Lusty Love

With adolescence comes the stirring of physical maturation that is deeply moving to members of both sexes. Hands brush in passing, and the blood pounds in one’s ears. A desire to be close, to touch, to possess, to have and to hold one’s lover, wells up recurrently with crescendos of feeling that are bafflingly urgent. A girl may be perplexed by her sexy thoughts and dreams. A fellow may be amazed that brief encounters with the opposite sex can cause such strong, intense, and urgent sex feelings. To the inexperienced young person, these surging sex-toned emotions which are so new, so powerful, and so insistent may be confused with “the real thing.” Sexual attraction is one facet of love, but only one. There are other kinds of love that are just as much a part of relationship between the sexes.

Tender Love

Before long, the dating boy and girl may find that they are becoming fond of one another in a warm, gentle way. He is protective and considerate of her. She is thoughtful and kind to him. They discover a tender sympathy growing up between them that is sweet and meaningful. This, too, is a part of love—a very important part, both in dating and in life together through the years.

THE COURSE OF LOVE

It is generally recognized that the course of love rarely runs smoothly. But it took two university professors to plot the course that love takes in the lives of actual young people. Professors Kirkpatrick and Caplow found that the most usual course of love is one starting with mutual indifference and moving upward through attraction to love, and then either dropping again to indifference, with the broken love affair, or remaining in love at a high level of mutual involvement.

One out of every five love affairs studied is irregular in its course, with unpredictable shifts from love to hate to indifference to liking in various combinations throughout the history of the relationship. Somewhat fewer young men and women experience an even more vacillating kind of love that is off-again-on-again, with ups and downs like a roller coaster’s.

Experience teaches that while being in love is fine while it lasts, there are many love affairs that fail to grow into anything important. So the question arises: How can one recognize infatuation for the short-lived thing it often is?

IT MAY NOT LAST

There is a tendency to believe that one is in love as long as it lasts, and that any love that did not last must have been infatuation. The formula is a simple one: if it was, it was infatuation; if it is, it is love.

A girl says something like this: “I thought I was in love last summer, but by Christmas time we were not even good friends. I guess it couldn’t have been real love after all. It must have been just an infatuation.”

A young man looks back over his most recent love affair and likens it to emotional fireworks—bright and colorful while it lasted, but completely dead when it was over, with nothing left to remind him of the glory he once knew. So he concludes that what he had felt was not love at all, but simply infatuation.