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“Dear Prof, now I know how God works. I was almost dead in a sickness that no doctor was able to cure and no medical laboratory was also able to discover the cause. I was always in pain for 10 years. I spent all my money treating myself, which made my children drop out of school. I was unable to pay their school fees. My business completely failed and I was begging to feed and to buy drugs. I sold all my cars and properties, including the only land I had in Abuja.
In fact, people thought I was going to die so they kept asking me to arrange things in my family. Oga, Prof, the last native man that treated me said I should not bother paying him because to him I was going to die the following week. One man who visited his girlfriend that was charmed by evil men introduced your column to me and I started reading you every week. When I first contacted you, I was instructed to order six different kinds of your oil, which my in-law assisted me to do. When we got the oil and started the prayer, miracles started immediately.
The one I drank flushed out the entire contamination in my body system. I must confess to you sir, that I became healed after two weeks of my prayer. How it happened I cannot tell. Another great miracle that took place was the re-establishment of my business, the money that a friend who sold my property ran away with, was returned after the prayer and I have re-established my business with same. Glory be to God for using you, sir.
– Mr. Valantine J.U., 09021118330
This article will be incomplete without bringing to the mind of the reader the importance of love and how infatuation has helped to condition the minds of our young generation.
On a serious note, some marriages have been contracted in lust, grew in ignorance and matured and nutured in infatuation and then graduated in divorce.
This is due to the fact that couples failed to first consider if they were meant for each other or not. Love is very important in marriage. One who is in love must find out if it is truly love or infatuation.
Now it is worthy of note here that the average person progresses through five stages of love, namely, infantile stage, parent love stage, buddy love stage, adolescent stage and mature love stage. Without bothering ourselves going into the stages in detail, it is very imperactive to understand that infatuation is a great mixture of sex and emotions.
My dictionary defines the word as, “completely carried away by unreasoning passion or attraction.” It comes from a Latin word that means “silly or foolish” to differenciate between love and infatuation is usually complicated.
Both words [love and infatuation] do have one thing in common, strong feelings of affection for a member of the opposite sex, which complicates sorting out the differences because many of the symptoms, according to Nancy Van Pelt, “overlap one another. Genuine love may include several symptoms found in infatuation.”
Many scholars have devoted their time to research on love, resulting in volumes on the same subject matter, but little or nothing is said about infatuation. Well, I am convinced that love and infatuation share three symptoms, which include passion, nearness, and strange emotions. Passion may be present without genuine love in a relationship; it is entirely possible to feel passionate or to have strong sexual feelings for a person you have not even met.
However, sexual attraction can be as urgent in infatuation as it is in genuine love. In the same vine, the desire to be near to one another constantly can be just as overwhelming in infatuation as in genuine love. You may wish to be together always and feel empty when he/she leaves you, this does not mean that you have found real love and your destined partner. Longing for the other person may be just as strong in infatuation as in love.
Experiencing strange emotions when you think about the other person is not valid either. You may feel like walking on air when everything is going well with your love and downright ill when things are going wrong. This can happen just as frequently with infatuation as with real love, although funny feelings and strange emotions are probably more indicative of infatuation.
Love develops slowly; infatuation on the other hand develops rapidly. Love grows and growth requires time. Infatuation often hits suddenly. You cannot really know a person after only a few meetings. Many people wear masks and put on their best behaviour at first. So love ends slowly, infatuation ends rapidly. Just as genuine love takes time to develop so also it takes time to vanish.
Infatuation ends much the same way it begins, fast, with one exception. Infatuation will not end rapidly if you have become involved sexually because sex complicates the emotional responses. A couple may stay together not because of the many nterests shared but because of mutually satisfying sexual relations.
Love centres on one person only; infatuation may involve several persons. An infatuated person may be “in love” with two or more persons at the same time. These individuals may differ markedly in personality and temperament. For instance, a young woman may say she is in love with three or more persons and as a result finds it very difficult to choose from among them. You may be surprised that she loves none of them but what is moving her is lust and infatuation. Genuine love focuses on one person who embodies the qualities you have selected as essential. Love motivates positive behaviour, infatuation has a destructive effect. Love will bring out the very best in you. Your love will encourage you to function at your highest level; by contrast, infatuation has a destructive and disorganising effect on the personality.
Infatuation thrives on unrealistic daydreams in which you imagine the two of you leading a beautiful, blissful life together in perfect agreement at all times. These daydreams cause you to forget the realities of life, school, work, study, responsibilities and money. Love, on the other hand, recognises the importance of compatibility, while infatuation disregards it.
“If you are in love, not only will the physical appearance and behaviour of the other person attract you, but so also will his/her character, personality, emotions, ideas and attitude. You will be interested with the way he/she thinks and responds to situations.”
Love recognises faults, infatuation ignores them. Love will lead you to recognise fine qualities in others and help you build relationships on those, nobody is without fault but love will discover it and help in correcting it, but infatuation will keep you from seeing anything wrong. Love survives separation. Absence does make the heart grow fonder. Absence helps you recognise how much the relationship means to you, but infatuation dies the moment the person fades from sight. Out of sight becomes out of mind to an infatuated mind. Infatuation cannot survive the test of time. Love controls physical contact but infatuation exploits it. Love is selfless while infatuation is selfish and self-centred because you will only be thinking of what the relationship can do for you and not what you can do for the relationship. Love produces security while infatuation produces insecurity.
Now do you prefer marrying a man or woman under the sway of lust, infatuation or love? Marriage by destiny is marriage done in love and not by infatuation.
The divine will of God is LOVE and not infatuation. Infatuation has led to the reason why so many wives have killed their husbands and vice versa.
