CLUE 11. How Do You Feel about and Refer to Your Relationship?

Infatuation: If a girl is infatuated, time and again she used the words I, me, my, and he, him, his. She did not once use words like we, us, or our. She was unwittingly revealing her true feelings. By the use of these terms she has betrayed that she is still keeping her own identity carefully separated from his.

That tells us that she has not yet come to think of herself as part of a couple. She has not yet invested her self in the relationship. She’s still clinging to her own selfish identity. That points to infatuation.

Real Love: Two persons who have real love, on the other hand, come to feel that they are no longer separate, but have in great measure become one. Since they see themselves as a unit, as a couple, they tend to use we and us and our when they refer to what happens to them. It seems only natural and right to do so. They don’t even have to think about it. They are simply so much alike in motivation, attitudes, values, interests, and viewpoints that the differences between them are reduced to a minimum. There results a strong feeling of oneness; each person feels fully accepted, protected, and secure. They are still unique, separate people, but they merge themselves into a pattern of common bonds. In this sense they have become “unselfed.”

In love, the couple gives up much of their separate selves, yet by doing so each becomes even more fulfilled as a self. A person’s identity is not stifled by love; it is enriched. As they become a “we,” each is at once a more fulfilled “I.” They get double enjoyment out of everything they do. In the first place, each of them enjoys things as individuals just as they did before they were in love. But in addition, they have the added joy of sharing those things with the loved one.