Many of these kinds of yearning admirers throughout history and myth were portrayed as noble, their suffering dignified. But their stories haven’t necessarily aged well. The passion sometimes feels dark and out of control, often verging on abusive to its target.
For the most part, they backed up the core theory behind my friend group’s “glimmers of hope”: that feeling strongly for someone can make you feel more alive. And that is, in fact, usually a good thing, rather than an unbearable source of torture or a gateway to maniacal infatuation.
Crushes can also teach you a lot about yourself. Pickhardt told me that adolescents develop them as a way to formulate what attributes they value in others and what that says about their own identity. The same can be true for adults: Fantasizing about a crush is an exercise of the imagination. “It gives you an opportunity to step out of your present,” Lopez-Cantero told me. She compared it to a good book, which transports you and “disrupts your everyday thinking.” Suddenly you might be envisioning yourself, however playfully, living out a future you’d never considered,
She’s studied the strategies that people in monogamous relationships use to rein in their crushes, and found that the most successful ones include redirecting attention to their partner and focusing on what they don’t like about the other person. Single people, I’d surmise, could probably check themselves in a similar way, by investing in other areas of their life that bring them joy—and paying attention to their crush’s imperfections.
There is projection in all human relationships.” You’re always seeking to understand someone through the biased lens of your own mind, never totally getting the full picture. We tend to see partiality as the enemy of reason, but being partial to someone—believing in their unique worth, despite their shortcomings—is essentially what love is.
A crush is a powerful little vial of that pure feeling—the longing, the push and pull. In his poem “The More Loving One,” W. H. Auden compared unrequited love to looking up at the stars, observing their beauty while knowing full well they “do not give a damn.” But he wasn’t mad about it; he saw that that’s how it should be, and anyway, he was more appreciative than obsessed. “Were all stars to disappear or die,” he wrote, “I should learn to look at an empty sky.” He was right: You don’t need to lose sleep staring up at the cosmos all night. But it’s always nice to see a glimmer in the dark.
Infinite access to knowledge resembles an unrequited crush — a vastness that promises fulfillment, that seems to overcome human limitations and let people forget their problems. But it doesn’t care back. The asymmetry between what AI offers and what it actually knows about us mirrors the gap between projection and reality in any one-sided attachment. enzyme ecology-of-technology
