Here is an excerpt from an artigo written por A. De Witt, a professional counselor, discussing infatuation and true love. I read several other artigos on this topic (written por psychologists, medical professionals, and theological experts)and many say much of the same thing (except those who are mais medical in their approach and tend to talk about dopamine, adrenaline, and brain activities as related to infatuation and love). I found it fascinating as it related to the relationships found in the Twilight series:

"Infatuation is like a drug, or a form of madness. You are taken over por a whirlwind, you are consumed por thoughts of the other person and nothing else matters. Your life suddenly revolves around this person and you want to spend every waking moment with him or her. You are in a dream, dizzy with bliss. True love, on the other hand, is mais a sense of friendship and respect."

Like a “drug”. In the Twilight series, only one character was referred to as being like a “drug”. It wasn’t an adjective that was randomly pulled out of thin air. There is a reason why Edward was compared to narcotics; there is a reason why, every time Bella was with Edward, she felt a high, and every time he breathed upon her, she felt blissful. There is a reason why Bella considered Jacob as her best friend, and not Edward.

De Witt brings up ten basic perguntas to ask oneself in order to dinstinguish whether one is feeling 'infatuation' or feeling 'true love'. After readin those questions, it became painfully clear that both Edward and Bella are very much infatuated with each other.

One pergunta was "Do you have a life of your own?" De Witt goes on to say that with real love, you don't live for the other person completely. por that definition, and from what we saw in New Moon, neither Bella nor Edward were willing to "live" without the other. It's terribly romantic, but it's also "infatuation".

Another pergunta was "How would you feel if your amor was unrequited? Could you amor the other person enough to respect his or her choices, even if those choices exclude you?" Real amor needs nothing in return. Here again, when Bella believed that Edward no longer wanted her, her life as she knew it "ended". She was addicted to Edward and needed his "love" in order to survive, but, again, this is an example of infatuation. A person who truly loves another can function even if he/she is not loved back, and he/she will continue to amor that person no matter what the circumstances.

One of the most important perguntas asked por De Witt (along with his comments) was this:
“Can you be open and honest with your partner without fear of rejection? Are you able to be yourself? Or do you hide your weaknesses and try only to show your strengths? When you truly amor another, you don't concern yourself with impressing your beloved. Rather, you are mais interested in serving your lover and you know that is easier to do when you are honest.”
Just taking this one point, it already tells us that Jacob was on the right track with Bella. He always believed honesty was the best policy when it came to Bella. Edward took it upon himself to decide when to be honest with her and when not to be.

Naturally, how brutally honest you want to be may depend upon the person receiving the information. Jacob understood Bella’s emotional strength and understood how much information she could take without having a nervous breakdown. He was all for telling Bella about Victoria and knew she would be able to handle it internally. Edward decided that he should simply take Bella to Florida without telling her that a killer vampire was after her. Ultimately, Bella was upset that she was the last to be informed about this while Paul, Jasper, and her dear friends risked their lives to find Victoria. Even though Edward had noble intentions, he did not understand Bella’s capacity to handle her fears against the threat upon her life, whereas Jacob did.

In essence, Edward wants to keep Bella from the “evils of the world” and have her experience only the good as much as possible. Although this is idealistic, it is far from realistic and definitely unbalanced. You just cannot avoid the yin and have just the yang. Edward also thought Bella should be spared any information that would hurt her emotionally. Constantly sheltering someone from hurting is not doing a person any good, and in many cases, it is actually mais harmful. Take a child who is vaccinated continuously every ano and a child who is minimally vaccinated and is often exposed to small doses of viruses in the air in everyday life. In the end, the latter will be physically stronger because the small doses of virus serve as a form of immunity for the body. Protecting a person from being hurt is going to make the person emotionally vulnerable in the long run and it is less healthy.

Taking all this in and seeing how evident it is that what Edward and Bella have is infatuation, whereas what she has with Jacob is love, why do the majority root for Edward and Bella? Simple. We, as humans, amor infatuation, also known as “romantic love”. If asked to name some of the greatest amor stories in history, we come up with stories like “Romeo and Juliet”, “Wuthering Heights”, “Moulin Rouge”, “Somewhere in Time”, etc. There is a recurring pattern in these types of stories. The “love” between the apaixonados is like fireworks – they’re grand, they make a bang, they are romantically showy, and then they die. True love, which is based on friendship and reality, is boring to read about. Humans have to live with daily stress of daily life and we want to at least escape that when we’re relaxing and enjoying a book. We want the fantasia and the “obsessive (albeit unhealthy) love” because “true love” is not flashy enough to make us turn the pages. It doesn’t matter that one or both of the apaixonados end up dead – they had that moment of pure bliss and passion!

One professional matchmaker noted “it’s not so much that we really adore those grand amor stories. Rather, it's that we're thankful that all the bad stuff is not happening to us.” With stories like Romeo and Juliet, we don’t have to deal with reality that might have taken place had both of them lived. Their passions would have cooled off, and as one writer of ‘love and infatuation’ put it, “Romeo would have started spending too much time with his pals and not enough on the balcony. Juliet's pushy mother would have started nagging for her to have a baby.” Who wants to read about that?

The amor between Jacob and Bella is too rooted in reality. Their amor is comfortable and honest; it would have been the normal route for Bella in a normal world; Jacob is her best friend and her sun. Edward is sheer bliss and passion; he is the eclipse that hides the sun and pulls us into the mysterious realms; he is the dangerous adventure readers want to take but cannot do so in reality because of grades, school, college, mortgage, children, what have you. It is no wonder Edward has a much bigger following, even if, in reality, Jacob Black would have been the right choice.