Intense but shallow, short-lived passion or obsession.
Intense but shallow, short-lived passion or obsession — strong attraction with a built-in note of folly.
The family's “shallow but intense” outlier — high in heat, low in depth and duration, and carrying a built-in note of foolishness (it descends from Latin for “foolish”). It contrasts sharply with lasting love, devotion, and attachment: infatuation is typically passing, often projected onto an idealized object, and frequently used to mark a feeling as not the real thing. Its nearest neighbor is the colloquial “crush.” The only family member with an inherently cautionary connotation.
1640s “fatuous passion,” from Latin infatuare “make a fool of” (in- + fatuus “foolish”). The verb's sense “inspire a foolish passion beyond reason” is from the 1620s.
The “foolishness” core has been present from the start — the word was never neutral. The verb infatuate began (1530s) meaning “make foolish,” with the romantic obsessive-passion sense from the 1620s, carried into the noun by the 1640s. No reliable recent-generation shift.