The Power and Wonder of Crushes

I am a romantic at heart and have developed a fascination with people having crushes.  A crush is someone you feel fondly towards before any mutual feelings start to be established.  I have no idea how many crushes I have had over the course of life, but it could be near triple digits.  Some have lasted as short as a few hours while others went on for weeks, months, or longer.  I have never successfully had a crush evolve into something further.  The women I was fortunate enough to find mutual attraction with seemed to like me first (I was often too stupid to notice).  I found the courage to share my feelings with the objects of a crushes about two dozen times without any success.  The experience of never having a crush reciprocated has left me curious and excited to see other people's crushes evolve into mutual attraction and eventual relationships. 

My crushes that were not acted on were left alone for an assortment of reasons.  Most of the short term crushes simply wore off as I learned more about the person that I did not like or did not fit me.  In some cases I have had crushes on people who were involved with someone else and would talk myself out of the crush.  There were a couple times where I went for it anyway and I shared my feelings with the unavailable, either being brave or stupid, but the results were always the same. The toughest situations were the longer lasting crushes where the hope of something more was present just enough to keep me interested and never enough for me to do something about it.

I am very familiar with the mixed emotions behind a crush.  The excitement that comes with finding someone interesting, the curiosity to learn as much as you can about them, the sense of possibility about what might happen, and the joy of each chance you get to spend time with that person.  The difficult other side of that coin is the wondering if that person could like you, the concern that each moment has a thousand times more meaning than it probably does, the loss of rational thought, and the waiting for a sign of something to happen either way.

I am not sure if I have had more or less crushes than most.  I have always had a natural curiosity about people and for a long time I had a deep unmet longing to be loved.  There are two people who had crushes on me and went for it, but I did not reciprocate.  I am pretty sure I was an ass in handling those moments and wish I could have done it differently.  I am grateful for the kindness of so many of the women who turned me down.  Many of these women went on to become my friends.

I do not regret taking a chance on the crushes I did, but my lack of success occasionally did harm to my self-esteem.  I sometimes wonder if there were crushes that I did not act on that had a chance of working out for a short while, if only to add a successful experience to my history.  I have also pondered if there were people who had crushes on me that I did not know about, and if there were, why did they not say something?  At the end of the day, I have no complaints.  I more than landed on my feet, my experiences have given me many interesting stories to tell, and I can now safely live vicariously through the crush experiences of others.