Crush

 

Crush is defined as a brief but intense infatuation for someone, especially someone inappropriate or unattainable. Unlike crushes and states of infatuation, love truly sees and accepts their object of affection. Love is an intense feeling of deep affection. Love is patient, love understands, and love is forgiving

Crushes are rooted in fantasy and tend to happen when you don’t know much about a person but idealize what they are like. If you get closer to your crush and develop real-life experiences and a sense of reciprocity, the crush can develop into something more.

But for most of us, crushes don’t evolve into something that needs medical attention, so you don’t need to worry too much. Crushes are a very normal, healthy part of human experience. The next time you fall for someone and think, “I can’t get (fill in space here) out of my head!” you have brain chemistry to thank for that!

It might sound harsh, but it’s actually totally normal: everyone has their own unique set of dating deal-breakers, and it’s OK to lose interest in a crush (or even a long-term partner) if you discover something about them that you simply can’t overlook.

In reality, according to psychologists, a typical crush usually lasts for four months. If the feeling persists, what you feel is what we like to call, “being in love.” But before we start freaking out, let’s get real. Science is one thing, but it can’t measure someone’s feelings and make it a statistic.

Crushes are driven by some hugely powerful brain chemistry, which completely wrecks your judgment, and sweeps all your doubts and fears away. So as a crush really kicks in you’re powerless to stop it. Which is how people start affairs, risking everything for something completely irrational.

When you have a crush on someone, the stress and reward systems in the brain are activated, which are “associated with stimulation, action, and revving up the mind and body in some manner”.

A crush is more personal than idolizing or coveting. A crush is usually private, a comment in a diary, a ‘take your breathe away’ moment that only your know. If pictures are posted up on the walls and all your friends hear about your obsession, it may become a problem of stalking or other unhealthy fixations.

One can go through hundreds of lives, meeting and greeting people for the first time and they are soon forgotten. Some may become close enough to invite over for dinner, attend your wedding, borrow your lawnmower and reminisce over a tall drink on a hot summer evening. There are others who at a certain point in your life are important but wander off and lose touch with so others take their place.

Yet every now and then, there is this other person. For whatever reason, this person can’t be forgotten.

Sometimes there is just a brief passing, sometimes there is just a connection at a distance, and sometimes there is a conversation where every word is poetry.

Sometimes they know they are a ‘crush’. Sometime they don’t. Sometimes you don’t know you are the ‘crush’.

The ‘what if?’ of having a crush stirs the endorphins possibilities?

The next step is flirting, attempting to get your crush’s attention. If it doesn’t work, the crush may fade as just another dream.