These words denote the emotion which a person feels for someone or something. Love , attachment and affection are all general words which designate the kind of feeling that binds a person to another person or to a thing by ties of the heart or of the mind. Love goes beyond attachment and affection in intensity. Thus you would not speak of a mother’s attachment to her baby but of her affection or love . Love may also imply less control or regulation of feeling than affection or attachment because it connotes the possible presence of passion in its make-up: His love for her, being based on physical attraction alone, could not withstand the boredom and jealousy that soon became part of it. Attachment sometimes suggests a warm liking: a fond attachment to one’s pet. It can refer also to the kind of loyalty which is inspired by mental rather than emotional sympathies: he suffered from a profound attachment to a cause which his judgement told him was honourable but which the prejudices of his upbringing rejected as radical and morally unsound. Affection differs from attachment in that it expresses a greater depth of sentiment and is almost always directed towards a living being: the cherished affection of a childhood friend.

Crush and infatuation are alike in denoting a special kind of affection or love. Both are absorbing, extravagant, often unreasoning and unreasonable sentiments, usually as temporary as they are intense. But, while one can have a crush on a person only, one can be infatuated with something inanimate: When he reached middle age, my father developed an infatuation for gambling. There is also a difference between crush and infatuation in that the former almost always designates the feelings of a young person and the latter those of someone more mature.

• Jeannie’s crush this week is on her maths teacher; The old man’s infatuation with his nurse made her job so difficult that she asked to be taken off his case.