatest difference is the motivation. While true and lasting love is motivated by a desire to honour God in our relationship, infatuation seeks to honour self-interests and self-satisfaction.
Here are a few ways that love and infatuation will go different directions all together.
1. Love Is a Choice to Commit | Infatuation Is a Fleeting Feeling
You've probably heard it so many times that it feels like an old cliché, but it remains a steadfast truth: Love is not a feeling, it's a choice.
For anyone who has ever felt that they were slaves to infatuation, you can be set free if you want to. And if you don't want to, it's time to check your destination because all that the infatuation highway will lead you to is a life of loneliness and emptiness.
Love is about control—being able to control our emotions and choices and choose to do what is right and to choose to commit to your vow to love someone even more than you love your own life. Love is not self-seeking (1 Corinthians 13:5).
2. Love Is Spirit-Empowered | Infatuation Is Self-Seeking
The fruit of the Holy Spirit is love (Galatians 5:22). The only reason why we can love with the genuine love of God is because He lavishes it upon us, making it so overflowing that we will want to be a channel of it to others.
Infatuation, on the other hand, seeks only to love in a businesslike manner. We give love when we get it back and we hold back when we are denied of it.
But God shows His most radical love in that while we were still sinners, He gave Himself up for us. God has enabled us to love others the same way.
3. Love Is Founded on Christ | Infatuation Is Founded on the Flesh
The only reason why we can love—whether it be romantically or any other way—is because Christ loved us first. Our ability to love and serve others is founded on Christ and how He has loved and served us. To love based on any other way will be limited and finite.
That's the problem about infatuation. It gives with a need to be reciprocated. When we cannot be filled up by the other, we start alienating one another. Love founded on Christ will never run out of love to give because He will always be a source of love to us.
