On Crushes

When I was fourteen years old, I woke up in the middle of a summer night after a short dream about a friend of mine. In the dream, we were standing under a tree together; then we held hands. That was all.

I woke up from the dream knocked over by the rocket launch of puberty manifesting in a single, monomaniacal belief that would make up literally two-thirds of my thoughts by volume over the next year: that I was IN LOVE WITH HIM, and therefore IN LOVE for the first time, and so this was what IN LOVE meant, a concept I had read about in Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights but had never experienced before. I remember feeling very literally crushed; it was like someone had accidentally dropped a bowling ball on my ribs. 

In retrospect, this was a formative moment in which I was about to wire a bunch of neural pathways in lasting ways, and therefore, in retrospect, I wish I had asked *anyone at all* with more life experience than me to help process this feeling. Instead, I innovated a ~unique and brilliant strategy~ that has stuck with me to this very day regarding romantic and sexual feelings: HIDE THEM AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

Avoid all but the most perfunctory and accidental contact with the person. If you're invited to do something with them, come up with excuses not to do it, or if you have to see them, don't look at them directly, keeping them visible only in your peripheral vision. If you run into them, affect a pathological nonchalance. Always wait a day to text back. Exchange exactly two sentences of extraordinarily awkward polite banalities. Obsess about those few seconds of contact for months afterwards. 

If seeing them for prolonged periods is unavoidable, friend-zone the shit out of yourself; banish yourself to the Siberia of friend-zones. Ask them obsessively about their own crushes, their dates, their sex life, the people they're interested in. Take long calls from them about their romantic difficulties in the middle of the night; drag these calls out for as long as possible. If they ask you about your feelings, lie, mislead, misdirect. Talk about everything in the most intellectualized ways. 

Feel the impulse to talk to them about your feelings and then bury that impulse under an avalanche of rationalizations. The logistical: they are seeing somebody else, they are getting over somebody else, they are too old for you, they are too young for you, they are your coworker, they live far away. The moral: they dated your friend, they are your ex's friend, they are your friend's friend; they're hot and people are probably always hitting on them and it's really annoying; having a crush demeans their brilliance, or is objectifying, or is a betrayal of your friendship. The philosophical: feelings are stupid; they're just chemicals; you should be smart enough to think yourself out of them. 

Most powerful of all are the self-destructive rationalizations: you should avoid these feelings because you basically suck, and therefore having any emotions about this person at all sullies them. They are profoundly Better Than You in every way: more attractive, smarter, more successful, more interesting, wiser, more lovable. And anyway, you tell yourself, if you did ever get together with them, their immense superiority to you would make you deeply insecure; you would get caught in a loop of trying to impress them; you would never measure up. 

Of course, I found out quickly that avoiding contact is a fantastic way to make you obsessed with someone: the less you speak to or see them, the greater the vacuum to fill with your emotional projections. Even if you don't talk to them, you will fantasize, acting out weird little plays about the two of you meeting, or making coded art about your feelings. I obsessed with my 14-year-old crush for over a year, re-reading every email and letter we exchanged; I anticipated the few minutes we might run into each other for weeks, and rehashed them for weeks afterwards; I listened to songs they had recommended to me hundreds of times.

I think emotions are often learned responses to actions that we do: for instance, when you have to avoid going into restaurants for years, you become afraid of restaurants, just because you avoided them. Avoidance teaches you to fear. In the same way, hiding shit from everyone over my life has taught me shame, and the shame has taught me insecurity that I still carry around in every romantic or sexual interaction to this day.

And that insecurity quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The longer you go, the more insecure you feel. If you ever do decide to talk to them about all of this, you feel that there’s no way to move forward except vomiting up your feelings and then running away. On the other hand, if you do get with them, this pattern teaches you to associate passion with fear and security with numbness. You associate the feeling of getting to know someone with the feeling of returning to earth. Instead of noticing your deepening connection, you just notice the bubble of your crush bursting.

There's an improv game called "new choice" where you're doing a scene and then someone yells "NEW CHOICE" at you and you have to do the line you just did in a completely new way, or improvise a different line than the one you just said. Like a lot of improv games, it's more interesting to do it than to hear about it, but it's basically a mindfulness meditation. Whenever you come up with an idea of what to say, you get instantly attached to your idea; someone shouting "NEW CHOICE" forces you to let go of that idea and find a new one. And predictably, when you let go and think of something new over and over again, you get more and more creative. The fourth or fifth thing you say is inevitably surprising and hilarious and alive in ways you never could have expected. 

I’m trying to find a new choice of what to do with romantic and sexual feelings: neither obsessing over them nor repressing them. The more therapy I do, the more I feel that everything is just a mindfulness meditation of some kind, so it’s not surprising to me that having good relationships reminds me of this game. Having good relationships requires the trick of letting go of what's in your head so that the person who's actually in front of you can surprise you: suspending interpretations and judgments so you can just notice who they are, what they feel.

And as always, the way to master this trick is to try it on yourself first. To practice suspending your judgments of yourself, and that means even your own judgments of your crushes—to just notice the vulnerability and embarrassment of having them and feel it and just let it exist, even when it's painful; to show up for yourself.

And then, when you detach from that feeling, you can do it not because crushes are bad or weird or creepy or wrong or because you're disgusting, but in order to just see what is actually there. And what is actually there is not always what you imagined. But it is real and alive.