Crashing hard on Your Crush?
We’ve all been there.
You meet someone you have a great connection with and for one reason or another, you can’t move things forward. Maybe because it’s your boss. Maybe it’s your ex. Maybe your crush is already attached. Whatever the reason is, you can’t move things forward. You’re stuck in that state of longing. You’re stuck in that state where you wake up thinking of their eyes, their smile. You want to reach out all the time. You want to do everything to get their attention, to be close. You can’t stop thinking about them.
What do you do? What can you do to stop thinking about them?
These emotions — the longing of, and the loving of are intertwined like strings that make up a rope, pulling us closer together. How can you love someone without longing for them? How can you long for a person and not inadvertently love them? How do you sustain a love you do not long for? How do you understand these emotions, where they come from and how to make sense of it?
Rebecca Solnit says: “We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.”
Perhaps the need to possess what you desire is the flaw in love. Can you love without feeling inclined to possess it? Can we ever celebrate desire as torturous as it is? If you are in that state of longing. Remind yourself that it is in this pain that you can write the most beautiful sonnets. If that is not enough, remind yourself that it is in this pain that you are exercising your most intellectual and generous capabilities (in not crossing the distance). If that is not enough, remind yourself that your brain is addicted to a certain chemical which is released when you’re thinking about this person and it feels good. Your brain is not motivated to stop.
Faced with these obstacles that render you a deer in headlights in the face of your beautiful subject of desire, let’s approach it from a different angle. What are you getting from this interaction that you’re not getting elsewhere? How can you learn to give some of those emotions to yourself? Can this desire shed light on what you lack and what you look for?
In order to decide what to do, you need to understand the nature of desire and longing and how our brain responds to certain stimulus. Should you 1) Live in desire or 2) Eradicate it (via distractions / intellectualizing it / or just giving it time to fade)?
For now…relish in it. Once in a while someone walks into the room and lights up your brain like fireworks in the sky. That feeling doesn’t come often and not everyone has ever felt it. Stay with it a moment longer. Ride the waves of life. You’ll be fine. Relationships are made up from more than the feelings of desire and longing.
