Andrea N. Richesin - Crush

I was sixteen the first time I fell in love. He was one year older with long hair the color of honey, a rakish grin and bold blue eyes. On our first date, he took me to a dinner theater to see Neil Simons Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Afterward, he pushed me against my parents front door to kiss me, scratching my cheek with his stubbled chin. He told me he had never felt this way before yet I kept asking him to prove his love to me. So he offered grand romantic gestures: poetry and carefully drawn portraits, a turquoise ring and impassioned mix tapes. To meet my conservative parents on Halloween, his costume was a T-shirt emblazoned with the symbol for anarchy. He could not have been more irresistible to me.

As suddenly as it had begun, it ended with a phone call. I was too humiliated and stunned to ask for an explanation. My mother told me to mourn him as if he were dead, which was difficult as I passed him daily in the hallways at school. Holding his hand, I had felt invincible, all the problems of the adult world far, far away. I fell in love many times afterward, but never with the same fierce feeling of abandon and certainty. I knew that love was vulnerable, a fragile aspiration I might crush if held too tightly.

Like most teenagers whove been crushed by first love, I found an imperfect path back to trust. Weve all had our hearts broken and know that sinking feeling the next morning when you realize youre on your own again. You dont die of a broken heart, you only wish you could. So I suppose my mother was right, it is like a minor deaththe loss of a dream, and the realization that love doesnt last forever.

Although wrestling with the demons of unrequited love is devastating, a crush can also boost a wounded ego, save a marriage, and make one feel alive. It has the power to transform a shy backward kid into a bold adult. Its not only an education for a person naive in the world, its the joy of a fantasy you may or may not choose to pursue. Crushes can live in our heads for our own secret enjoyment, but they also encourage us to take risks we might not have imagined. Falling for the wrong person, wounded, love doomed, we still search for our soul mates even when it seems they may be impossible to find.

These twenty-six contributors offer glimpses of their first love experiences in all their joy and sadness, and how they influenced their growth as both women and men. In many cases, their crushes expanded their worlds and became the means by which they burst out of the narrow and boring cocoons of their youth and into the world at large. We recognize our own loneliness and longing to connect in their tales of heartbreak and thwarted desire.

In Jacquelyn Mitchards incredible essay, she recounts her blissful first love, barely consummated, but which consumed her for years. She concealed the passion she felt for the young boy turned soldier in his confessional letters she kept hidden. Their secret love remained sealed away for twenty years before she confronted it again. A young Ann Hood is mistaken for an older woman when her elder brothers friend, the boy in the white VW Bug, zooms into her life. They form an unlikely friendship that lasts over thirty years. Both Mitchard and Hood take comfort in the histories of their forbidden loves, that still reminds them of the young girls they once were.

The impossible idealism of love when confronted with its messy reality makes it easy to surrender to the fantasy of a crush. It allows us to exist in a sort of imaginary world with the object of our affection. In Daria Snadowskys To Sir Anthony, With Love, she sees the C. S. Lewis biopic film Shadowlands starring Anthony Hopkins and falls head over heels for the elderly actor. She discovers that you can project all your fairy-tale illusions on a superhuman persona and fabricate a perfect, consequence-free relationship precisely because it is unattainable. I knew my make-believe life with him would serve as an ideal distraction from my humdrum nonlife in ninth grade.

Steve Almond also recognizes how we cling to this larger fantasy of who we might be to our lover and to ourselves. He thinks, If I could be good enough for her, I could be good enough for myself. Such is the absurd fantasy that animates all our crushes, young or old. Through her correspondence with a former crush Heather Swain learns that we created realities about each other that worked for us at the time, which in the end is what 99 percent of crushes turn out to be. When David Levithan was ambivalent, his crush helped him to face his true feelings. Levithans essay reveals how seeing his crush free himself helped him to do the same. He confesses, I want to remember him as he was, even if that memorys vague, and perhaps even wrong. Who he was to me matters so much more than who he actually was. According to Levithan, the difference between a crush and love is its viability. If a romantic union doesnt last, was it merely a crush and nothing more?

The contributors learn to deal with this inevitable rejection, and although it has made trusting again that much harder, they are wiser now. Brendan Halpin is bewildered by the refrain most teenage boys must hear, I like you as a friend, which surely must sound like the kiss of death from the lips of a girl hes yearning to kiss. Melissa Walker and Tara Bray Smith pine for the anointed golden boy from afar. In shy journal entries, doodlings and hidden diaries they detail all their devotion they cant express to their beloved crushes. Their romantic lives take a serious toll on their self-esteem and all their insecurities would seem to melt away with his approval. Through their writings, they honed their boyfriend fantasy: a handsome prince who would whisk them away from the tedium of trudging through their bored schoolgirl lives.