Earlier this week I was having a conversation with a friend about a move they were planning. They mentioned that they had been looking at one particular location in particular, one that they were familiar with and liked the layoff. "I am infatuated with them, infatuated to the point that I do so many drive-bys that they may think I am casing the place" was the comment. We both laughed a bit and carried on with the conversation as friends do.
But after I had said my goodbyes, something nagged at my mind, something that that seemed off for 24 hours until it resolved itself.
It was the word "infatuated".
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Infatuate (ĭn-făch′oo͞-āt″): To make foolish; cause to lose sound judgement; to inspire with foolish or shallow love or affection.
Infatuated (ĭn-făch′oo͞-āt″id): Lacking sound judgement; foolish, completely carried away by foolish or shallow love or affection.
Infatuation (ĭn-făchǝ-’wa-shǝn): An infatuation or being infatuated.
From: Latin infatuatus, to make a fool of (in, intensive + fatuus, foolish)
Webster's New World Dictionary. New World Dictionaries: New York, 1984.
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I suspect most or all of us are familiar with the concept of infatuation. In our culture - at least at one time - it was associated with the lightness of young romance; it is a staple of the Hopeless Romantic (of which I was one, and in some ways may still be).
In reading the definition - which I cannot remember fully reading before - the elements of foolishness or shallow love or affection fall right in line with the associations I have with it. It easy enough to understand, of course: at some point someone notices a person with something more than a little interest. In that moment, interest can lead to sort of fantasy (no, not the kind the world usually associates with that word). The infatuated person hangs on every word and gesture of the object of attention. They visualize what it would be like if there was a deeper relationship. In an infatuated state of course, this is not difficult: we know virtually nothing about the other and so only tend to think the best and happiest sorts of thoughts. In a way, they become marionettes on a stage of our making.
It is not just confined to people: one can become infatuated with a belief system or an interest; in fact, a great many hobbies probably start with some level of imagining "What would be like if I did X"? The answer is undoubtedly the same as the mythical relationship in our mind: a sort of flawless execution and expertise that makes everything we touch work without issue. Our swordsmanship is always flawless, our cheeses are always round and perfectly aged, our sewing without blemish.
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But infatuation cannot continue.
At some point, reality starts to break in. The imaginary relationship becomes real, and suddenly we discover that the person we visualized in our mind is not the same person as the person we now find ourselves with: they have faults and flaws and short tempers and bad days just as we do. The interest never develops the way we think because getting good at anything takes time: we spend our swordsmanship doing thousands of cuts, our cheese falls apart, our sewing has become a series of stitching followed by ripping stiches out.
It is at this point that infatuation can take one of two paths.
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The first path - more often than not, the one taken - is that the thing is simply dropped. "That relationship was never for me" we sigh as we move on, our eyes already on the horizon for the Next Greatest Love. "I simply cannot make any progress" we sniff as we look at the collection of items we purchased to support our new interest, which suddenly has no more use to us than something to sell at the next garage sale.
If caught early enough of course, the harm is minimal. "Summer Romances" are called that for a reason, short term relationships that never were going to blossom anyway because someone was leaving at the end of Summer. "Passing Interests" are the easy way we move on from our current interests to the New Best Thing that will change our life.
But sometimes this is realized too late: the relationship that now has a marriage and children and possessions attached, the interest or hobby what we invested so much of our resources in only to find out it was not for us. As the definition says, we have lost sound judgement and been inspired by shallow affection or love. Sadly, everyone around us has to pay the price.
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The second path is the path of the death of infatuation.
In order to move to anything else, the infatuation itself has to die - not "die" in the sense of the death of the relationship or interest, but die in the mythical expectations we have of the thing. If one has ever been in a serious committed relationship or truly followed a hobby or interest, one knows that there comes a point at which we have to make a choice to continue on even though the relationship or the thing is not what we thought it would be at all. We accept the reality of the situation - the person that is not our magical ideal, the interest that makes us study harder than we thought, the hobby that calls for mastery and not just passing interest - and we invest in it. It may not be the sappy sweet romance that we originally thought or the effortless mastery that we dreamed of, but we find in them a sort of reality - a "realness" that make the dreams that we had seem made of cotton candy and clouds.
We have learned better than that. We have the experiences and scars to prove it.
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It occurred, to me, as I listened to my friend rhapsodically describe the place he desired, that this is an issue that much of modern Western society struggles with.
We have our dreams - dreams of relationship, dreams of home, dreams of interests, dreams of careers - that we become infatuated with. We dream of these things based on the thinnest of veneers - the glance of a person at a meeting, a passing conversation about a job, a video game that makes swordsmanship seem effortless - and suddenly our mind and life is fixed on these things. We - to use the definition - lose sound judgement and engage in shallow affection or love. And at the first sign of reality or difficult or the fact that our "dream" is not what we imagine, we pass on to the next thing without stopping.
We have become a people that seek a world that exists only in the barest of our imaginations, because we do not try or want to do more. We make no plans to succeed in any of these things, because we turn from those paths long before we would need them. We avoid the messy reality of people and interests and careers and hobbies, choosing to look down the road at the Next True Love or Next Big Thing.
It is only when we choose to ground ourselves, when we throw the anchor down and the current tears against our boat, that we begin to find the underlying thing - the true True Love or real Big Things - that we were seeking in the first place.
