Dear Daughter,

There is a phrase you have grown up hearing – in films, in songs, in the conversations of older cousins at family gatherings. I love you. Three words that carry, depending on who says them and when, the weight of the entire world.

While you have seen/heard a short version of it in school, in college, you will not just hear them. You will see them everywhere, in real time, all around you. In the way someone looks across a crowded canteen. In the two people who are suddenly, inexplicably inseparable. In your own chest, one ordinary afternoon, when you realise that a particular person has been occupying your thoughts for longer than you noticed.

That feeling, when it arrives, will feel enormous. It will feel unlike anything you have felt before.

I am not writing to tell you to be careful of it. I am writing to help you understand it – because what you feel in that first rush is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously. But it also deserves to be understood. And understanding it will take a little more than the moment itself can offer.

What infatuation actually is.

When you spend long hours with someone – in class, over meals, in late-night conversations that somehow stretch past midnight, something quietly shifts. Maybe it is the way they think. Maybe it is how they see the world, or how effortlessly they make you laugh, or simply that being around them feels like breathing easy. You stop noticing the time. You start noticing them.

This feeling has a name. It is called infatuation. And before you dismiss it as something lesser – please don’t. Infatuation is genuine. It is warm and vivid and consuming, and it is one of the more beautiful things about being young and open to people.

But here is what it is not: it is not the same as love. And the difference between the two is not something you can feel in the beginning – because in the beginning, they feel identical.

Infatuation lives at the surface. It is dazzled by the parts of a person they show you first – their charm, their attention, the version of themselves they bring to the early weeks of knowing someone. It is real, but it is incomplete. And it tends to fade – sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly – once the initial brightness settles.

Love is something else. Something slower, and quieter, and considerably more demanding. Any relationship worth trusting needs time – real time, measured in years rather than months – before you can begin to know what it truly is.

In the first six to nine months, both people are still, in some sense, on their best behaviour. Not dishonestly – but naturally. They are careful and considerate and attentive. And then, slowly, the real person begins to emerge on both sides. How they handle being wrong. How they react when they are misunderstood. What they want from their future, and whether that future has room for yours in it. Whether the things that seemed minor become patterns, and whether those patterns are ones you can live with.

This is not a test. It is simply what time does – it reveals.

The complications your generation navigates.

Your world has also given new names to things that have always existed. Situationships. Breadcrumbing. Benching. Talking stages that never quite arrive anywhere. The words are new; the confusion and the quiet hurt underneath them are as old as people have been falling for each other.

Knowing the vocabulary will not always make it easier to navigate. But knowing yourself will. And the single most reliable compass I can offer you is this: notice how you feel, not just what you think.

When you think about this person – is there ease, or is there a low hum of anxiety that never quite settles? When you are with them, do you feel more like yourself, or do you find yourself editing, adjusting, shrinking slightly to fit?

There is a fine line between someone who makes you feel safe and someone who is over posessive. The first is a gift. The second is a warning.

And be thoughtful – please be thoughtful – about what you share and with whom, and when. Trust is something that should be extended gradually, as it is earned. Not withheld out of suspicion, but given in proportion to what someone has shown you over time. This matters not just emotionally, but practically. The world can be unkind to young women who trusted too completely, too soon.

Some relationships will drift apart on their own – a natural fading, like a season changing. Others will end when one person decides to move on, and the other is left behind, hurting. Some, occasionally, will turn in directions neither of you expected.

All of it is survivable. All of it, eventually, becomes part of how you understand yourself.

But I realise that in telling you what infatuation is – and what it is not – I have opened a door without fully walking you through it. So next week, I want to talk about what love actually looks like when it is real. How you recognise it. How you protect it without clutching it too tightly. And why the most important thing love will ever ask of you is that you do not disappear inside it.

And the week after that, we will talk about heartbreak. About the particular ache of a first ending, and the slow, unglamorous, necessary work of coming back to yourself afterwards.

For now, just know this: what you feel is worth taking seriously. Your instincts are worth listening to. And there is no rush – not for any of it.

You have time. More than you think.

With love and hugs,

Mumma