Even a Crush is Something

There is something noble in the most pathetic forms of love.

For it’s very pathetic to love someone you don’t know—to really love them, hook, line and sinker—to be ready to throw up everything, for someone whose middle name you don’t even know. We’ll do anything to distance ourselves from it. It’s just a crush, we’ll say, depreciatingly. Pacing our room, anxiously remembering a conversation we’ve had; cringing, like from a bee sting, from the things we said wrong, laughing out loud at the things they said right. Just a crush, we say, picturing early 2000s tv high-schoolers.

And it is pathetic to have this sort of tv highschooler crush. I don’t deny that. But there’s something noble too.

Why? Because—I know it’s trite, but—we all know the importance of unconditional love, love that doesn’t move on or abandon. And there’s something unconditional-love-like in limerence. It is an unreasoning, stupid love that runs headlong into pain. It is an unearned, unrenouncable loyalty that stays strong when it should crack.

How dull it is, how staid, when everyone is wise and no one gets hurt. That isn’t love. Love doesn’t have an element of risk; it is risk. It should be impossible for someone in love to get an insurance policy.

Now, this most pathetic form of love—this falling headlong for someone you barely know—goes too far. You can’t live that way, you can’t, I’ve tried. You have to have brains at some point. You have to love the real person. Still, there is something deep chosen love can learn from deep involuntary love. The openness and devotion and romance of limerence can be reenacted, quieter and better, in true love.

So I raise my glass to everyone who’s suffered for a crush. We’ve cringed at you and you’ve cringed at yourself—but behind all the nonsense, you had a germ of something that sparkled like diamonds.