Crush
'Tis the season to be distantly attracted.
The past month has been full up with drama, for reasons that will ultimately bring things I have needed for a while. In the moment, it has left several post ideas swirling in the void and me at a loss for which thread to follow when I do seize upon a spare writing moment. Yesterday I decided this is the one to get out.
We’re ascending the peak of summer, a particularly ripe season for crushes. I have never been the serial-relationship type as are some of my friends and acquaintances, but I may be the serial-crush type—if not on someone I know personally, then almost always on some old/dead rock star. Usually dead. Dead is safer. (We’ll circle back to the question of safety.)
So far this year I’ve had two real-life crushes, on people I’ve bonded with over shared interests/situations who even happen to share a line of work with each other. And when I say I’ve had, I don’t mean to suggest any kind of past tense. Both are slow-burns, or low-burns, possibly my brain’s attempt to shield me from something it knows, for one reason or another, I can’t act on immediately. I thought I had a handle on the one before unexpectedly adding the other to the queue, and now everything is out of whack, and what with the life events unfolding and how hot Berlin has suddenly become, it’s a struggle to stay tethered to the present when I’m by myself.
My feelings bloomed in classic incubating spaces of community and mutual friends. One of the equally classic annoyances of the sensation we call a crush is that it isn’t invited (see image below). It goes to show the influence our dream-world exercises over our waking lives. We go around, these self-driving cars (not unlike the aforementioned) with little to no knowledge of the dream-engines that operate us. I entered into these interactions seeking a connection in the short term, even for as little time as one evening, and got more than I bargained for. We can’t help developing crushes, nor do we choose their objects, but we can gain some insight into ourselves through them. Because the crush, while outwardly centered on another person, is truly about us.
Inaccessibility, as we all know, is seductive. It gives our imaginations free rein. Whether these people are inaccessible to me because my own life is in a complicated period, or would remain inaccessible to me if it were not, is actually immaterial when I think about it. I have always been susceptible to the allure of inaccessible people, which largely concerns my discomfort with trust and vulnerability. I can share decidedly intimate moments with people and shrink back at the first sign that I will have to be vulnerable. I can be forthcoming about some parts of myself and deathly afraid of what might happen if I were forthcoming about others.
Crushes, on accessible and inaccessible people alike, expose these fears, these internal mechanisms with which we’ve yet to reconcile. There’s a reason it’s called falling in love: it happens quickly and feels beyond our control. We generally don’t like to be in positions of helplessness, but we do like having goals, and a crush gives us a goal: ostensibly, to attain the object of our affections, to win them for companionship. But is this always what we’re really after? Is it merely for our lives to be altered, which is achieved already by having a special someone to fantasize about? While—importantly—not having our lives tangibly altered at all, as we can hold the beloved at arm’s length and nurture our crush from a distance, thereby skirting the danger of crossing into Real Romantic Territory, seeing the beloved in all their human imperfection, and shattering our pleasant illusions?
Which brings me to my point that inaccessible is also safe. A degree of inaccessibility may in fact be an essential component of a crush. People we can’t be with, or not in a way that instantly gratifies us, make ideal crush-objects because we can project onto them without violating either their personhood and autonomy or our relationships to them. I can (and do) write self-insert fanfiction about the dead rock star du jour and get plenty of satisfaction from the thought. The ideal. Plato told you, better than I ever could, how tempting it is to prefer the ideal to the real. Helena de Bres does a darn good job, too.
Except the ideal can satisfy only up to a point. In my experience of crushes on people I know, anyhow, the desire to hold onto the ideal is dandy until it interferes with the desire to incorporate these connections meaningfully into my social circle. And that is increasingly the case: the developing hunger for the real pushing against the practiced dominance of the ideal. I believe it has to do with my evolving wishes for my life as reflected by these crushes: security, a balance between similarity and contrast, a sense of belonging even if what unifies us is not belonging.
That’s growth, as far as I’m concerned. It’s also, in my hour-by-hour navigation of conversations and actions, incredibly frustrating. More fuel for my conviction that I am undergoing my adolescence now—my first one, in every way but physical.
And yet a crush is a delight, a necessary refreshment of one’s outlook, values, and sense of self. It doesn’t have to ruin one’s life. So let one (me) reassure you that whatever crushes take you down this summer are not only unavoidable but legitimate. Invite those people and feelings in! Text them back! It can mean as much or as little as you want it to. Try not to take it too seriously (that’s rich coming from me, but whatever). Feeling so acutely reminds us we’re alive, and we ought to find the joy in that.
Really. Text them back. That’s an order to myself more than to you.