That's Why They Call It A Crush

Firstly, a bit about the motivation of our author; it seems clear that (given that ThirtySense, in her article on February 9, called her relationship with her new guy two months old) this article would have been written about a month after ThirtySense got to know her new beau. And, indeed, if we go back to the December 9, 2011 “Not My Finest Moments of 2011″ we see that she mentions that ‘last weekend’ (which would have been the 3rd/4th) she ‘met a cute guy’ and that ‘she likes this guy’! So let’s assume for the moment that we have here a psychological history of this relationship being formed and the love-struck ThirtySense is talking autobiographically; that is, she is labelling it as a ‘crush’ here in some sense after a month (or wondering about the nature of the feeling. And indeed, she may be sending him a secret cyber billet-doux with the following line, ” Thank God oh God, he doesn’t [know about my worrying]! Well, unless you write a blog and he’s reading it right now…”)

Secondly, I thought at first that ‘crush’ is mainly used to indicate something less that a full feeling of love, or the full ‘falling-in-love experience’ (see for example Dictionary’s “a brief but intense infatuation for someone, esp. someone unattainable or inappropriate”), but further reading (in ‘The Urban Dictionary’ for example) is ambiguous and shows that it can be probably both full and ‘less-than-full’; it’s not clear how ThirtySense means it (and I would be loathe to label her full-feeling as less than full). For example, one finds as definitions both “a burning desire to be with someone who you find very attractive and extremely special” AND “the act of falling hard for someone even though it isn’t love yet” OR “a precursor to love.” So the intended degree of intensity and possible distance from love remains unclear. (Obvious questions here would be: if one feels ‘love-at-first-sight’, is that an immediate crush? Or has one bypassed the ‘crush phase’ (lesser sense) altogether?)

Thirdly, and at the heart of the article, is the question: is it normal to feel fluctuating feelings of affection/liking/love in new relationships? If so, in every respect? Do (we might ask) very secure people feel fewer fluctuations, or fewer fluctuations of a certain type, than insecure? This is hard to answer for two reasons: 1) we need ‘relationship experience’ to answer the question, and 2) we need a model of what a ‘super-healthy’ relationship between two people who are starting to love each other looks like. (Experience in itself is not enough to answer the question because we may not be sure how secure/insecure we ourselves are, and thus can’t judge our response necessarily as a ‘healthy response’. But a model in itself is also not enough because without it being verified by our psychological reality at all, there is no convincing proof that it’s describing what’s happening in relationships or that it includes all relevant factors and feelings.)

Let’s start trying to resolve the question with some of the feelings that ThirtySense herself describes: “He saw me wake up with black gunk in my eyes yesterday – what if he stopped thinking I was cute?” or ” Maybe I shouldn’t have invited him to my friend’s wedding” or “I must have sounded clingy” or “why did I talk so much? He must think I’m boring.” Are these feelings normal?
Well, certainly these kinds of feelings and ‘emotional behaviors’ are normal in a statistical sense; that is, many people who are involved in new relationships feel like this. But, the real question is, is this psychologically normal, i.e., healthy and to be expected necessarily? Or is it to be expected by someone of maximal psychological theoretical health? THAT question is more difficult to answer.

I would argue at least sometimes NOT. Why? Because, as cognitive-behavioral therapists would point out, our thoughts dictate what we subsequently feel, and-to some extent-we can ‘control’ our thoughts in the sense of slowing down our racing minds, making these thoughts more conscious, and examining them. And when we do this, SOMETIMES we find that some of them are not that that reasonable. For example: 1) if he loves you, it’s quite possible that he’ll think it cute the way you rub your eyes as a sleepy-head in the morning to get those gooey or crystalized eye-boogers out; and, similarly, think it cute if he sees you drool in your sleep and tries to subsequently measure the diameter of your ‘drool pool’ with his Craftsman 50 yard tape measure, 2) No, maybe, just possibly, you shouldn’t have invited him to the wedding, but if one friendly invitation will destroy a relationship then it’s probably not on a good footing anyway, 3) ‘Clingy’? As in on his ‘gun hand’? (Well, ‘ThirtySense’ is from Texas or the South apparently…) 4) “why did I talk so much. He must think I’m boring.”? Are you sure it really bothered him? How do you know that?

Another interesting subtlety is whether our self-esteem is raised or lowered by whether he/she might or might not love us versus whether we’re happy or sad that he/she might or might not love us (and Thirty alludes to this partially when she says, “the swinging pendulum of your self-esteem”). But there’s a difference between the two. To find true love is such a great treasure that of course we should be thrilled when we start realizing/believing that we’re finding it and thus have fluctuating happy or sad feelings about its presumed viability and authenticity as our estimation of these waxes and wanes; but, given that our personal identity and esteem is also so intimately connected to the issue, if our perceptions affect our self-esteem then our feelings will fluctuate on that account as well. And whether THIS happens is often dependent on how well we know ourselves and whether we’re going to perhaps discover, via the interaction, new bad traits about ourselves or even just the unfortunate fact that we’ve lapsed into bad old ones. Thus, we may be feeling ‘self-esteem anxiety’ on this count, as well as on the issue of sadness or happiness.

A third and final distinction is that when relationships are beginning the interpretation of the other person’s glances, character, and actions is harder. (As a brilliant short story says of two lovers after they have come to know each after many months, “We could understand each other’s every glance, every movement now.”) And so, just KNOWING what’s going on is more difficult. But this difficulty seems unavoidable, although it probably can be easier or harder in the beginning depending on whether two types of people are the same type and ‘get’ each other’s methods of communication. But certainly to some degree we will be able to interpret a person’s non-verbal behavior better after knowing them for six months than if we’ve just met them; this thus results in less necessary fluctuations in feeling the longer we’ve been with them, ceteris paribus.

Thus, in conclusion, there seem varying reasons for why (in Thirty’s phraseology) the ‘blissful brainfuck’ that comes with a new relationship may vary substantially in nature and intensity.

Peace and out-be safe out there, people.

@Leonard: TLDR