I Loved Having Crushes

When I was a kid, I was the queen of crushes.

And by that, I don’t mean that I had any particular luck with anyone I crushed on, but simply that there were a lot of guys I decided I was into. (I wasn’t ready to open up my options beyond guys at that point.)

See, some part of me — subconsciously, mind you — needed to have someone to crush on in every environment I was in.

This meant that in the years at school, I was able to sustain one singular crush for a decent period of time, but once those very few school years ended and homeschooling began, I’d have to find new, temporary crushes.

Sure, there were people who stayed in my sights for years, but those were often overshadowed for weeks or months by the short-term crushes I latched onto at camps and afternoon theater programs.

It wasn’t unusual for me to set my eye on someone in the first day or two of a camp or class, but then shift that focus by the end of the first week because I’d found a better prospect.

Not that there was actually any defining trait across these guys I found myself interested in aside from the fact that they existed, although they did tend to fall into one of two camps:

1. Nice and friendly to me, looks unimportant.
2. A widely-acknowledged-as-attractive smart-ass.

I never had a chance with those in the second camp because I believed them to be out of my league. (This was likely untrue in any inherent sense, but lack of confidence surely made it so.)

Regardless of my chances with someone, however, crushing on them took up most of my available mental space. Not only did I get to have little butterflies any time I interacted with them, but in my downtime, I’d make up all sorts of romantic fantasies.

I’m a storyteller and apparently always have been, so I’d tell myself these wonderful made-up stories of something that could happen. Obviously, they were terribly innocent because I was terribly innocent.

I mean really, I’d bet a significant percentage of those fantasies started with a confession at a water fountain and eventually skipped forward a decade or two to when he and I would eventually be married.

Only as I neared seventeen did those fantasies get less innocent, but still, I would have been imagining our wedding night because I was a good girl.

(God, so embarrassing.)

What I have to get across here though is how much these crushes and the stories I told myself (over and over again) sustained me. I don’t have a good excuse for why I needed them, but I did.

I needed them to the extent that in the weeks leading up to the trips we’d take, I’d start inventing hypothetical crushes that I hoped to meet there.

For instance, I recall that prior to our trip to Japan (I’d have been about thirteen at the time), I continuously replayed some fantasy of getting lost in a wilderness area and being rescued by a local boy who obviously would fall for me.

(Lame, lame, lame — god, I was so lame.)

It’s a little hard to pin down when this crushing phase came to a close, but I suppose it had to come with my first real relationship.

I am a loyal person. When I commit to something, I commit. So for at least the months before he and I went on a ‘break,’ I kept my crushing tendencies penned in.

I have for the most part stayed true to that in my years of serial monogamy.

But when it comes to when I stopped telling myself stories? Probably about the time I started getting too disappointed about them not coming true.

It’s one thing when you’re twelve and you know that nothing is really going to happen. It’s entirely another when you’re in a relationship with someone and whatever special day is coming up on the calendar has little chance of going the way you might script it.

That part of me — the part that would write some lovely could-be-maybe-tale — is now long-retired. I suppose she makes an appearance in my capacity as a writer of fiction, but certainly not in the writing of my own life story.

And, I guess because of those appearances — either that or the scars of too many disappointments — I don’t miss the fantasies.

But I do miss the rush of the crush and those delicious feelings of excitement.

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