Infatuation

This artifact is an 8-page declaration of love taken from a middle schooler who was checking the love letter for grammatical correctness before she let Deante give her friend Alexis the letter. The letter details exactly how much he loves Alexis and everything he loves about her. He ends the letter with 4 large hearts.

This artifact is a card given to Stephanie by her boyfriend Wade for Valentine's day. It is originally a card for a niece, but Wade crossed out the "e" to make it "nice". He includes his own text along with the cards generic statement. The card itself follows the traditional Valentine's Day theme of purple, red, and pink. 
The submitter provided the following about the artifact’s history: This is the first Valentine's Day card my boyfriend Wade ever gave me. It was our first time ever celebrating the holiday with a significant other.

This artifact is a poem written by Wade and given to Stephanie during the first month they started dating. 

This item features two love letters written by both Jeff and Lisa Cronk in the early weeks of their relationship. They are handwritten notes that were left for each other at the apartment they shared.

The first stage of every romantic relationship is infatuation. This is the stage commonly referred to as the honeymoon stage where you are obsessed with your partner and see them as perfect. This stage is commonly characterized as focusing strongly on the physical attraction towards another. Passion, lust, and very flirty feelings often come out into the way couples communicate with each other. Couples’ idea of love is magnified and exaggerated because those sweet months of the initial attraction cause an overwhelming amount of dopamine to be produced in the brain signaling a full-body euphoric state.

Love letters thrive during this stage in the relationship because its driving force is passion and romance. Infatuation inspires people to write poetry and confess their unending, undying love for another in a dramatic and often cheesy fashion as a way to prove the intensity of their feelings. You are trying to woo the one you like with romantic gestures. Writing during this period may also focus on the physical aspects of the body since attraction is such an important factor in forming a new relationship.

To the left are some examples of texts composed during the infatuation time period. One text is an eight-page declaration of love written by a middle school boy. Although this letter technically wasn’t written during the course of a relationship, it clearly shows the effects infatuation has on everyday writing. The boy dramatically declares his love for Alexis and talks about how he wants to spend forever with her. He describes her as perfect and focuses a lot on how beautiful she is and her amazing smile. He is passionate about his feelings towards her, despite not really mentioning knowing much about her which is characteristic of infatuation. Another text is a card containing a poem written by my boyfriend after our first kiss. It is cheesy and simple, but entirely romantic. I remember I obsessed over this poem for months because I thought it was the sweetest thing I had ever read. Another quality of the writing that comes out of this stage is that it often times is sentimental and nostalgic as relationships go on. It is a way for couples to look back on their wild, romantic selves and reminisce fondly. The artifact “early love letters” created by Jeff and Lisa Cronk shows the exaggerated feeling of love that couples often experience. The words "you are loved" are repeated throughout both pieces multiple times. This repetition doesn't diminish the meaning behind the words though, it just shows how much this emotion controls one's thoughts in the beginning.