Why Your Crush Should Just Be a Crush
It’s all about feelings, baby!
There’s something about saying “crush” as an adult that feels subversive. As though crushes are something to be exclusively written about in childhood notes passed between desks. Maybe in a world focused on ownership and agreements, a crush, which inherently lacks both, *is* subversive.
A crush isn’t based on reciprocity or a relationship, it isn’t really between two people; functionally, a crush is just… your feelings. Maybe it’s just seeing someone cute on the subway.
Crushes can be acted on or never spoken, they can be reciprocated but don’t have to be, they can exist fleetingly in single moments or sit in your heart for years. Saying “having a crush” doesn’t quite feel right because the necessary condition of crushing is not really having anything tangible. Crushes are boundless and indefinable beyond that little tug in your chest when the image of your crush pops into your head unexpectedly.
In “Eros: The Bittersweet” Anne Carson writes “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” A crush — crushing? bring crushed? — is finding the beauty in the lack of something, never having but always yearning. Crushing on a good, impossible crush is the breathlessness of never arriving but the glimmer of hope that maybe someday…
“What are you looking for?”
If you’ve ever been on a date eventually someone will ask you this question: What are you looking for?
How do you even answer it? Writing in The New Inquiry, Tiana Reid gives the only response that has ever made sense to me:
“I hold an unruly aspiration for deep love with friends, the delicate rushes of a first glance, brief attachments with strangers, and decades-long relationships that break me down and build me up. The condition of living demands this absorptive intensity and persistent survival that might help us work through the rhythms of rapture and loss.”
In short, a crush: something more or less than a relationship and somehow nothing like that at all.
I spend a lot of time thinking about crushes — my Venus is in Scorpio — and why I have at least seven every moment of every day — once again, my Venus is in Scorpio. The self-reflective yearning of a crush is one of my favorite feelings in the world. If you, like me, find yourself defined by your relationships with other people, crushes are salient.
A new crush can be a new mode of being, a new way to see yourself through someone else’s eyes. Where a relationship is two people interacting, a crush is one person interacting with the imagining of another. It can be beautiful when the imagining overlaps with reality, but it’s beautiful when it doesn’t too. There’s beauty in the vulnerability of not really expecting anything back. Reciprocity becomes a happy accident and sweet coincidence instead of tacking “an eye for an eye” to each of your relationships. Without expectations, crushes thrive.
Lately, I’ve become a proponent of a “crush to nowhere.” The act of crushing is enough. If something comes of a crush — a date, a meaningful glance on the train, them putting their hand on the small of your back at a party — that’s great! But, it’s not the point. A crush is the purest distillation of feeling simply for the sake of feeling.
It’s all about being crushed.
