A sanitised version of Hell

After reading my friend’s blog¹, I began to think about crushes. The definition of a crush (or a limerence) is:

…a state of mind characterized by intrusive thinking, longing, uncertainty, hope, misperception, fantasies, and passion.²

Basically, It boils down to being delusional. My friend Gaz³ is an exception to this rule, thankfully, and I am not calling one of my closest friends delusional here. I want to focus on the more intrinsically compulsive types of crushes. Teenagers are far more prone to these, but us elders are not immune, trust me.

Disclaimer: This is my own opinion, please don’t be offended!

A crush is something many people suffer from time to time. It’s comforting, and provides a practically orgasmic form of escapism. They are not inherently unhealthy, as everyone has to have hope⁴, and that’s what they ultimately mean. You have fixated all romantic feeling on them, through choice, hormones, or just merely noticing that they are fun to be around. However you chose them is important, but not really in the scope of this lecture. For more info on these, check the footnotes.

Back to the topic at hand. So you’ve chosen your target, but realised you can never express to them how you feel. So now you’re in a quandary: You love them, but what now? Do you forget about them and move on? Or do you carry on harbouring this unrequited yearning? For this, we assume you take the second option.

An imaginary world is created, where you concoct images and scenarios of the first kiss, etc, and you are quite happy to escape into this universe at any given opportunity. But like all pleasure, it’s heavily addictive. You need to keep doing it more and more to feed the insatiable romantic beast inside of you. if you do this, then it is quite easy for it to cross over into an obsession, where they then become destructive. They become destructive when your very mood can change on a whim, when you plan your social life around them for no apparent reason (and unbeknown to them), when a touch becomes a caress, when you read flirting web sites for tips on reading their actions. The list could go on.

I may be on a soap box here, but I am not immune from them, and I’ve had my fair share in the past, and absolutely none of them ended with me getting the girl⁵. But I found it difficult to live a life where I had emotionally invested so much in a person who was unaware of my feelings. So, about 12 months ago, I decided not to put so much faith in these flights of fancy. It was very liberating, and I honestly don’t regret it. Don’t get me wrong, I still fancy girls, but I make sure to stay clear of obsession. You’d be wise to do the same.

But don’t think I’m going to leave you without a final note. If you do like a girl, then just ask her out.⁶ I understand it’s an easy thing to say, but seemingly hard to do. But, if you know anything about the opposite sex, then you will pretty much know the answer before you ask them.

But, as my tag-line saids, it is better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n, and living your life when weighed down by a crush is a form of Hell, just a sanitised version.

Addendum
Another inspiration for this post was a girl from work asking me if a boy has any idea if a girl likes them. I didn’t really know the answer, as I’m a dreadfully bad judge of person. I made a couple of guesses, some more likely than others, but she refuted them. So I’m now left with two options, either I was right but she was embarrassed and denied them; or, I’m missing the obvious one. A tad queer, but it’s about a woman, so of course it is strange.

References & Footnotes

1. Gazaroosa
2. Limerence, Wikipedia
3. Gaz’s profile
4. Romantic Hope
5. When I was 17, I finally built up the nerve to ask a girl out who I had been pining over for a couple of months. I had a Southern Comfort to calm my nerves. 5 shots later, I was drunk, and let’s just say it didn’t go well (See here).
6. How to ask a friend out