Crushed

As has been conveyed if not expressly stated, I have felt like an adult from a young age. This has mostly been fine with me. I’ve never been nostalgic about high school. I don’t have any fun stories about any childish antics.

That said, there was one teenage stereotype I just couldn’t avoid and that was being boy crazy. It was rarely a guy who was my age who held my attention, I usually went for the old and inappropriate, but regardless of the target my crushes would be all-consuming.

Despite most of my crushes being on real people I knew as opposed to celebrities, nothing happened with 85% of the crushes. But that almost wasn’t the point. I just loved having them. I loved taking virtual strangers and picturing what a shared future could look like, trying to dial in as much detail as possible with the minuscule amount of intel I had managed to gather without social media as a resource. I loved having something to focus on other than the agonizing way I was living my life, which was entirely to get into a “good” college. The churn of AP tests and choir practice and dancing like a monkey for teachers who previously taught my brothers (“Thrilled to have another Seyfried! Evan was one of reasons I became a teacher”) was relatively joyless on a day-to-day basis. To have a crush was to make my days a series of little thrills every time we crossed paths in the hall. They would eventually peter out, always, but each was enough to sustain me for a while, enough action to keep myself cogent, enough to avoid my collapsing in on myself like a boring, dying star.

When I finally got to be fully in charge of my life, crushes became less of a coping mechanism and more actively fun and real. There were years where it felt like a crush could actually turn into something real if I made the effort to use a little elbow grease.

But recently I’ve lost the ability to have a crush, and I’ve been dealing with way more grief than I could have expected. It just sort of drifted away over the couple of years, growing fainter and fainter with every painfully awkward first date, every second date with a dramatic reveal (voted for Trump, thinks all lives matter (they don’t by the way), only eats orange food). I’ve reached a level of cosmic exhaustion, where my certainty that I’ll never locate a true partner is less of a “woe-is-me” thing and more of a scientific conclusion to a lifetime of experimentation.

I know too much. Incidentally whenever guys describe themselves in app as “curious” it causes a really unpleasant physical reaction deep in my body. I’d like to know a whole lot less. I don’t want to know that we eat like eight spiders during our lives while we’re sleeping. I don’t want to know about the potential good I could be doing for the world by adopting a vegan lifestyle. I don’t want to know all the very specific side effects of every anxiety medication on the market.

I do also know that I don’t want to be where I am when it comes to my love life but the outcome does makes sense if you see the amount and quality of inputs over the years. Compounded with my crushiness (crushanity?) breaking it’s not looking promising.

They can’t always be uppers.